Home console systems

Blips on the TV...

Ralph Baer wrote a paper in 1966 with his ideas for a TV gaming system, then created in 1967 a system called the "Brown Box" which was able to display 2 moving dots, and optionally had a gun to shoot the dots. With his collegues he thought up several games, a fox hunt game, and a gun game to shoot the dots. After some negotiation with some TV companies, a deal with Magnavox was struck who produced the "Brown Box" as the "Magnavox Odyssey". More details...

Odyssey had many components, so a simpler chip was developed, in a box, with one game, ready to run. The story of Sears Tele-Games¹ goes like this: at christmas of 1975, this box was sold for $100: the one game was Pong, and the box was called Tele-Games. Alcorn tells about the difference with Odyssey:

The one game in a box concept continued with the handheld area.

In 1976, the `Fairchild Video Entertainment System' was launched, with a built-in Hockey/Tennis game, and eventually supported 21 cartridges with additional video games. These were the first steps into a more versatile home gaming system. Also in 1976, RCA launched its `Studio II', of which the graphics were not much better than earlier machines, but which also had extra, optional cartridges available to get new games.

Atari responded³ to the new cartridge based systems by developing the `Game Brain', that could also handle multiple games via cartridges, the cartridges were self-supporting. However, it was never released, "in part due to the far superior system Atari was in the process of bringing to completion."

This far superior system is described next, it is the Atari VCS, which stands for `video computer system'. Although its development started before the release of the Fairchild system, and it was released later, in 1977, but also became much more popular than the Fairchild system. New elements⁴ in this console:

The real innovation in the Atari system was the way the picture was built. Most systems use a frame buffer⁵ that assigns to each pixel a color. But, this requires a lot of memory for reasonable resolutions with some colors, and memory was very expensive. So, the VCS has only "128 bytes of memory" and used a custom chip, "Stella" that generated two video lines on the fly. This complicated programming the device, because you had to be in time to generate the video line, but it made the hardware very cheap. Judging by the number of games that have appeared for the VCS, this limitation was cleverly worked around.

In 1980⁶, a competitor to the Atari VCS appeared on the market, namely the IntelliVision by Mattel. In the beginning their vision was a family computer to do tasks like "family planning, stock analysis, teaching to play guitar, that sort of thing ...". Then in 1981, they started to market the device by directly comparing it to the Atari system. This kind of competition was new:

However this aggressive marketing "backfired", when ColecoVision was released in 1982⁷, which had even better graphics. Combined with a crash in the industry, Mattel closed down Mattel Electronics, so the device became not so hugely popular as the Atari VCS was.

Vectrex⁸ also deserves a small mention: it hit the market in 1982, and was a vector-based home console system with a black nine-inch screen. Although an innovative idea, and although many games of that time were well playable on a vector based machine, it never took off. Possible reasons suggested⁸:

• "...Vectrex's timing was bad. It came out at a time when the video game industry was on the verge of collapse."
• "Vectrex was also monocromatic, which might have been perceived as a limitation."

ColecoVision was released in August 1982, and was a further advancement over it's predecessors. "Hundredths of thousands of consoles and close to 10 million cartridges were sold for this system."⁹ The most popular game was Donkey Kong, which made the difference, and the idea was picked up from Nintendo, when one of Coleco's employees visited Japan. From a console point of view, outstanding features were expansion modules: "a fancy joystick, a driving module with a plug-in pedal, a rollerball, and the Atari 2600 convertor." This system was the first to have a cross-platform adaptor, so all Atari 2600 cartridges and its games could be played on the ColecoVision.

For Nintendo^A, business was done producing arcade games. However, in the early 1980s, they decided to work on a next generation game machine for in the home. They introduced the "Family Computer (or FamiCom)" in 1983 in Japan, "where it was very successful". However, as previously told, the US market for video games collapsed, so a release for the US market had bad timing; Atari was going down and negotiations with them were difficult. Therefore they released a couple of coin-operated games for arcades which were successful. This resulted in confidence, people liked the games, "but the retailers were a different story". Their plan^B was as follows:

By 1989^C the NES in the US was the most dominant console, although by that time in Japan, already a new console becoming popular, the "PC engine" by NEC, introduced in 1987 in Japan. The PC engine was renamed to "TurboGrafx-16" for the US market. "The PC engine was touted as the first 16-bit system, although its CPU was actually an 8-bit chip. The system did feature an updated graphics processor." Shortly after, Sega introduced its 16-bit "Mega-Drive" system, which was later named Genesis for the US market, but it did not become as popular as the PC engine. However, in the US, in the Christmas season of 1990, Sega came out as winner. Keith Schaefer, executive vice president of NEC Technologies explains^D:

In 1991, Nintendo launched their 16 bit system, the Super NES. Together with Mario, this system was very popular, although with Sonic, the Sega Genesis was also a big success.

Some years later, in late 1994, the Sega Saturn was introduced in Japan^E. In Japan it was a success initially but in part because Sony was going to introduce the PlayStation in late 1995, Sega moved the introduction date of the Saturn from September 1995 to May 1995. This caused both a console and a game shortage, combined with a steep price, $399, which was $100 higher than Sony's PlayStation, which in turn caused the Saturn to not sell well. An innovation for this console was the Netlink add-on, that allowed people to browse the Web, check e-mail, and play games on-line.

As told, late 1995 the PlayStation by Sony was released, a 32-bit system with great graphics able to play the popular 3D games of that day, and added to this, the game makers found the system easy to work with. Combined with massive marketing, and a year's advance on Nintendo's N64, Sony became "a major player in the console wars"^F.

Sega released another box in 1999^G, the Dreamcast, with faster graphics, builtin 56K modem, and an online gaming network was started. However, "Sega's reputation was working against them. Many potential Dreamcast owners had written Sega off by this time, having endured several failures." In combination with big competition from Nintendo's N64 (released in 1996), and Sony's Playstation, Sega dropped to third position, resulting in: "History will tell if this was Sega's last console system, but for the moment, it would seem so." (page 313)

Microsoft entered the console market in 2001 with its Xbox console, which became hugely popular instantly, partly due to its low price (Microsoft has deep pockets), partly due to the game Halo, which people were expecting and wanting to play. Also the Xbox has an online "Live" mode, with a lot of games supporting this and players are able to talk to each other with through microphone giving it a really "Live" feel.