If you’ve been gaming for any length of time, you’ve probably seen your fair share of consoles come and go. The march of progress definitely applies to gaming even more strongly than a lot of other media. Now, there are plenty of reasons why this is a really good thing. Pushing forward with new hardware and technology means that games are always striving to be even better than they were even a few years ago. But it does come with downsides as well. For one thing, it makes it all too easy to forget about previous console generations. And that means that a whole generation of great games ends up getting forgotten about. With that in mind, here are three classic consoles any self-respecting gamer needs in their collection.

NES

While Nintendo’s little gray box can’t quite credit as having started it all, there’s pretty much nothing about the last twenty-something years of gaming that can’t be traced back to the NES. This little console gave us some of gaming’s most beloved icons from Mario to The Legend Of Zelda. Plenty of NES games are still held up as classics and for a good reason. What they might lack in the features and graphics of modern games, they more than make up for in creativity and influence. These games paved the way for the future, and they deserve to be played by everyone!

Playstation 2

Many gamers can still remember the rage when it was revealed that the Playstation 3 would no longer be backwards compatible with PS2 games. And that rage came with good reason. There are those who would argue that the PS2 has the best back catalog of games on any console. It was the console that shook off the “toy” preconceptions from the Nintendo era and brought gaming to a truly mainstream audience. Not only that but it set up the dominance of the DVD format almost singlehandedly. Of course, the DVD is hardly relevant anymore and just about any device can play them, but the sheer incredible library of classic games is the real reason that everyone should have a PS2 in their collection.

Sega Dreamcast

Oh, the Dreamcast. This will probably go down in history as one gaming’s saddest losses. Sega’s final console seemed all at once to be the biggest success and failure of its generation. The console was massively ahead of its time. With innovative controls, including fully analog triggers and a portable connector, and a library of genuinely great games. But at the same time, it never really reached the audiences that it wanted to. The PS2 was just too dominant in the market. Combine that with a lackluster marketing campaign, and Sega’s wonderful little console seemed doomed to fail. These days Dreamcasts aren’t that easy to come by, and when you do they come with quite the price tag. But if you can get your hands on one then make sure that you hold on to it. Not only is an important piece of gaming history, it’s just a great console.