The Video Game Critic

I noticed something while going through reviews today. I noticed that the TG-16 and Sega Genesis were in the 90's category, and the Dreamcast was in the 2000's category. At first I thought "Well, those systems were released late in the last years of their decades". But the Intellivision is still in the 70's category. Which is strange, because that system wasn't officially released until 1980. What's with the inconsistencies? The TG16 was released in 1987 in Japan. That's more than enough time it should be in the 80's category!

The Intellivision was released in 1979, actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision

The Sega Genesis and TG16, were both released in the North American markets in 1989 (TG16 was released in Japan as the PC Engine in 1987, the Genesis was released as the Mega Drive in Japan in 1988).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Genesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboGrafx-16

I believe the Critic asked for input when first setting this up.

The thinking was that since the Intellivision primarily was intended to go up against the Odyssey 2 and Atari 2600 and is most associated as the competition for those platforms rather than as Mattel's contender in the Colecovision/Vectrex/5200 generation (Which was meant to be the ill fated Intellivision III), that it be grouped with those despite only the test market launch occurring in the decade of the 1970's with the wide launch not happening until 1980.

Since the Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 are widely accepted as the start of the generation after the NES/7800/SMS and went up against the Super Nintendo that was launched worldwide in 1990/1991, with most of their commercial life occurring in the 1990's (Especially in the west where they saw a much later release than in Japan and barely made it out in the 1980's), they were grouped there.

It's an imperfect system, but the forum consensus was that this was the least confusing arrangement for these outliers that don't cleanly fit into a decades system setup purely by launch date alone.