As with most industries without a single dominant leader, console manufacturers have marketed their products in a manner to highlight them in a more favorable manner compared to their competitors', or to focus on features that their competitors may lack, often in aggressive manners. For example, console manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s heavily relied on the word size of the central processor unit, emphasizing that games had better capabilities with 16-bit processors over 8-bit ones.[2] This type of aggressive marketing led to video game journalists to call the competitive marketing as a "war" or "battle" as early as August 1988.[3][4] As each new console generation emerged with new marketing approaches, journalists and consumers continued to use variations of the "war" language, including "system wars" and "console wars". By the early 2000s, the term "console war" was most commonly used to describe heated competition between console manufacturers within any generation.[4]