A Brief History of Game Console Warfare

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a gallery on the history of console wars. Starting with the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, all the way to the 2006 Wii. The details on the Magnavox Odyssey: 'This is where it all began. Game guru Ralph Baer's invention for Magnavox brought video gaming out of the arcades and into the living room. As the first home video game console, the Odyssey had no audio output and could only display black and white images. But the system came with translucent TV screen overlays to simulate full-color graphics in games like tennis and hockey. The Odyssey's sales were less than impressive: Magnavox had sold about 350,000 units by 1975.'"

Comments

Cotton Candy, get yer Cotton Candy!

[AKAImBatman]

Usually, a discussion of "warfare" would include some actual, oh I dunno, warfare? Instead, all we get is a bunch of pictures of the winners and the hanger-ons of gaming history. (Starting with the requisite reference to the Magnavox Odyssey.) The whole article feels like it was put together to create yet another story about the new game consoles coming out. To flesh it out, they took a few pictures and ripped a little data from Wikipedia.

I mean, how can you write an article *supposedly* about video game warfare, but so completely miss the Video Game Crash of '83/84?!? You're far better off checking out Wikipedia's article on the same thing.

That being said, someone behind the scenes seemed to know what they were doing. the Tron Deadly Discs cartridge was a hilarious backslap at both Atari and this article.

A list of systems oddly missing:

• Channel F (FIRST cartridge based system)
  
• Intellivision
  
• Odyssey^2
  
• Colecovision
  
• Atari 5200
  
• Atari 7800
  
• TurboGrafx 16
  
• Atari Jaguar
  
• 3DO
  

All of those were supremely important to the history of video game "warfare". Yet not a one in sight. How odd.

A Real History Lesson

[Doomstalk]

I recommend that anyone who finds this article interesting should read Steven L. Kent's excellent The Ultimate History of Video Games (formerly known as The First Quarter). It's a detailed and nuanced history of the video game industry, starting with the pinball industry's birth in the late 1800s, all the way to the death of the Dreamcast. It's incredibly engrossing, and will leave you with a much clearer picture of how far the industry has come.