I been thinking about fanboys for a bit and started to wonder what motivates them?  Now I know that people’s definition of fanboy is different, but I consider a fanboy as someone who blindly defends one company while at the same time totally disregards a rival company despite the quality of their products.  

Now as a kid, I grew up a total Nintendo fanboy.  I loved the NES, and bought everything Nintendo.  Of course, this also meant that I hated all things Sega, and totally wrote off the TurboGrafx-16.  This was great for the NES era, because, uh, well—Nintendo did no wrong.   Nintendo’s light gun was cooler than Sega’s light gun, Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy was better than Phantasy Star, Mario and Zelda were better than practically everything—done, end of story.  This continued through the 16-bit area for me as well.

It was only during the N64 era did my fanboyism start to falter.  I was defending Nintendo’s decision to stick with carts instead of CD’s saying things like “carts are faster”, “Nintendo has this crazy compression thing going so they can put a CD game onto a cart”, “developers don’t need the space of a CD anyway”—then Final Fantasy VII was announced for the PS1 and I was shocked.  I was so mad I e-mailed Nintendo asking how they could let this happen.  The summer before FFVII came out, I had a summer job a reluctantly decided to get a PS1 to prepare for the launch of FFVII.  I initially felt dirty—how could I get a non-Nintendo console?  But after a bit, I started to come around.  Resident evil was fun, Castlevania:  Symphony of the Night was fantastic, Metal Gear Solid was awesome, and of course FFVII kicked ass.  While I loved my N64, I was really appreciating having multi-consoles.  I no longer had to take sides.

The next generation, I was out of college and was making some money, and I started to branch out.  I got the Dreamcast, then the PS2, then the Gamecube, and even got an X-Box.  I was living the dream. 

This gen, I have all 3 systems, and love them all for their strengths and weaknesses.  Now today with the Internet and the message boards, it seems like the console war is as heated as it’s ever been.  A person who has a 360 bashes the PS3.  PS3 fanboys apparently hate Halo and FPS’s.  Wii users….well, they are saying some of the crazy things I was saying about the N64:  “well, the Revolution doesn’t have to do 720p like the 360, so games will look the same on a SD TV”, “You can’t tell the difference between a Wii game and a 360 game on a SD TV anyway”, “Nintendo is making Mature games now—for the hardcore”. 

I think that this blind loyalty to a single console and whatever games they have stems from the fact that gaming is expensive and most kids can only afford one console.  I mean $200 for an entry level 360 is still a lot for a kid.  So I can understand why they are trying to validate their purchase by undermining the competition—because the worst thing would be to spend all this money, and have your console fail (like the TG-16, or Jaguar, or..sigh…Dreamcast).  This would mean, of course, that the people who are the blind fanboys screaming how IGN is getting paid by Micro$oft, or Sony is buying Killzone 2 reviews, or everyone is teh biased against Nintendo is a single console owner.  This also assumes that crazy fanboys are a bit younger and can’t afford to go multi-console.  I wonder if this is true?  I have no data to back up this claim—I’m just keyboarding here.  Is fanboyism rooted in an economic divide, and not just brand loyalty and nostalgia?  Are people with multiple consoles still as defensive of their PS3 as a dude with ONLY as PS3?  Now that I’m a bit older and working/making money—I really couldn’t care about the console war.  I just want great games for any system, and if I really need a game (I’m looking at you Metal Gear Solid 4), I’ll get the system.  But if I still needed my parents to supply me with my gaming fix, I would probably only have one expensive as hell system and would be defending it to my last breath.

Perhaps only when the different consoles are all bargain bin prices and we're all rich thanks to the new Obama'ized economy will we have internet peace...that is until you go on a movies forum.