A History of Game Consoles, As Seen on TV 61
PC World is running a great retrospective on videogame consoles, looking all the way back to Atari's pong. The best part is, they're doing it via television ads for the systems. The article features highly entertaining blipverts for Pong, the Fairchild, the VCS, the 2600, the Intellivision, the Odyssey, Vectrex, Colecovision, the Atari 5200, and many, many more. From the article: "Gamers were tiring of PONG consoles, and Fairchild Instrument and Camera's Channel F console offered a fresh new alternative. It featured programmable 'videocarts' containing ROM chips and code, as opposed to the dedicated circuits that the Magnavox Odyssey's plug-in cards used. The cartridge concept emerged as an industry standard, and is still used in handheld gaming devices today."
Re:PCWorld for the win! (Score:3, Insightful)
There was nothing revisionist about it. It just wasn't obvious to consumers.
From a 50,000 foot level, what happened is that game consoles had been flooding the market with new hardware and titles at an unsustainable rate. At the same time, console makers had been trying to turn their consoles into full computers in an attempt to make their systems more appealing. Commodore attempted to improve the computer market by advertising that computers could be both for serious work AND games. To top it all off, retailers had long believed that Video Games were just a fad.
All this added up to a powder keg that was ready to go off. About the same time, Commodore started a price war with Texas Instruments, Atari manufactured more E.T. cartridges than their were systems, E.T. was poorly received, and retailers ended up with too much console product on their shelves. So they did what any console maker would do: They reduced the prices on the console stuff to clear it out faster so they could focus on the computer stuff. This was picked up on by the public (who already were being told that computers were superior) and the market for console stuff disappeared overnight.
*CRASH*
The bright side of this is that there are still tons of sealed games for the old systems just waiting to be found. They've been sitting in warehouses, attics, backrooms, and all kinds of other interesting places for the last 20+ years. Even today, I can still get sealed games for the 2600 and Intellivision for barely a couple of dollars. You just have to know where to look.