You guys put a lot of time and effort to make this very historical with Game Dev Tycoon, but I think you forgot to add a few things. For starters, the most important console was probably the first, by that I mean the Atari. It was the first console and thus, one of the most important consoles in the market. It’s main reason for it’s success was that it was a in home arcade you could fit in the living room.
Though it’s downfall was also heralded as the downfall of gaming. You see, Atari would publish just about anything, it didn’t have any quality control back in those days. If it was a game that it could sell, PUBLISHED! So you had a handful of good games and a huge amount of pure utter crap, some very very buggy. This was at it’s peak when ET was released, the developers had no more than 6 weeks to build a game and it tanked. ET was so bad, it was said that it was the reason for killing Atari, as well as dubbed the worst video game in the world. There’s a plot in Alamogordo, New Mexico where all the mass produced games of ET were buried, much to the dismay of ecologists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T.the_Extra-Terrestrial(video_game)
You should also mention something about the whole Hot Coffee debate with Rock Star Games, as this too, had a huge impact on games and game design to this day.