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A Brief History of Game Console Warfare

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the long-have-we-fought-and-many-have-died dept.

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.'"

5 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cotton Candy, get yer Cotton Candy! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting
    the Nintendo goggle thing

    The VirtualBoy.

    I left out a bunch of consoles that simply weren't relevant in the market. Otherwise I would have droned on and on about the Bally Astrocade, the Emerson Arcadia, the Neo-Geo, the SG-1000 (Mark I, II, & III), the APF Imagination Machine, the Wonderswan, the Apple Pippin, the...

    Um... I'm droning on, aren't I?
    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  2. Re:*shakes head* by Lemmy+Caution · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Microsoft began making designing, producing, and selling mice in 1983 (playing catch-up to Apple, I believe, and designing Word to take advantage of the mouse.) Many years before Sony was even in the video game business, and two years before Nintendo shipped the first Famicom/NES (they has already been making arcade games for 8 years.)

    I recall Microsoft having designed some specialized cards for early PCs, too, but I don't recall their name.

  3. Re:Cotton Candy, get yer Cotton Candy! by ZakuSage · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps the better article to check would be Console Wars?

  4. Re:*shakes head* by Scoth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Don't forget the Microsoft RAMCard. Quite popular in their day. I love the "Great Software: Yours, Ours, or Theirs" tagline in the ad. How things have changed.

  5. Re:Cotton Candy, get yer Cotton Candy! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You cannot discuss the Video Game Crash without mentioning the "Super Systems" like the Colecovision and the 5200. Systems like the Intellivision and the O^2 also played a huge role. Mentioning it in passing is hardly addressing the console crash, much less the "warfare" that caused it.

    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade