[amalcon]

Certainly the N64 (immediately prior to Gamecube) was supposed to be super high tech. They actually stressed the partnership with SGI in the marketing, and literally named the console after the word size of its CPU. In retrospect the former was pretty weird, since the public would not have known that name or anything.

Folks can quibble about the Gamecube if they like, but step back one generation and they were definitely trying to push the technology.

[hbn]

The 90s console wars were all about bits, even though no one knew what it meant other than "more bits = better". It was really Sega that started the bit-wars, releasing the Genesis while Nintendo was still selling the NES. They were very successful with getting kids to compare how powerful their console was to Nintendo's by slapping a giant "16-BIT" front-and-center on the top of the console and mentioning it in all the advertising. And that kinda stuck around for years.

Most of those kids didn't know what 64-bit meant, but they knew it must be better than their old 16-bit piece of junk. That's 4x the amount of bits, therefore the console was 4x better!

[philistine]

It was NEC that started the bit wars with the PC Engine in Japan. They heavily marketed its graphics as 16-bits, to have a quick way to explain the quality improvements over the Famicom.