One look at the buzz behind the New Xbox Experience—with its bevy of new features, and its biggest marketing campaign in the history of Xbox—and you might think that not only is this the first time something as piddling as a game console interface has gotten the spotlight. It’s also the first time system software has deserved it.

You’d be wrong on both counts, though. The fact is, console interfaces have always been hugely important, both to gamers and hardware makers. Console designers know just how much the interface design informs the experience of using the machine. It’s the first thing the gamer will see and hear, every time they start up. It’s usually the first thing they interact with, before ever even putting a game into the system. It is, for lack of a less preposterous metaphor, the soul of the beast.

The systems on this list represent the majority of console interfaces’ short history. Some are elegant and unobtrusive, while others are clunky and (in some cases, literally) alienating.



Sega CD
Year: 1992
Features: Audio CD, Karaoke

In consoles’ prehistoric cartridge-based times, things were fast and simple enough that system interfaces were not strictly necessary, and therefore rarely used. The introduction of CD added enough complexity to make them a necessity, to give gamers at the very least an audio CD player and something pretty to look at during the slower startup. With its first CD-based system, Sega took this opportunity to present the console’s heavily hyped sprite scaling and rotation. The whole affair was place in an outer space setting, simple visual shorthand for “futuristic.” In an act of generosity, the publisher also included a CD+G mode in its audio player. This turned the Sega CD into a free karaoke machine, functionality that inexplicably no longer exists in modern consoles.



Sega Saturn
Year: 1994
Features: Memory Management, Audio CD, Karaoke, Basic Options

Sega learned a few lessons between 1992 and 1994. The most obvious one would be that people were going to be listening to the console’s opening chime a lot, which meant minutes-long MIDI orchestras weren’t appropriate; the Saturn instead went with a quick, innocuous tune, with a presentation of polygonal throughput resulting in a brushed metal logo treatment. The interface itself is a great example of mid-90s Xtreme To The Max design, with music CDs being played in barrel-rolling star fighter hurtling through space. As is appropriate for a science fiction vessel that CD player had a lot of buttons, which is stylistic consistency of a sort.



Sony PlayStation
Year: 1994
Features: Memory Management, Audio CD

The original PlayStation was a well-designed machine on most counts, and this continued into its startup screens. Somehow, a pure white screen and deep, rumbling bass felt more futuristic than any cheesy sci-fi gimmick Sega forced onto the screen. Players who had a game in the drive at startup had that followed by four notes that will forever be burned into their brains. If you didn’t have a game in…well, the interface you got depended on where you lived, but one was the drabbest of gray grids and the other (the one in the above video) looked like a Trapper Keeper. So it wasn’t all great.