Trigger Happy
398
AFTERWORD
Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation2 console, which
launched in the U.S. and Europe in late 2000, did not
represent the instant big bang that some were
expecting, and only served to demonstrate the point that
an increase in processing power does not instantly
entail better gameplay. It took until the summer 2001
launch of state-of-the-art driving game Gran Turismo 3
for PlayStation2 really to take off in sales terms. After
the death of Sega’s Dreamcast console in the spring,
when the venerable Japanese hardware giant cut its
losses and reinvented itself as exclusively a software
designer, 2001 became notable mostly for excited
anticipation of more new consoles—Microsoft’s Xbox
console, which launched in the U.S. on November 15,
2001, and Nintendo’s GameCube, which arrived three
days later. And yet, despite all the next-generation
hype, the most successful videogame phenomenon of
the new millennium was running on hardware by now
nearly twelve years old: the Game Boy.
This phenomenon was PokÉmon, the game of
nurturing and training pocket monsters that became an
