A History of Game Consoles, As Seen on TV

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 22, 2006 @08:38AM from the after-these-message-we'll-be-right-back dept.

PC World is running a great retrospective on videogame consoles, looking all the way back to Atari's pong. The best part is, they're doing it via television ads for the systems. The article features highly entertaining blipverts for Pong, the Fairchild, the VCS, the 2600, the Intellivision, the Odyssey, Vectrex, Colecovision, the Atari 5200, and many, many more. From the article: "Gamers were tiring of PONG consoles, and Fairchild Instrument and Camera's Channel F console offered a fresh new alternative. It featured programmable 'videocarts' containing ROM chips and code, as opposed to the dedicated circuits that the Magnavox Odyssey's plug-in cards used. The cartridge concept emerged as an industry standard, and is still used in handheld gaming devices today."

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I was born in 1966 by Anonymous Coward · 2006-12-22 09:14 · Score: 1, Funny

For me, it all began with my parents fucking.
Earliest game by edwardpickman · 2006-12-22 09:23 · Score: 3, Funny

Punch card Pong was a bit boring but gaming had to start somewhere.
Re:Antikythera mechanism by SnarfQuest · 2006-12-22 11:20 · Score: 2, Funny

Nope. That was the prototype XBox. You know how long it takes MicroSoft to go from a prototype to a usable version?

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