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Video Gaming Consoles with Removable Media

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Did you know:

Twice within less than a decade the video gaming industry had two major financial meltdowns. Many know about the "Crash of '83," but the first crash happen in 1977 and would threaten the future of the entire medium. The crash in the market was caused by the success of the Pong home console. Many electronics and toy manufactures wanted to capitalize on the growing trend of video games and attempted to make their own clones of the Pong system. At the time the idea of copyright infringement in the industry hadn’t been fully brought into practice. Unlike in today’s video game market which operates on a global level, many consoles were produced and sold locally in European and Asian countries where American copyright law couldn’t reach them. With so many systems for sale around the world many major manufacturers couldn’t get a share of the market in countries where Pong clones where being produced at an unsustainable rate. It is easy to see why the market for video games couldn’t sustain such large number of consoles, which forced many manufactures to sell their systems at a loss just too clear stock. The effects of the crash were even felt into the second generation of consoles, with Fairchild and RCA abandoning plans to develop future video game consoles. The only thing that would save the video gaming industry would be ports of popular arcade games like Space Invaders, and PacMan. With better graphics and better games, companies like Atari would survive the crash and go on to dominate the second generation of video gaming consoles.

Pong, in Cartridge Form

The consoles in the first generation are like no other video gaming consoles, because they didn't use microprocessors to run programs, or even ROM to store programs. Before even the dedicated Pong consoles of the late 70s, video game systems used discrete transistor-based digital game logic. The very first console, the Magnavox Odyssey, for example only had simple circuits on the cartridge that, when it was plugged in, changed the way the console displayed graphics on the TV. No one had ever seen such a thing in the home before, and interacting with your television with these new "TV games" really became a sensation.

By 1976, General Instruments had figured out how to place all the circuits needed for a TV Pong game onto a single microchip, the first Pong-on-a-chip. This really put the new industry into high gear, because it was easier than ever to produce a TV game... and just about everyone did. Some companies figured out that you can put these new chips from GI in a cartridge and instead of trying to sell several consoles only had to sell one console with several different "game cassettes."

By the end of 1977, so many companies were producing Pong type gaming systems that the now flooded market began to crash. Yes, there was a "video game crash of '77," 6 years before E.T. did, or didn't, cause the crash of '83. By 1978, sales of the first generation consoles had fizzled out in North America and Europe, with Nintendo extending the first generation in Japan to 1980 with their line of TV Games. With advances in technology, and lowering prices, new systems like the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision used microprocessors and far outperformed the now dwindling Pong-on-a-chip gaming systems.

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