Console Wars – The history of games consoles
“Could I project how far this thing was going to go? The answer’s obviously no. Nobody realized, even at that time, that we were on this geometric curve … that would go straight up to heaven,” – Ralph H Baer
Even though video games themselves first appeared in the 1950s they were played on massive computers connected to vector displays, not TVs. Ralph H Baer conceived the idea of a video game that was played at home in 1951. While he was working for Sanders Associates he created a series of video game console designs. One of these designs, which was nicknamed the “Brown Box”, featured changeable game modes, this design was shown to a number of TV manufacturers, and lead to a deal between Sanders Associates and Magnavox.
Magnavox released the first home video game console, which was known as the Odyssey and could be connected to a TV set. The initial design called for a huge row of switches, which would allow gamers to turn on and off certain components of the console thus allowing the CPU-less console to create slightly different games like tennis, volleyball, hockey, and chase.
This design was replaced with separate cartridges for each game, and even though Baer had designed cartridges that could include new components for new games, the cartridges that were released by Magnavox all served the same function as the switches, and allowed users to choose from the Odyssey’s built-in games.
It was not until Atari’s arcade game Pong made video games popular, that the general public began to take more notice of the budding video games industry. In the autumn 1975, Magnavox, due to the popularity of Pong, cancelled the moderately successful Odyssey and brought forth the watered-down Odyssey 100 which only played Pong and hockey.
In conjunction with this they also released a second, “high end” console, the imaginatively titled Odyssey 200 which added a plethora of new features including on-screen scoring, four player local multiplayer/co-op, and another game, Smash. Released almost at the same time as Atari’s home Pong console, these three consoles kick-started the burgeoning consumer market.
In the years that followed, the market saw many companies rushing similar consoles to market. After General Instruments released their new and innovative as well as inexpensive microchips, many of the smaller developers/console manufacturers began releasing consoles that looked different externally, but internally were playing exactly the same games.
Most of the consoles from this era were dedicated consoles, meaning you could only play the games that came with the console. These game consoles were often just called video games, because there was little reason to distinguish the two yet. Around this time Magnavox, its main rival Atari and newcomer Coleco started to push the envelope, leading to the market becoming flooded with simple, similar video games.
In 1976, the Fairchild company released their home console the VES (Video Entertainment System) Even though earlier consoles used cartridges, either the cartridges held no information and served the same function as flipping switches just like the Odyssey, or the console itself was empty like Coleco’s Telstar, and the game cartridge contained all of the components. The VES was different, as it contained a programmable microprocessor this meant its cartridges only needed a single ROM chip to store instructions, that were sent to the microprocessor.
Soon both RCA and Atari released cartridge based consoles, the Studio II and the now eponymous 2600 respectively.....
The first video game crash (1977)
By 1977, manufacturers of much older and obsolete consoles as well as Pong clones sold all of their systems at a loss, allowing them to clear stock. This created a huge glut in the market, which eventually caused RCA, and later Fairchild to abandon their respective consoles. Only Atari and Magnavox remained to battle it out, even though both companies suffered losses during 1977 and 1978.
In North America this “crash” caused most of the smaller game companies to go out of business, but in Europe it had a different and dramatic effect. Due to the reduction in demand for the chips that powered the first-generation consoles, the price of those chips dropped drastically. European manufacturers started to release their own first generation, cartridge based game consoles that had no CPU.
The cartridges for these consoles would contain the same chips that had powered the later Pong consoles. Even though the VES continued to be profitable after the 1977 crash, and programmable cartridge based consoles like Odyssey II had been introduced to the market, there was no real recovery, at least not until Atari released a conversion of the arcade classic Space Invaders in 1980 for the 2600.
This completely revived the home console industry as many consumers bought an Atari console just so they could play Space Invaders at home! The success of Space Invaders’ also started the trend of console manufacturers trying to get exclusive rights to arcade titles, as well as being the harbinger of advertisements for game consoles claiming to bring the arcade experience home.
By the start of the 80s the Atari 2600 stood tall as the number 1 console on the planet, due in the main to the release of Space Invaders, it had won the first “Console War”……..
