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Pong Home Consoles

DIY & Pong Kits | Discrete Circuitry | Pong-on-a-Chip: A-E | F-M | N-S | T-Z

List of Pong Chips | Pong Emulation | Other Dedicated Consoles

Sources

Did you know:

In 1967, Bill Rusch, who was working with Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison on the development of the Magnavox Odyssey, suggested a ping pong type game. This game would go on to become Table Tennis and be packed in with the new Odyssey as Cart 1. In May 1972, Nolan Bushnell visited a Magnavox Odyssey demonstration in Burlingame, California where he played this table tennis game. Bushnell would later have Allan Alcorn design a similar game, and Atari released their first Pong arcade machines later that year, which would influence the design of many arcade clones and eventually the Pong home consoles themselves. Through the Magnavox Odyssey and the Atari Pong, table tennis would launch the home video game market.

Pong Comes Home

Allan Alcorn designed Pong in 1972 as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell based the idea on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey. Surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work, Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney decided to manufacture the game, which became the first arcade version of Pong. Within 3 months, other companies were cashing in on the success of Pong with their own versions. There was little Bushnell could do about the "jackals" who stole the game, as he did not patent it. Ironically, Magnavox later sued Atari (and many other manufacturers) for stealing their Table Tennis game.

With the success of Pong, it was only natural that people would want to take the game home. Along with the many arcade clones, companies started to manufacture home versions of the game. In 1974, Atari engineer Harold Lee proposed a home version of Pong that would connect to a television. The system began development under the codename Darlene. By the end of 1974, several manufacturers in both the US and Europe had already started selling home versions of Pong. In 1975, Atari developed the first Pong on a Chip, and started selling their Pong version through Sears in time for Christmas as Tele-Games Pong. Atari's new microchips were not made available to other game manufacturers, and by 1976 Texas Instruments, General Instruments, National Semiconductors, and others began designing their own Pong chips.

With easy access to Pong chips, every radio, television, and electronics manufacturer (a leather company, department stores, and many other industries) all hopped on the Pong bandwagon. Magazines started running ads for DIY Pong kits. Food manufacturers licensed Pong systems to promote their products. By 1977, companies all around the world were developing Pong clones: Eastern Europe, USSR, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and several countries in South America. Pong flooded the toy, sports, and electronic sectors, and by 1978 the newly established video game industry experienced its first market crash.

Categorizing the Different Pong Console Types

Pong home consoles are essentially Plug and Play video gaming systems (meaning they have built in games played on your television) considered part of the First Generation of video gaming consoles. Because there is such a large number of them, they're getting a section of their own, separate from other Plug and Plays. This list has over 940 unique consoles listed (the Pong Picture Page website listed 2086 before it went down). I've consolidated several different lists found on the internet, but not all of them (I had to stop somewhere). Compared to other lists this may be one of the largest, but it should not be considered a complete list.

What is and is not on the list

The list is broken up into 3 sections:

Discrete Circuitry is a bit of a misnomer, as most Pong systems have some discrete circuitry. Discrete circuitry refers to systems that didn't use a processor (CPU) to run software or memory (ROM) to store software. That is to say, it is incapable of running a game program. All consoles from Generation 1 were strictly hardware without software as we would know it today. Although a Pong chip isn't necessarily software (in the idea of a cartridge or disk), this Discrete Circuit category is essentially everything before the Pong chips that came out in 1976. The first systems (Magnavox Odyssey 100, Zanussi Ping-O-Tronic, Epoch Electrotennis) were made with a circuit board full of resistors, capacitors, and transistors, and no Pong chips. Later, these components were shrunk down into early forms of integrated circuits, or microchips, and you began to see improvements with things like character generators (paddle, ball), game logic (serve, ball rebounds, collision detection, etc.), and on-screen scoring.
Pong on a Chip became a reality with advances in integrated circuitry. Atari made the first Pong chip, 3659-1, which played 1 game, Pong (obviously). Later in 1975, General Instruments designed the AY-3-8500, which was the basis for a majority of Pong consoles on the market. Other chip manufacturers were Mostek, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductors, Universal Research Labs, Mitsubishi (for Nintendo), and others.
Advancements in integrated circuits continued, and chip manufactures started to make more complex characters (cars and rocket ships for example), and more complex game logic. Some of the more popular, more complex games of the time included Tank Battle, Car Racing, Stunt Cycle, Breakout, and others. These are listed separately in the Plug and Play section.

What you won't find on this list are systems that incorporated a lot of these later "Pong chips", but did so in cartridge form. I've chosen to list these cartridge-based, first generation consoles separate from the dedicated Pong and Plug and Play consoles listed here. Some of the systems from the first generation you won't see here is the Magnavox Odyssey, the PC-50x family of systems, Coleco Telstar Arcade, and others.

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