Just as the earliest films do not feature recorded sound, the first video game console is silent as well, with graphics which we would consider very primitive by today’s standard.Ītari’s PONG arcade machine was so popular in 1973 that Atari decided to market the game as a home console two years later in 1975. The demonstration of the "Brown Box" led to the licensing of the technology by Magnavox in 1972, resulting in the release of the first official home video game console – Magnavox Odyssey. There were only six simple games for the console, namely ping-pong, tennis, handball, volleyball, chase games and a light-gun game. Baer, also known as "The Father of Video Games", he developed the brown video game console such that it can be hooked up with any ordinary TV sets. The first video game console (working prototype) debuted as a bulky rectangular brown wooden box with two attached controllers, and thus the name "Brown Box". Over the past few decades, video games have been refined by graphical enhancements, increased processor speed of video. Whether you’re a gamer or not, this is a great opportunity for you to go behind the scene and uncover the ‘making’ of present-day consoles! If you are amazed by such facts, then I guarantee that this entry will excite you even further with the bits and pieces of fascinating historical facts across the video game consoles timeline. Did you know that there were more than 70 different consoles to date? And did you know that there was a peak era of video arcade game when Nintendo and Sega were fiercely pitting against each other with their revolutionary consoles? In a way, the aggressive competition between companies of video game consoles had churned out the superior features of video gaming to bring to us the excellent quality we see today.Īs you shall see below, the evolution of video game consoles is indeed intriguing. We can now play affordable games of high calibre with 3D graphics and awesome interactivity in the comfort of our home, taking for granted the little and subtle improvements made to each and every consoles before becoming what they are today. Did not actually contain any ROM or data of any kind.Video gaming has come a long way since the early days of Pong and Pac-man.Cartridges contained a series of jumper circuits that connected different components on the main board together.In the first production runs of the Magnavox Odyssey and the Philips 7000, these were permanently attached to the console in later models, they were removable and replaceable. Two 8-way, one-button, digital joysticks.No actual CPU, just very simple logic circuitry.In fact other than a basic table tennis game (which would later be copied by Atari as "Pong") a majority of the games relied almost as much on the overlay and an imagination as it did on the image appearing on the television. Various shooting games where the white block would appear behind an overlay lighting up various targets.Īnd many more of that ilk. GamesĪ Simon-says type variant where one moves the white block to a part of a body on an overlay of a boy and a girl.Ī roulette game where players placed a poker chip on a (physical) numbered sheet, and hope that the white block goes into their desired number on the overlay.Ī 50 state educational game where one player would name a state and the other would have to place the white block so it would appear in the state on the overlay To get around the graphical limitations Magnavox included various overlays with the various carts. Most of the games were two player only, and consisted almost exclusively of two white blocks on the screen which the players could move via dial controllers. Most of the games on the Magnavox bear little resemblance to the games of today. The system however used cartridges to tell the system which game (or series of games) to play. Most (if not all) of the games were built into the system itself. This made it so pointing the gun at any light source would count as a hit. It would recognize any light source as the screen. However, you would not need to point the light gun at the screen to be successful. The Odyssey also had the first optical video game light gun, which was made for the Odyssey game Shooting Gallery. Magnavox settled or won many court cases against various companies including Nolan Bushnell for eerie resemblance between Bushnell's Pong and Tennis for the Odyssey. The Odyssey's sales were poor due to bad marketing by Magnavox retail stores and the consumer misconception that the Odyssey only worked on Magnavox televisions. The prototype Odyssey (referred to as the "Brown Box") that Baer got to work in 1968 is now in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It was released in Fall of 1972 and was designed by Ralph Baer in 1968. The Magnavox Odyssey is the very first video game system.
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