[Jorengarenar]

>the premise is sort of flawed.

>The author says that the 3rd gen of consoles really begins with the NES, and so these early 1980s consoles can't belong to the 3rd generation.

Rather than the author, I would say that it's everybody else - a general consensus - making that claim.

>So I think it makes more sense to say that the 3rd generation begins in 1982/1983 with the Colecovision and Atari 5200.

I think is precisely the premise of this article - to show that those systems, had it not been for a crash of 1983, would have been categorized as early 3rd gens instead of late 2nd gens and to give a way to somewhat correct the mistake by calling them "generation 2.5"

[sneed_chucker]

> Rather than the author, I would say that it's everybody else - a general consensus - making that claim.

Sure, I guess I'm just disappointed that the author didn't take his argument to the logical conclusion and say that actually the 3rd generation of consoles began earlier, but that it was distorted in the US due to the 1983 video game crash (which was really only a thing in the US).

I think it comes down to online discussions of video game history often being very US and Nintendo centric, and the concept of a "generation" being quite flawed (the author does mention that).

[Jorengarenar]

I mean...

> Six years after the start of the Second Generation, a new generation of consoles appeared (...) For reasons that are not entirely clear, they are considered part of the Second Generation.

As well as in last paragraph:

> (...) ‘What to call this so-called “Lost Generation?’” Should it be renamed to the Third Generation, and the Third to the Fourth and so forth? That would be confusing. While I like the term “Lost Generation,” and it lends well to how these machines were (...) doomed by the console market crash, (...) I suggest calling it the 2.5 Generation; this avoids any renaming and places it in the correct chronological order.