The VCS was conceived in 1976 by Joe Decuir, who designed the chip set and the first prototypes; Harold Lee, who had pushed Nolan Bushnell in the direction of consumer electronics with home Pong; and Steve Meyer, who figured out how to make the VCS cost effective.

It was based around the 6507 micro-processor, had 4k of ROM max and 128 bytes of RAM to keep track of scores etc. It had three sound channels that it put out in glorious mono. Its CPU clock speed was 1.19 MHz (the same units as in "a Pentium233 runs at 233 MHz").

The VCS was a great product but Atari didn't have the money to perfect and manufacture it. They would have to merge with a big entertainment company to do this. Eventually Warner Communications executive vice president Manny Gerard made his first acquisition for the company. Gerard later said he saw the VCS in an Atari lab and said, "Holy Shit! This is going to take over the world".

With the blessing of Warner boss Steve Ross Atari was bought for $28 million (see Nolan Bushnell article in RETROGAMER 1).

400,000 VCS's were produced and the VCS went on sale in American shops in November 1977 for $200. Although it was an impressive piece of kit it encountered market apathy. Most people had played Pong for six months and then got bored.

This was their image of a TV video game. Atari produced versions of most of their arcade back catalogue for the console. Part of the Combat cart was the arcade game Tank (I love it's option for steerable bullets - reality goes straight out the window). Breakout was given it's first home version, quite a slick game for it's day.

The simple two player shooter Outlaw with its blocky graphics appeared and the earliest of video games Space War also received an outing. VCS Chess blanked the whole screen (sometimes for hours) while it thought of its next move.

The driving game Night Driver used the paddle controllers to good effect. These were colourful and competent versions but they needed the equivalent of a hit to make their product mainstream. They needed this impetus to create excitement to bring video games to the masses. And that, incredibly is what they got.