Friday afternoons growing up meant a trip to the video store. It was an utter thrill, like a little weekly Christmas, where my mom would turn my sister and me loose among the laminated, empty VHS boxes to pick out something to rent for the weekend. And as a rare treat, she would sometimes relent to our whining and let us take home the Holy Grail of rentals: a Sega console. A teenage Video Update employee would retrieve it for us and make sure that the controllers and cords were all accounted for in a massive, nuclear-code-style suitcase.
That’s what carrying an entire game console looked like in 1993. Things are a little different now. A few weeks a...