Bally and Allied Leisure announced their own systems.Īll came up short next to Atari. Magnavox unveiled the Odyssey2, which came with a built-in membrane keyboard for writing your own game software. Soon, RCA released the Studio II, which had built-in gamepad buttons and also accepted cartridges. The next month, Fairchild beat Atari to the punch with its microprocessor-based Channel F, an impressive game console with color graphics and the ability to accept cartridges, unlike all the other TV game systems on the market-and just like what Atari was already working on. To stay afloat and raise enough capital for launching the 2600, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell sold the company to Warner Communications for $28 million. Most importantly, the 2600 would accept cartridges that stored additional game programs in either 2KB or 4KB of ROM. The 2600 hardware design also featured a custom graphics chip designed by Jay Miner and Joe Decuir called TIA (codenamed "Stella"), while a MOS 6532 contained the system RAM and processed controller input. Al Alcorn, Jay Miner, Joe Decuir, and some other engineers designed a cutting-edge console with an 8-bit, 1.19MHz MOS 6507 microprocessor, a more affordable variant of the MOS 6502 that would soon appear that same year in the Apple II and the Commodore PET 2001, two of the first personal computers. And it transported you to an array of virtually unlimited new worlds right from your living room or den.Ītari was already working on a solution. When connected to a television set, the 2600 brought real Atari arcade games home.
Once you got tired of the built-in games in any of these systems, that was it you couldn't add new ones. Coleco unveiled the Telstar, and Magnavox released more streamlined Odyssey models.īy the end of 1976, dozens of dedicated TV game consoles flooded the market as Atari, Magnavox, Coleco, and others jostled for position in what turned out to be a quick boom and bust cycle.
Sears sold its own Tele-Games Pong jointly with Atari and also released Taito's Speedway IV. The company soon followed up with plenty of variations, including Super Pong 10, Super Pong ProAm, Stunt Cycle, and Video Pinball. Three years later, Atari scored a hit with its Home Pong console. Originally designed in 1967 and launched in 1972, the Odyssey played 12 different games on your television it didn't have color, so you put plastic overlays on the TV that acted as playfields for the simple black-and-white graphics. But it had nothing in the home yet-that fell to Magnavox, which was selling Ralph Baer's brilliant Odyssey. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security SoftwareĪtari was already flying high by the mid-1970s, having launched the coin-op video game industry with Computer Space and Pong.
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