A History of Game Consoles, As Seen on TV

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."

Comments

PreacherTom is an Astroturfer

[Anonymous Coward]

PreacherTom is an astroturfer for BusinessWeek magazine. Look at the URL in this recent Slashdot story and notice the campaign_id string. Now look at his user page. Scroll down to the submissions section. Notice how almost every one is a link to a BusinessWeek.com article containing the campaign_id string. Now look at the search results for "campaign_id preachertom". He's been pulling this shit on slashdot, digg, Fark, MetaFilter, and who knows where else. Check out this MetaTalk thread for the initial discovery.

Spread the word, perhaps?

PCWorld for the win!

[AKAImBatman]

Just about every other "history" article as of late has jumped from the 2600 to the NES, ignoring the rich history in between. PC World deserves a pat on the back for changing this. That being said...

For a while, superior graphics and sound made Mattel's $300 Intellivision (and a succession of rebadged versions) the major competitor to the Atari VCS. Mattel's product was the first console to use a 16-bit microprocessor, but poor controllers and--more importantly--a lack of third-party games limited its success.

The Intellivision wasn't lacking third party titles. Everyone from Activision, to IMagic, to Atari (!) released games for the system. You can see a full list of games over on IntellivisionLives.

While Intellivision focused more on thinking games rather than arcade action*, it was pretty much successful right up until the Video Game Crash of '83/84. At that point, Mattel Electronics died, but the Intellivision lived on as part of the newly formed INTV Corp. Some of the best games were produced under INTV (Diner, Thin Ice, Thunder Castle, Hover Force, etc.), and they didn't close their doors until 1991. (IIRC)

And many [Colecovision] units came bundled with a near-arcade-quality port of Nintendo's Donkey Kong.

Except for the fact that Donkey Kong was on the wrong side of the screen. :-/

Suprisingly, not that many players noticed this little gaff.

Previewed at the 1983 Consumer Electronic Show (CES), the Odyssey 3 Command Center held out the promise of an improved keyboard, a built-in joystick holder, a voice synthesizer, and a 300-baud modem.

Not entirely true. It was released in Europe as the Phillips Videopac+. It took collectors a while to realize that the Videopac+ (O^3) was different than the Videopac (O^2), and that the new console had actually been released. Albeit in small quantities. Of course, the extra hardware enhancements the article talks about (like the modem) were not in the European release.

* Don't get me wrong. The Intellivision had some great action games. Dreadnaught Factor is one of my favorites, as is Space Spartans.

Re:The best part...

[od05]

Click on the "print" link and it shows the article on one page without ads.

We want to see the vids, not RTFA :)

[g253]

So here are the links :

pong : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X53eJ8AWQ9Y
fairchild : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-763921347 2647728205&sourceid=docidfeed&hl=en
vcs :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU3gHAGbi0Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_XrIx2eUGc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lROb1vWNiig
Magnavox Odyssey 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oG1TlryN88
Mattel Intellivision : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXet1I2TuXE
Vectrex : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1KQ4i5oRrM
ColecoVision : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GpptJusOjM
and Expansion Module for Atari 2600 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6T7755ux2M
Atari 5200 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAlmxV8e7tE
Odyssey 3 Command Center (never released) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv1a9U-6rJQ
Sega Game-1000 Mk II : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iImQcL5Vs-g
NES $250 deluxe set : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cssV9F6JhbE
NES power glove : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93iDhnBcMGo
NES power pad : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzH732OFTqg
"NES rap" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuHOCyJWFDE
Sega Master System : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLEeoOaze_A
Atari 7800 Pro System : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A46SSY9q3n8
Atari 2600 Jr : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_nOWJd4H_A
NEC TurboGrafx-16 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmR1xJAho_c
Sega Genesis : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUtIWT7CLTw
Sega Genesis : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOM01F4Ihcc
Sega Genesis : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWZARgoipGw
Neo Geo : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ0aEjlTYms
SNES : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKPZNHUlSHA
SNES : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRjVXIWZfeM
Philips CD-I : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ROwwU29xCw
TTi TurboDuo : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEvzN5YcR80
Amiga CD32 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMd5lMV4uFI
3DO : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTRqsS-ftgQ
Jaguar : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQaro-yjBqI
Saturn : http://ww

PS3 over priced?!

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Fairchild Channel F console cost 170 bucks in 1976.

In constant dollars.

It would've cost as much as a high end ps3.

The Fairchild didn't even support BluRay!

Re:Remember This Atari Game?

[frogstar_robot]

That sounds like Megamania. http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?Softwar eLabelID=297