From: drudetb@infonode.ingr.com (Ted B. Drude)
Subject: Re: History of Home Video Games
Organization: Intergraph Corporation, Huntsville, AL.
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 15:55:11 GMT

In article <x-m272k@rpi.edu> petitc@vccsouth23.its.rpi.edu (Christopher Jon Petit) writes:
>(Only major highlights are included, and the home market is the major focus)
>
>  Anyhow, a little while later, Nolan Bushnel decided he also wanted to try to
>make an electronic game that could be put in bars and such.  

I've heard several anecdotes about what Nolan was up to,  pre-Atari. 
According to the book "ZAP! - The Rise and Fall of Atari",  Nolan was
working on his own Spacewar clone when he stumbled across Magnavox's
Odyssey at a trade show.  He then decided it would be alot easier to
clone that,  because it could be done with a single microprocessor and
some glue chips. Spacewar, in Nolan's mind,  would have required a
complete minicomputer  and he was already working on building one.
Anyway, he shortly had an Odyssey clone working and started Atari. 

...

>  A few years later (around 1975 or so if I'm not mistaken), these Pong games
>were mass-marketed and could be hooked up to a TV screen.  

Well, Magnavox had their Odyssey I out earlier than that...maybe in 1972
or 73.  And while Atari was not the first company out with a home
console, Pong, and its many variants,  certainly became the rage.
(The fact that Pone was an Odyssey clone was later admitted by Nolan in 
testimony he gave during a lawsuit between Atari and Magnavox.) 

...

>  Now, the video game market was in trouble.  It was around this time that
>someone mass-marketed a truly successful video game console with programs
>that were on 'cartridges' rather than hard-wired into the machine itself.
>This machine was the Atari 2600.   Anyhow, because of good marketing, and
>a thirst for video games, the 2600 found its way into millions of homes.

The Fairchild Channel F and Bally Astrocade were cartridge-based home
systems that both pre-dated the Atari 2600.  I also think the Magnavox
Odyssey II may have been out sooner than the 2600. But you're right in
saying the 2600 was more sucessfully marketed than those other early systems.

>The success of the Atari 2600 spawned several other home video game systems--
>the most notable being the Intellivision (Intelligent Television), the
>Colecovision, and (much later) the Atari 5200.
...

> Now we hit the 1980's.  The Atari 2600 is a household name, and the
>Intellevision and Colecovision have found their respective 'niches' with video
>game lovers. 

Well,  again,  I hate to point this out,  but the Atari 5200 was out on
the market at the same time or  before the Colecovision.  And if you're
talking about the 5200 and Colecovision,  you are ALREADY well into
the '80s,  by a couple of years at least. 

>  For several years, only arcade games were produced.  They had good graphics,
>but excellent gameplay.  This let the video game market bide its time, until
>the day when, hopefully, the market would revive.

In the meantime ('83-86) the home computer market went through a huge boom
and a shakeout. What really killed the first generation of home
video games were home computers that were priced at or below the home
consoles (Atari 400,  TI99/4A,  VIC-20, Tandy CoCo,  Timex 1000,  ad
infinitum).  Also Atari sold out to Time-Warner,  who thoroughly 
mismanaged it by general hubris and incompetence.  Coleco spent all 
their extra cash trying to turn the Adam debacle around.  Several other
major players, including IBM, TI,  and Mattel all gave up on the home
game/computer market.  Commodore survived the shakeout, won the
pricing game, and sold millions and millions of C-64s during this time.
Their corporate profits and stock value were at an all-time high. Atari
continued to peddle their 8-bit line of computers with mixed results,
and put most of their R+D money into their more profitable coin-op  efforts. 

>But, this [the Atari 7800] ]also never really found its niche---very
>few tapes were >produced, although the ones produced were superb (a
>wonderful rendition of >Asteroids was amoung them).

Atari had developed this machine as early as 1984.  Again,  becuase of
general corporate mismanagement, the machine was not marketed properly, 
and most of the games were not developed for it until well after the
Nintendo was establish in the US. Actually  over 40 titles were
produced for the 7800 by Atari. (I've got most of them.)  But a lot
fewer titles were produced for it by third parties than for the 2600. 

>  As a few years passed, the NES became almost as much a household name as did
>the Atari 2600.  Many different kinds of tapes were released---although none
>included many (if any) variations as did the classic Atari 2600 tapes.  Right
>now, the NES has around 200 tapes available.

Just FYI,  there were about 800 different titles produced for the 2600.
Admittedly,  many of those titles are poor quality.  But the same can be
said of many NES titles.

------------------------

This post is not meant to flame everything you've said,  but you might
want to read some books that are excellent documentation about the
early part of the home video game and home computer markets.

Two I would definitely recommend are:

"ZAP! - The Rise and Fall of Atari",  by Scott Cohen

and 

"The Home Computer Wars",  by Mike Tomczyk

==============================

- Ted D.