If variety be the spice of life, Gerhard Florin, EA’s head of international publishing, has had too much. Considering the cost of development and the current retail environment, it’s easy to see how a single-console future seems like a really good idea. Why develop for three different consoles when you can develop for one? If there were one, standard, universal console, there’d no longer be an excuse for poor performance and missing features. There’d be no more idea of a “fanboy” because we would all be unified under a single console that plays all games with high-definition graphics, excellent connectivity, innovative controls, and costs less than $100. Mr. Florin predicts that this could happen within 15 years.

Where the fantasy breaks down is when you realize, most of us already have something very much like that. Except for price, the modern PC can do just about anything. It covers all your basic media needs — movies, TV, music, pictures, etc. — but it also plays games. This is where consoles really shine, however, because many people find PCs too difficult and expensive to enjoy modern games. On a console, you never need to worry about drivers, patch updates, graphics card incompatibilities — you always have an up-to-date platform that will play the game at an acceptable level of performance with the current level of graphics you expect. It’s a one-time cost that you, usually, don’t have to worry about maintaining. And that’s generally the problem — you don’t ditch your car just because a new model came out, do you? Imagine if, instead of buying an Xbox 360 at $499, you could swap out the old video card and CPU of your current Xbox and have the next-generation in gaming for only $200. All those jokes about the Wii being two GameCubes slapped together? Imagine if such a thing were possible… Well, as it turns out, despite the fact that the video games industry is still very young, most of these ideas have already been tried.

In the early 90s, SEGA experimented with ways of extending the life of their hardware by implementing interconnectivity between their consoles. The SEGA CD, for example, plugged into the Genesis and gave it the ability to play the new breed of games that were being produced on CD-ROM. After that came the 32X, which plugged into the cartridge port of the Genesis and gave gamers the ability to play 32-bit games. The idea was to extend the life of the Genesis at a lower price so that consumers could experience the next-generation in gaming without having to buy a whole new console. Eventually, however, the system became moot when SEGA released the Saturn — a true, self-contained, 32-bit gaming platform. Regardless of the success or failure of these components and their different iterations, what it all came down to was what consumers saw as “next-generation” versus “last-generation with next-generation slapped on”. This hybrid Genesis/CD/32x-thing was a hideous conglomeration of hardware that toppled over easily when assembled and looked ridiculous. In the end, you would have paid $190 for the Genesis in 1989, $299 for the SEGA CD in 1992, and $159 for the 32x in 1994, totaling $648. Although that price was spread out over a number of years, the tedium of upgrading to each component made some gamers weary and confused about the direction SEGA was heading. Adding insult to injury, the Saturn would be released barely a year later in 1995 at a price of $399. Finally, after years of lackluster upgrades with only moderate performance boosts, SEGA had released what was — in consumers’ minds — a next-generation console with more features and games designed to take full advantage of the hardware. Unfortunately, a week after the launch of the Saturn, Sony released the PlayStation. Regardless of what fans thought of SEGA at this point, Sony, a newcomer to the industry, quickly made waves and rose to the top.

Despite gimmicky attempts at saving money and giving consumers more features and options, what consumers want is a next-generation experience from their next-generation console. Whether that means better graphics, more immersive game play, or online connectivity is really up to the user. And that’s the final nail in the coffin of the single-console future myth — consumers want choice.

If the games on a console are poor, for any reason, the positive opinion of that console goes down. People — developers and consumers, alike — would be left wringing their hands, wondering, “What if?” They would take whatever is being cited as the current “problem” and constantly turn out fantasy scenarios of a console that did not have the perceived problem. Of course, this happens anyway — no console is perfect. But in a world where there is only one console available, it wouldn’t be long before someone had the bright idea to produce their own console that does exactly what they want without any of the perceived limitations of the last generation — quickly followed by a rival company producing a console that promises to go even further. The future of gaming is not a single console: the future is choice — and more specifically, niche choice. For some people, they want a console that appeals to them and offers games that they want to play. This allows for a wide range of devices that each cater to a different audience. Some are hardcore, some are casual. Some like puzzle games, some like first-person shooters. Some like role-playing games and some like real-time strategy games. Currently, none of the next-generation consoles have been able to deliver content to such a diverse audience at an affordable price, but there is a last-generation console that can.

The PlayStation 2 — a decidedly last-generation console — is currently selling like crazy. Why? Because at $129 retail, it’s cheaper than ever with thousands of games available and more coming out each week, easily beating its next-generation sibling, the PlayStation 3. What this means is that a single-console future not only has itself to compete with, but also with every console that has ever come before.

But let’s not totally discount the possibility of a single-console future… What if, 15 years from now, the level of technology has grown so far and so high that gaming platforms become completely ambiguous? Well, I believe you’d end up with a future that looks very much like what we have today. The only, real deciding factor in which console you buy would be the games, themselves. Right now, the only thing stopping you from playing “Halo 3″ on a PlayStation 3 is the fact that Microsoft won’t license the game to be ported to the PlayStation 3. It’s not a technical limitation; it’s bureaucracy. The same could be said for “Super Mario Galaxy”, which could easily run on a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, but won’t if Nintendo has anything to say about it. But maybe, in a future where the top gaming companies agreed to work on a standardized, single console, such possibilities could exist. In fact, 15 years ago, who could ever have perceived that Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario would appear on the same console — let alone, in the same game — together? They wouldn’t even dare! And yet, we have two titles due out very soon that feature each mascot prominently: “Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games” and “Super Smash Bros. Brawl”. You can even play Sonic’s old games — originally released for the Genesis — on Wii and Xbox 360 as downloadable games. Consider what it would be like if Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony stopped making hardware and only developed and/or published for a single, agreed upon, standard platform where their games could compete on an even footing. They’d become what SEGA is today — a third-party software company that produces and publishes games on whichever console is available.

The only possible downside would be what might happen should the device fail. Survival of the fittest determines that in a competitive environment, even if only one console remains, at least one console remains. In the early 80s, it was all about the Atari 2600. With one console in such a place of dominance, every other company was looking for ways to compete — even going so far as building converters that would, for example, play Atari 2600 games on a Colecovision. When the Atari finally died, there was nothing left until Nintendo showed up with the Nintendo Entertainment System — a then, next-generation system offering a next-generation experience — that quickly claimed the hill. It didn’t just one-up the competition, it made them irrelevant. Since then, the market has only thrived.

The only questions that remain are, who would produce this console? Would this device have an open standard or would companies have to pay a license to produce games and peripherals? Could anyone create one? And if they could, what’s to stop them from creating their own version of it and building alliances with other third-parties to create games exclusively for their console? Wouldn’t we just end up right back where we started?

I’ll admit that the single-console future seems plausible. While the competition pushes companies to do better, more often than not, they don’t even bother. Far too often, this industry has seen consoles that attempted to bring more power than people needed and they did so at prices that doomed them to failure. But until attitudes change, I’ll have to assume that the best course of action is a multiple-console future. The single-console future, thus far, remains a myth.