Today the Wii goes on sale in North America for $249, eight days after the PlayStation 3 turned up at $599 and a full year after the Xbox 360. Three boxes, three completely different bets on what a console is even for. Watching them line up on the shelf, I keep thinking about the machine that isn’t in this fight anymore, and the one that used to win without breaking a sweat.

The PlayStation 2 is the one that won without trying. It launched in 2000 and proceeded to bury everything in front of it, past 100 million units and still selling six years on, which no console has ever managed. The trick was never the graphics. It was the DVD player. In 2000 a standalone DVD deck cost more than a PS2 did, so Sony quietly sold the cheapest DVD player on the market and it happened to also run Gran Turismo. The Emotion Engine, the weird memory cards, all of it rode on that one piece of household math. It is the best-selling console anyone has ever built, and it is not close.

This generation actually opened with Sega, and that is the part nobody wants to remember today. The Dreamcast beat everyone to market in 1999 at $199, with a built-in modem and online play before online play meant anything. It also killed Sega. Rampant disc piracy, no DVD playback, and the gravitational pull of PS2 hype drained the oxygen out of the room, and by January 2001 Sega walked away from making hardware after decades of doing it. I still think the Dreamcast was the best console almost nobody bought, and its corpse is the cautionary tale hanging over every company launching a box this month.

Into that 2001 gap walked Microsoft, which had never built a console and was willing to bleed billions to start. The original Xbox was basically a PC stuffed in a black box, a Pentium III, an Nvidia graphics chip, and the one thing nobody else shipped, a hard drive built right in. It existed to sell Halo and to plant a flag in a business Microsoft had no history in, and it did both. Around 24 million sold and a clear second place, but the bigger thing was Xbox Live in 2002, which quietly invented modern console online: one identity, one friends list, voice chat that actually worked. Everyone is still copying that.

Nintendo spent the whole generation in third with the GameCube, the little purple lunchbox that played tiny proprietary discs and flatly refused to double as a DVD player. The games were terrific, Metroid Prime and Smash Bros. Melee among them, and it still only moved about 21 million, which by Nintendo’s standards counted as a humiliation. The company that more or less invented the modern console business spent six years as an afterthought, and you can feel that chip on its shoulder in the thing it is putting on sale today.

Which is the whole setup for right now. Microsoft moved first again, a full year early with the 360, betting that a head start plus a mature online service buys loyalty before the others even show up. Sony is doing the exact thing Sony does, charging $599 for the most powerful and most complicated box on the shelf and leaning on Blu-ray and brand the way it leaned on DVD last time, except the launch is a supply-starved mess and the price made people laugh out loud. And Nintendo, dead last for six years, just flipped the table. The Wii does not even pretend to compete on graphics. It ships a motion remote and a pack-in tennis game and costs half of what the PS3 asks.

I am not going to call this generation tonight, it is about nineteen minutes old as I type. But the shape of it is already strange in a way the last one never was. The PS2 era was a one-sided slaughter. This time three companies are running three incompatible theories of what a console should be, a living-room media center, an online network, and a toy your mother will actually pick up, and all three theories might be right at once.

If you had asked me a year ago I would have said Sony walks it again on reputation alone. After watching the PS3 stagger out of the gate at six hundred dollars while Nintendo undercuts the entire industry with a gimmick that, annoyingly, actually works, I am no longer sure. The PS2 era is over. What replaces it is genuinely up for grabs, and that is the most fun this business has been in a very long time.

The Console War, in Order