CHVG: 1974 - Tank you very much

Chronological History of Video Games:
Kee Games wants to tank you... (1974)
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Here we are, 1974... the year I was born!  Certainly it had to be a magnificent year in gaming, yes?  Nope.  No it wasn't.  While there were some new innovations that did push different genre's forward into the arcade scene, nothing "big" occurred in 1974.  Was more of a development year... a time for ideas to matriculate and formulate.

Atari couldn't make 'em fast enough

I read that only about 8,000 Pong Arcade cabinets had been fulfilled by Atari by end of year.  Although this was still quite a bit more than your average pinball table, for comparison the Odyssey console sold almost 100,000 in its first two years.  (Possibly more, but exact sales figures don't seem to exist... and all the "sold" consoles didn't necessary move to consumers right off.  But this clearly shows why the console market was desired, and groundwork was being laid for a home version of pong and possibly other games.

It was near the end of 1974 that Atari President Nolan Bushnell gave the go-ahead for creating a "Home Pong" unit, thinking it could be a great success for Christmas sales in
1975.

During this year, Atari was trying to out-innovate "The Jackals" (as Nolan Bushnell dubbed the competition)… by coming out with a new game every month.  At first they reiterated with a number of different Pong clones, but eventually they also came up with some new creative ideas that were also hits in their own right:

• Gotcha (first maze game)
• Trak 10 (first racing game)
• Tank (yeah! the first tank game).

Kee Games’s Tank is the first game to store graphics data on a ROM chip. It's also a company that was secretly owned by Atari.  The idea of Kee Games was to get around markets where only 1 distributor could operate.  So Nolan setup another company with his neighbor, Joe Keenan, as the CEO. All the Atari games basically had an identical game with a different name -- distributed by Kee Games.  But after Tank became a huge hit, Atari actually went on to merge Kee Games back into the mothership.

Midway’s TV Basketball is the first arcade game to use human figures as avatars, instead of blocks or vehicles.  But the vast majority of games were variants of Pong.  Still, fairly boring times if you ask me.

Play Meter magazine publishes its first issue - the first magazine dedicated to covering the video arcade market.  There's a smattering of issues on the archive.org website, but this would be a treasure trove of interesting information if we could get the entire library available someday!

Play Meter Magazine - One of the earliest issues I found

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COMPUTERS:

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The PLATO system is still one of the few systems that have any games on it that are still preserved - and even playable today on various emulators, or the Cyber-1 platform.

SPASIM (PLATO)
  - Here we have the first documented, first-person mainframe game.  Wireframe graphics... a space shooter... very mathematical and definitely more like a sim than anything else.  It's best to watch a video tutorial, you'll get a feel for it without having to learn the tricky controls.

MAZE WAR  (Xerox - Alto)
  - I've now seen this game listed in both 1973 and 1974... so I'm not sure which one specifically to place it in.  But it was an important early game that introduced some of the concepts which become the first-person shooter.  A level editor was even created, and there was network play for player-vs-player action. 

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CONSOLES:

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  - The Odyssey dropped its price again to $50... but no new games were released.  But that's because this system did not really have programmable cartridges. The "carts" they sold simply had jumpers which would select an internal built-in game.  So by 1974, all the games ever designed were released and purchasable.  Odyssey continued to sell in 1974.. but it wasn't long before the system was dead. 

The game card, which isn't quite a cartridge.

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ARCADES:

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ASTROHOCKEY  - (pong variant)
 - It did have 4 variations of gameplay, including player vs. machine.  That's a nice addition.

ATTACK UFO
  - Uh... its a black & white game with UFO's.  That says a lot. Why are we so violent to tourists from other planets? 

BALL PARK
  - Midway releases in America, this Taito (of Japan) baseball game.  Looks pretty decent.  The sports-focus in video games is  a bit pervasive these days isn't it?

BASKETBALL
  - It's a basketball game from Taito, but no way to see it run unfortunately... but is deemed a "Landmark" title, being the first video game to use sprites, and the first to represent human characters.

Arcade flyers can be way better than the games!

CHALLENGE
 - Another Pong clone... by Micro Games.  Also looks like a "micro cabinet"... the thing is tiny.

"Honey, have you seen the Micro Game?"

COUNTDOWN
 - Pong clone, but you start with 5 points and can't let any goals or you lose a point at a time.  

ELIMINATION / QUADRA-PONG
 - 4-player pong clone... which also debuts in the first ever "cocktail" style arcade cabinet.  That's pretty cool. I did like how Atari was innovating from the beginning with game types as well as cabinet variations. Looking at the playing field, you can see the early groundwork for 4-player paddle games like Warlords later on.

FORMULA K
 - This is the Kee Games release of Gran Trak 10.  Same exact innards as...

GRAN TRAK 10 (GRAN TRAK 20 for 2-player)
 - Atari makes the first racing game... (and of course guys wearing helmets show up to play, with hot girls on their shoulder - see exhibit A)  

Safety First!

Gran Trak 10 was not only another hit game, and a growing genre.. but Atari also incorporated some anti-piracy methods.  Inside was a custom-designed ROM for the game, but Atari gave it the same part# as a Texas Instruments Arithmetic Logic Unit.  This mean that when pirates tried to build their own version, they'd order the wrong part and their clones wouldn't work.  Smart Atari!  Especially after all those frickin' pong clones!

