2004 in video games

Events

• January 20 – Wireds Vaporware Awards gives its first "Lifetime Achievement Award" to recurring winner Duke Nukem Forever.
• February 26 – Castle Wolfenstein creator Silas Warner dies at age 54.
• March 4 – Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences hosts 7th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards; inducts Peter Molyneux into the AIAS Hall of Fame.
• March 22–26 – Game Developers Conference hosts 4th annual Game Developers Choice Awards and Gama Network's 6th annual Independent Games Festival.
• May 11 – Nintendo officially announces its "Revolution" console.
• May 11–13 – The 10th annual E3 is held in Los Angeles, California, United States.
• July – IEMA hosts 5th annual Executive Summit.
• August 3 – Doom 3 is released, restarting the breakthrough franchise, and featured complex graphics features such as unified lighting and shadowing, real-time fully dynamic per-pixel lighting and stencil shadowing. The game became id's best selling game to date.
• October 12 – EA Sports launches the multi-format FIFA Football 2005. It is the last major title to be released for the original PlayStation console.
• November – ' and Half-Life 2 are officially released on PC around the world, bringing in a new era for the First Person Shooter genre of video games, with advanced graphics & physics.
• November 5 – Nobuo Uematsu resigns from Square Enix and becomes a freelancer, starting his own business, called Smile Please Co., Ltd.
• November 17 – Atari, Inc. Releases the Atari Flashback.
• November 21 – Nintendo launches its DS handheld in the United States with the enhanced remake Super Mario 64 DS''.
• December 12 – Sony launches the PlayStation Portable in Japan, and was soon released in other markets in 2005.

  Business

• January 12 – Ubisoft acquires Tiwak.
• February – Electronic Arts consolidates, rolls most of Maxis and all of Origin Systems into its Redwood Shores, California HQ.
• March – Microsoft announces XNA the successor of DirectX as the default API for "Longhorn", and Xenon.
• April 6 – Midway Games acquires Surreal Software.
• May – Sammy Corporation buys a controlling share in Sega Corporation at a cost of $1.1 billion creating the new company, "Sega Sammy Holdings Inc", one of the biggest video game companies in the world.
• July – Square Enix restructures executive branches around the world.
• September 1 – Acclaim declares bankruptcy and closes its doors.
• October 11 – Midway Games acquires Inevitable Entertainment and renames it Midway Studios Austin.
• November 30 – Midway Games acquires developer Paradox Development.
• December 13 – Electronic Arts purchases a 5-year exclusive agreement for the rights to the NFL, which includes NFL teams, stadiums and players for use in EA's football video games.
• December 20 – Electronic Arts purchases 20% stake in Ubisoft. The purchase at the time was considered "hostile", by Ubisoft.

  Notable releases

Trends

Video game consoles

• Nintendo GameCube
• Xbox
• PlayStation 2
• *Sony released an internal hard drive for the PlayStation 2 on March 23
• *The third major hardware revision of the PlayStation 2 was released in Japan on November 1

  Handheld game systems

• Game Boy Advance SP
• N-Gage

Video game sales

Critically acclaimed titles