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Nowadays, video game consoles are a ubiquitous piece of hardware in many households. Maybe you have a Switch hooked up in the living room, anXboxsitting beside your PC, a PlayStation standing menacingly waiting for games. The point is, it’s more common to have a console than not.
Yet in the early days of gaming, home consoles were not so common, with the video game market dominated by arcade cabinets. A seismic shift eventually occurred that put home consoles in the forefront, but when exactly did the first home console even appear? Let’s find out.
Did Home Consoles Or Arcades Come First?
Home consoles are extremely common now, while arcade cabinets are sadly mostly a thing of the past, this was not the case in the earlier days of the gaming industry. Arcade cabinets took off almost immediately, while home consoles took quite a while to catch up with them. Your general impression from that might be that arcade cabinets are much older than home consoles, though they’re much closer in age than you might have thought.
The very first arcade cabinet, housingComputer Space, was released in 1971. The very first home console, theMagnavox Odyssey, was released only one year later in 1972. Why then did it take so long for home consoles to catch up with arcades? A lot of it was a mix of the social factor with arcades as well as a more highly supported industry with alower upfront cost for consumers.
What Was The Very First Video Game Console?
Launched in September 1972,the Magnavox Odyssey became the first ever consolethat you could bring home and plug directly into your own television set. Video games were still in their early days here, with rudimentary buthighly experimental games released on computers, but none that consoles or arcades could achieve to the same effect. The Magnavox Odyssey was the first attempt to bring this experience to consumers.
The Odyssey came with multiple cards that could be used tochange the functionality of the console itself, allowing to to display different games. This is different from the later idea of game cartridges where the actual game was stored on the cartridge as ROM. Here, the cards inserted into the console werespecific directions and functions that told the console what to display, rather than the contents of the card being run by the console itself.
The Magnavox Odyssey sold pretty well for the first ever home console,selling approximately 350,000 unitsand spawning a long line of successive consoles.
Nintendo also worked with Magnavoxon their initial console, helping toincorporate their new Light Gun technologyinto it.
When Did Home Consoles Come With Interchangeable Games?
While the distinction may seem irrelevant to the average person, the core functionality in how game cartridges evolved is quite interesting, and something that didn’t occur until the second generation of consoles.The Fairchild Channel Fwas the first console to use both a microprocessor andswappable ROM cartridges, thoughthe Atari 2600 was a much more successfulattempt at this.
The Channel F was released in 1976, while the2600 launched a year later in 1977. With their ROM cartridges, it meant that the entire game was sold on the cartridge itself and the console had all the means to run it natively. Compared to the Odyssey, which did not natively have support to run games but rather created them based on the cards inserted into them.
In simpler terms, this meantgames were no longer proprietary to the systemas they were more complex products in their own right, rather than reliant on a singular system constructing them at run-time. Being a much more advanced system that allowed for more detailed games, the industryalmost exclusively used similar systems moving forward.
