Museum of Executable Arts: 1970's

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The 1970's gave us a multitude of stand-alone, single game systems, but this isn't what we're here for. We're here to sample the delights of the earliest home games consoles!

1970-1971
These were the quiet years, when video games were mainly one to a machine, or only available to rich, science lab types. Also, they were very simple affairs, made from analogue parts and multi-beam oscilloscopes.

1972-1975
This is where the fun began! The successor to the lab-based analogue machines of yore, the Magnavox Oddysey was released. While it was technically a one game machine, it came with cards which could connect the internal parts of the machine together in different ways.
The Oddysey lacked many of the basic functions we take for granted today, such as fancy full colour 3D graphics, and the ability to keep score, so the machine was packaged with an assortment of board-game pieces - tokens, poker chips, dice and play money.
You might expect such a low-spec machine to do badly, but this machine lasted until 1978 - a longer life than the Sega Master System!

1976
The Fairchild Channel F was released this year. It featured a sporty 8-bit CPU, a big step forward compared to the Oddysey. The games came on cartridges, a standard still in use by hand-held machines today.
In all, 26 games were released for this pioneering digital console - the same number of jumper cards for the Oddysey. The design of the machine is somewhat basic by today's standards - the controllers were hard-wired into the system until the 1979 model came out.

1977
The Atari VCS (later re-named to the 2600) brought popularity to the gaming world, and a large number of it's games are playable on collections for the Playstation 2 and X-Box.
For such a simple 8-bit machine, it had an impressive life-span, with production from 1977 to 1990, which is longer than the Gameboy and the Playstation!
A huge number of games were released for this console, from my personnal favourite "Combat", to arcade conversions such as "Space Invaders" and "Pac-Man" which secured the popularity of the device.
The full history of the Atari 2600 is littered with the clutter of more than 10 different types of controllers, 100's of games, and being in the ownership of several different companies.

1978
Originally titled the Bally Professional Arcade, the Astrocade as it became known in 1982 was first released. It featured four joystick ports, and was designed to have game cartridges loaded while the power was on. However, like so many other machines, the Astrocade was snuffed out in 1985 by the great video game market crash.

Magnavox also released the successor to its Oddysey - the originally named "Oddysey II" which looked a bit like a type writer. It featured a built-in keyboard for playing educational games, but fared even worse than the Astrocade, it's production run ending in 1981.

1979
The end of this classic decade brought us the Intellivision. Superior in every way to the Atari 2600, it was killed off in 1984 by the same thing that took the Astrocade. Not even an adapter which made it compatable with Atari 2600 cartridges helped. Had the gamers of the day realised how much better this machine was than the 2600, games of today could have been so much different.
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