The seventh-generation console war is the one I will defend as the most interesting of them all, because it is the only time the cheapest, weakest box on the shelf walked in and won. Between 2006 and 2009, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft fought a three-way fight that started with a sticker-shock price tag and ended with motion controls in living rooms that had never owned a console. I backfilled this whole stretch on m1k.tech as a running history, and here it is in order.

2006: the 599 dollar mistake and the 250 dollar surprise

The year was decided in May, on a stage at E3. Sony walked out and put a 599 dollar price on the PlayStation 3, and you could hear the air leave the room. Microsoft, a year into the lead it grabbed by launching early, answered with a Halo 3 teaser and quietly locked down a day-one Xbox 360 release of GTA IV. Nintendo did the strangest thing of all: it renamed its Revolution console the Wii, a name the entire internet mocked for about six months, then showed the world a remote you waved instead of gripped.

By autumn the hardware actually shipped. The PlayStation 3 launched in North America with a Blu-ray drive built in, which was either a Trojan horse for a format war or an excuse for the price, depending on who you asked, and then it missed its own launch targets. The Wii arrived at 250 dollars with motion controls aimed at people who had never bought a console, sold out 600,000 units in North America within days, and turned waggle into the word of the season before carrying the same trick into Japan. On the software side, Gears of War showed what Unreal Engine 3 could do and Guitar Hero II proved a plastic guitar could move three million units. By the time the quarterly numbers landed, Nintendo was printing money and Microsoft’s gaming division was still bleeding it.

2007: Halo 3, the Orange Box, and the Red Ring

2007 was Microsoft’s year on paper and its nightmare underneath. Halo 3 launched to a record 170 million dollar opening day, the Xbox 360 Elite added an HDMI port and a bigger drive, and the software lineup was absurd: Valve shipped the Orange Box, smuggling Portal and Team Fortress 2 into one disc, BioWare launched Mass Effect, and Harmonix turned the plastic-instrument craze into a full band with Rock Band. Then the other shoe: hardware failures got bad enough that Microsoft extended the warranty to three years and ate a billion-dollar charge for the Red Ring of Death.

Sony spent the year digging out. The PlayStation 3 finally reached Europe after a five-month delay, and by summer Sony cut the price to 499 and quietly admitted the 599 launch had been a mistake. Nintendo, meanwhile, did not have a bad year at all; the DS was busy redrawing the handheld market while the Wii kept selling faster than anyone could restock it.

2008: balance boards and the band-game boom

This is the year the industry chased Nintendo’s casual gold. Wii Fit and its balance board turned exercise into a system seller, Microsoft rebuilt the 360 dashboard around Avatars to look friendlier, and the plastic-instrument bubble inflated to its peak with Guitar Hero World Tour adding drums and vocals. The core players still got fed: Fable 2 leaned into one-button combat, Gears of War 2 introduced Horde mode, Mirror Edge tried first-person parkour, the Nintendo DSi bolted on cameras and a download store, and Blizzard set the PC world buzzing with the long-awaited StarCraft II.

2009: Natal, the Slim, and the high-water marks

The generation peaked here. At E3, Microsoft unveiled Project Natal, a controller-free camera that would become Kinect, Modern Warfare 2 showed the airport level that would dominate the news cycle, Nintendo announced New Super Mario Bros Wii, and Metal Gear Solid Rising broke Sony hearts by going multiplatform. Sony finally got its act together on cost with the 299 dollar PS3 Slim, Street Fighter IV revived the fighting genre, and the band-game wave crested and started to break with Guitar Hero 5 and the Beatles Rock Band tribute landing in the same week. The last word, for me, was Uncharted 2, the game that finally made the PS3 worth its launch price.

The full timeline

The lesson of this generation has aged better than the hardware. Sony brought the most powerful box and the worst opening hand, and spent three years apologizing for a number it said on a stage. Microsoft had the head start and the best year in software, then mailed a billion dollars in warranty claims to cover its own engineering. Nintendo brought the weakest silicon by a mile and read the room better than either of them. Power lost to a wrist flick. Anyone who tells you the strongest console wins was not paying attention in 2006.