Console War GIFs

About

Console War GIFs are animated GIF images representing the rivalries between the Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Wii video game consoles, which are often posted in video game-related discussion forums and subreddits.

Origin

On June 5th, 2012, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was held in Los Angeles, California, where Microsoft unveiled several upcoming games and new features for the Xbox 360, Sony presented new games and updates to the PlayStation and Nintendo showed titles for the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. During the conference, many animated GIFs depicting the three companies engaging in battle (shown below) were posted in a thread on the NeoGAF Forums.^[7]

e

Spread

On February 10th, 2013, Redditor deepbrown submitted an animated GIF to the /r/PS3^[6] subreddit, featuring representatives from the various console companies edited into footage from the 2009 science fiction film Star Trek (shown below). In the comments section, Redditor iDecline provided links to several other console wars animated GIFs. Prior to being archived, the post gathered over 840 up votes and 80 comments.

On May 17th, IGN Forums^[2] member started a “console war GIFs” thread. On June 11th, the 2013 E3 convention was held, where details were released for the upcoming Xbox One and PS 4 consoles. On the same day, Odd Future Talk Forums^[1] member Figger submitted a thread asking for users to submit the “best GIFs” pertaining to the Xbox One and PS 4 console wars. Also on June 11th, the college lifestyle blog Coed^[4] published a compilation of notable PS4 vs. Xbox Tumblr GIFs.

On June 21st, the pop culture blog Heavy posted a compilation of notable console war GIFs. On August 29th, 9gag^[5] user abdozkert submitted an animated GIF featuring several Pokemon representing different video game consoles (shown below). In the next 10 weeks, the post garnered upwards of 6,000 up votes and 2,300 shares.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Not available

External References