Gaming has been an interest of mine for many years. Looking only at the console in our house today leaves out a lot of that history: different systems, different groups of friends, and different ways of fitting a game into the day.
When I started listing the systems I have owned, I found myself moving between Sega, Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox. I have never stayed within just one platform.
The systems I have owned
- Sega: Genesis and Dreamcast.
- Nintendo: Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo 64 and Switch.
- PlayStation: PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 5.
- Xbox: Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
Those systems span different parts of my life. Friends were part of the reason I changed systems. The machine they were playing on could influence where I wanted to play too.
The people around the game still matter. Today, gaming includes time with my children and friends, whether I have a controller myself or am watching someone else play.
A console for a work trip
I bought my own Nintendo Switch with work travel in mind. I hoped it would make it easier to play games such as Fortnite while I was away. It did not work out as well for that purpose as I had hoped. That is my experience with the use I wanted from it, rather than a verdict on every way to use a Switch.
My children also have Switch consoles passed along by relatives. That is a different place for the same kind of hardware: something shared within the family, rather than the travel solution I was trying to put together.
The phone belongs in the picture
I also think of my phone as gaming hardware. Paired with my XREAL glasses and a PlayStation or Xbox controller, it becomes another way I can play. The screen, controls and connection each become part of the setup.
That is why travel gaming deserves its own stories. Carrying a screen I like does not settle whether I can get a game working comfortably in a hotel. My experience with those pieces is covered separately in the portable-screen story and the hotel-internet follow-up.
Playing a system is different from owning it
I never owned a Super Nintendo, although I have played its games through emulators, including on my phone. I also admired Kinect and the projects people have built around it, but did not own one.
Games deserve a place alongside the machines. The Last of Us is one I particularly enjoyed, especially the experience of sneaking through its threatening world. A list of consoles can only tell part of the story; what I played on them is the other part.
Personal recollections recorded October 28, 2026.
The occasion changes the hardware question
This history is easier to understand by comparing the occasions each setup serves. A console beside the television, a Switch packed for work travel and a phone paired with a controller solve different problems. Owning more than one kind of device does not make them interchangeable.
My Switch experience is a useful example. The question was whether it suited the travel gaming I wanted to do. The answer could be disappointing for that purpose while the same kind of console still had a place with the children. A fuller hardware history should preserve that distinction: what I hoped the machine would do, what I actually used it for, and which part of the experience changed my opinion. That is more revealing than arranging model names by generation.