We're near the eve of E3 and we've gotten a little nostalgic about the history of gaming. Though we expect great games to be a given, we're also hoping for some technical evolutions at the show, as the industry is known for taking great leaps and bounds when introducing new concepts that changed gaming. We look back and present our Top Ten Technological Advancements In Gaming.

10) The controller power button

It's 4-feet from my consoles to where I play videogames, but it might as well feel like a seven mile walk to turn a system on, off, or easily switch between playing one and then another. Thanks to the geniuses behind the development of next-gen controllers, never again will I have to walk my lazy butt around to turn a game system on. The Xbox 360. The Nintendo Wii. The Sony PS3. Each a console that now uses this technology.

9) Backwards compatibility

I've never owned a PS2, but yet I've played a number of PS2 games now, and it's all thanks to our choice for number nine: backwards compatibility. It's a feature that has proven itself so popular that most current gen systems have backwards compatibility right out of the box. Beyond helping a whole new generation of gamers discover and get the chance to play some great games they missed the first time around, backwards compatibility also frees up some much needed shelf space and makes it so you don't need to have as many consoles plugged into a wall outlet and risking a fire.

8) Passwords

Unless you were the master of a game when you were young and could do speed runs with your eyes closed, chances are you didn't finish many early videogames, if only because you couldn't commit to playing the game for as long as you needed before shutting it off. The password system was the first one in play to help remedy this situation, as typing in a password (some short while others very long) would allow players to start right from where they left off, being able to constantly move forward and possibly win a game instead of playing the same opening areas over and over. The only problem…those scraps of paper with the codes that were easily lost.

7) Patches

Games are delayed so much these days you'd think that when they do finally ship, they'd be 100% perfect and with nary a bug to be found. Cue the buzzer! Instead, it's all too common to receive a game and patch it as soon as you open it, or will either have to in a few days once a game killer is found. Thankfully, though developers might not get it right in the beginning, as least the introduction of online patches have made things right. Beyond patching problems, some even help out by making games better, such as tweaking the strength of an ability for maximum balance.

6) The second save slot

One of the greatest gaming travesties today is shipping a game to consumers and giving them only one save slot (I'm looking your way Dead Rising…though I love you to death). What if you spend hours playing a game and find yourself hitting a wall? You can't go back a few minutes or hours, but now instead must start back from the very beginning. What about games that let you make alternate decisions? Having a second slot lets you have the best of both worlds without having to waste one in order to try the game another way. Plus, if you ever let someone borrow ones of your old one save games, how many times did you receive the game back only to see that they had deleted your save so they could start their own? Argh!

5) Online gaming

Are you an anti-social misfit who can't talk to people in person, but can over the Internet? What about someone whose buddies all live too far away for local parties spent sharing a couch and cussing over controllers and chips? Being able to find another gamer in your area and who wanted to game on your time was tough back in the day, but today, thanks to the Internet, getting online to stay in touch with friends or find a random stranger is easier than every before. The console market got online gaming started with the underrated Dreamcast, which segued into later day systems, such as the Xbox 360, whose online features are constantly called the system's greatest selling point.

4) Internal saving

Remember how important passwords were? Well, imagine that system, but doing it in such a way that we never had to manually do anything more than clicking a few buttons to go to a save menu and then – tadda – our placement in the world and our advancement in the game was instantly saved. Internal saving is a thing of the past today with such additions as memory cards and hard drives, but before them there was "this" and we were damn glad to have it. If it wasn't for internal saving, who knows how many games we wouldn't have been able to beat when we were younger.

3) Sega Dreamcast

Looking back at the history of videogames, the Sega Dreamcast was a flop, and the last console to be released by Sega, who soon made their way into game developing after its failure. The Dreamcast had some real quality games, however, but beyond anything else it was the first stepping-stone into the next-gen systems. Remember the little memory units that you could play games on and then take those results to the actual game? A precursor to using handheld gaming systems to connect with its console counterpart. The biggest advancement came by way of it being the first console able to connect to the Internet, allowing people to not only surf, but also play actual videogames online such as Phantasy Star Online. If it wasn't for the Dreamcast, who knows if we'd be as connected as we are now with today's current generation of gaming systems.

2) Handheld gaming

I love videogames. You love videogames. The problem is that it's not easy to lug around a heavy brick of a console and ask the doctor if you can plug it into their television while you wait. With the introduction of handheld gaming, however, gamers were finally able to play games wherever and whenever they wanted, as they were no longer tied to the power cables and red, yellow, and white cords that overrun the back of a television like a growth of vines in the jungle. Whether it's the Gameboy, PSP, or such classics as the Mattel Electronics Football 2, handheld gaming really changed the industry.

1) Tennis For Two

Created by William Higinbotham, Tennis For Two is often considered to be the first videogame, or at least the first to ever use a graphical display. If you want to know how the game plays just think of Pong. The reason we picked Tennis For Two as our number one Top Ten Technological Advancements In Gaming is because without this single contribution, there is no guarantee that any of the past nine would've existed in the first place, nor the gaming industry that fans love so much. Gamers everywhere should be glad that Higinbotham was bored one day and decided to create the first videogame.