For more than a decade, between the late 80s and the dawn of the 21st century, Sega was one of the coolest video game companies on the planet. Its arcade games, from Golden Axe to Virtua Fighter, were blockbuster successes; the Mega Drive brought a punk rock attitude to the home console scene, challenging Nintendo's family friendly approach with eye-pummelling TV commercials and censor-baiting games such as Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. Arguably though, it was later, in the Dreamcast era, that Sega's studios were producing their most innovative and extravagant work. The likes of Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi and Space Channel 5 were hypercolourful celebrations of Tokyo pop culture. Now, the man who managed Sega Japan's developers at that time, Shuji Utsumi, is the CEO of Sega America and Europe – and he has a plan to restore the company to its creative heights.

Football, like everything else important in life, is about stories. People implant themselves into the narrative: where they were when they saw Maradona's handball, the strangers they hugged when Ole Gunnar Solskjær scored that historic last-minute winner at the 1999 Champions League final. No doubt new tales are already being conjured around Jude Bellingham's scissor kick against Slovakia in the dying seconds of Sunday's Euro 24 match. Sport is a nostalgia machine – and this is as true for video game simulations as it is for the real thing. Every gamer has their favourite footie sim, but for me, and many other players of my … ahem, vintage … it was Pro Evolution Soccer, numbers 3 to 6. This was the early 2000s, the age of the PlayStation 2. I was a writer for hire at Future Publishing, basically hanging out at its office in Bath, working mostly on the Official PlayStation magazine.

The outgoing boss of Sony's games division, Jim Ryan, who joined the company a few months before the launch of the original PlayStation, was interviewed by the official PlayStation podcast last week to mark his retirement. He talked up the PlayStation 5 as potentially Sony's "most successful ever console across multiple vectors" – interestingly, he did not specify what those vectors actually were. It would have to go some to beat the PlayStation 2's total of 160m – so far it's sold about 55m. As for that PlayStation 2 total: that's actually the first time we've heard it, in this podcast, in 2024, despite the fact that the PS2 was discontinued in 2013. The last official number we had for the PS2 was "more than 155m" as of March 2012, a number that's still quoted on Sony's own website.

My parents were somewhat sceptical of video games when I was growing up. I did have a SNES and then an N64 as a child, but I was allowed to play them only at weekends, so on Fridays I would come home from school and binge on Mario 64 with a huge pack of Haribo Tangfastics. My gaming horizons didn't broaden until I was a teenager, when I started earning enough of my own money to buy myself a PlayStation 2 and I started hanging out on forums with other nerds whose gaming worlds were significantly broader than mine. And the PlayStation 2 had some weird games. The N64 did to an extent – I nurture an enduring fondness for Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon – but not like Sony's console.

Since its 2017 release, the Nintendo Switch has become a household game console for gamers and non-gamers alike. Few consoles penetrate the mainstream deeply enough to have parents referring to a console by its proper name, instead of their children's "Gameboy" or "Wii". Even fewer come together as a complete package that ties together the ideologies and technical ideas of their preceding consoles like the Nintendo Switch has. This graphic visualizes the Nintendo Switch sales success story alongside more than 20 years of Nintendo console sales. Nintendo has a long and storied history in gaming--but since the release of the original Game Boy in 1989, the company has favored a two-pronged approach with its game consoles: having both a portable handheld console and a home console which connects to a TV on the market.

Arcade-style sports games had quite the following in the early and mid-2000s. From Tony Hawk's Pro Skater to the many iterations of FIFA and NFL titles, these games had lasting impact on players, with many continuing to play new games or seeing remakes or remasters of their favorites. One such series was SSX, the popular snowboarding game that was released just over 20 years ago. SSX was the first title from EA Sports Big, a new-at-the-time addition to the EA developer umbrella. The game received critical acclaim across the board and received several awards, including 2001 Console Game of the Year from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.

Standout titles include Grand Theft Auto III, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy X. It was also the year Xbox made its debut, while the Sega Dreamcast bowed out. But while all that was going on Nintendo was still going strong, releasing the Game Boy Advance in March of that year and a new home system in September. The GameCube was quite a console, an adorable box with a great wireless controller and fun add-ons like the Game Boy Player. Unfortunately, the system was plagued by a thin library, especially compared to the PlayStation's combined roster of PS1 and PS2 games.

The second true 32-bit machine after the FM Towns Marty, the 3DO was available via a unique business model: the 3DO Company (formed by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins) licensed its technical specifications to third-party manufacturers such as Sanyo and Panasonic, which then built their own versions. Unfortunately, this approach made the hardware hugely expensive ($699 at launch – equivalent to $1,267 or £990 today) compared with rival consoles that could be sold at a loss by their manufacturers. There were some excellent titles, including the original Need for Speed and the strategy-shooter Return Fire, but the PlayStation killed it stone dead. The veteran company's final console boasted a powerful yet jumbled architecture based around two silicon chipsets (named Tom and Jerry) and a Motorola 68000 processor. Some say it was difficult to code for, it lacked a broad games catalogue and at $249, it was also very expensive.

The launch of the PlayStation 5 is still running on schedule despite the coronavirus outbreak, according to Sony. The company said that it has seen significant changes to the way it works – but that development is still continuing as expected. Sony said earlier this year that the console was planned for the holiday period at the end of this year, along with the Xbox Series X. And though the outbreak has led to "some challenges", it is still progressing as scheduled, the company said. Sony gave the update in a new results release, which also indicated a rise in the number of people buying and downloading games during lockdowns.

Sony has revealed the PlayStation for the upcoming PS5 – and claims it is a "radical departure" from what has gone before. Named "DualSense", the controller comes with a variety of new features including haptic feedback, new triggers that can make themselves harder to push, a built-in microphone and a whole new redesign. The chief change in that redesign appears to be that the controller is larger and bulkier than the DualShock 4 that came with the PlayStation 4, borrowing a design more akin to the chunkier Xbox One controller. PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said the controller marks a "radical departure" from its previous generations, and promised that more about the console – including its design – would be unveiled in the coming months. Both Xbox and PlayStation have taken the unusual step of showing off a variety of details about their new consoles, months ahead of their "Holiday 2020" release schedules.