But then, an accounting error in the game's production meant that every Gran Trak 10 machine sold at a loss for Atari.  Dumb Atari! It nearly helped bankrupt the company.  They thought, "Sure. we're losing money on each unit - but we'll make up for it in volume."  (okay, I obviously made that up.  Classic joke.)

PIN PONG
 - A black & white pinball simulation game by Atari.  Uhm...  cool... that is if want to take everything that's fun about pinball, remove it, and then sell the sizzle.

PUPPY PONG
 - Cool story behind this... basically a free-play version of Pong, but packaged in a cute yellow dog house. This particular setup had its début at Chuck E. Cheese.  It was a neat attempt at giving kids something fun to play without having to feed it tokens. Only a few survive today, as it never saw a wide release, due to Charles Shultz's complaints about its similarities to Snoopy.  (See Snoopy Pong, 1973).

QWAK!
  - An early light gun game where you shoot ducks out of the sky. And, it sounds like you have your ever-trusty hunting dog to go retrieve the blasted birds.  Aw, those poor ducks - they were so abused by early gamers.  It wasn't until much later when Deer became the big targets for virtual hunters that ducks could breathe a sigh of relief.  

REBOUND
  - Pong you say?  NAY I say! So much different... you see, the ball bounces up & down across the screen instead of side-to-side   Oh my? Gravity is involved!?  Your little paddles (er, psuedo-people) hit the ball over the net and to the other side.  Yeah, I'm a bit sick of all these pong-like games myself, but at least it's a welcome variation.  Was also a very realistic sales flyer:

What even is going on here?

SMATCH
 - WTF? Another great name for some sport game, hah! (I think this was another pong-like game, but was distributed overseas?)

SPEED RACE
  - A Taito release, also known as Racer or Wheels.  This was a ground breaking game, innovating with such concepts as vertical scrolling, sprites with collision detection and a driving wheel for a controller.  One of the first driving games.

Go Speed Racer!

SUPER PONG
 - Even Atari is enamoured with Pong, and puts out this 4th title in the series.  Three paddles per player and better ball physics... increased speed, serve from anywhere - Viola!  Another easy buck from a proven concept, yes?  

TANK
 - Ah yes... the Combat cartridge that first shipped with the Atari 2600 game was based on this original arcade game (albeit with a ton of crazy added variations).  The idea was cool, though.. control a tank and shoot the other guy before they shoot you.  It combined maze games with tank control games... both fun genres IMO.

The original "Tank" was an instant hit. So Kee Games (Atari), quickly devised a plan to launch a whole series of Tank games. They designed a boardset that could be easily modified to change the game. This would allow them to come out with a new Tank game whenever they wanted, with no real extra work needed.  And to think how many variations were included even on the simple Atari 2600 - "Combat" or "Video Olympics" is just staggering progress.

Tank was Kee Games biggest hit

TOUCH ME
 - Okay...  have to mention this game, simply for it's awesome title!  Technically it's not a video game - it's just Atari's version of the vastly more popular Simon.  Atari also released a hand-held Touch Me as well (a year or so later) so you could play with yourself anywhere - "No mom, I'm just playing Touch me!"  Oh, Atari...  trail blazers, yes... but man could they  make some boner decisions.  Oh sorry.. bad choice of words.  

But the real ironic twist is Ralph Baer (remember the original Odyssey?) sees Touch Me, copies it, and creates Simon. Remember, Nolan Bushnell copied the Odyssey (Ralph's machine) and got in trouble.  But Ralph Baer copies Atari, gets away with it... and Simon somehow goes on to become so popular that it actually has the impression of being the original, and Touch Me feeling like the clone.  Nice one... you sly devil Ralph!

You wanna play Touch Me?
(is not a good pickup line)

TV BASKETBALL
 - kinda cool... at least they got a BBall hoop on the screen... or at least the flyer says so.

WHAM BAM
 - No seriously, I'm not making this stuff up.  And here I thought, "Wham Bam, Thank You Ma'am!" was a recent saying, but one look at this flyer, and I think you can guess where this game got its name from!  Holy moly...

WILD GUNMAN:
 - WOW!  Now that I see this, I vaguely remember watching somebody at a pizza parlor playing around with this game.  It was so intriguing.  It could've been a clone, but I had totally forgotten about that memory.  This was really a technological stretch. Long long before Dragon's Lair, they were trying to interact with live-motion here.  

I swear I saw this once (or at least something like it)

Wild Gunman was Nintendo's first 16mm film projector games and becomes Nintendo's first big export product, in Europe and USA, because the effects of Japan's oil shortage that occurred in 1973 began showing : Japan's economy went into a tailspin and people couldn't afford using their money on Nintendo's Shooting Ranges anymore.

An updated version of the game was released in the arcades and in the Nintendo NES, ten years later in 1984, replacing photographic images with cartoon-style video game sprites. In this version the player also waited for the opponent's eyes to flash (accompanied by a speech bubble reading 'FIRE!!').  On October 4, 1997, Gunpei Yokoi, the creator of this game was tragically killed in an automobile accident, at the age of 56.

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CULTURE:

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Angering an entire generation of kids...

The Rubik's cube invented

The MRI invented.

CP/M was created by Gary Kildall, founding Digital Research
  - which gave lots of ideas and future fodder for people like Bill Gates, yeah?

Dungeons & Dragons was released!  (and all the future nerds rejoice...)

Pepsi was first American company to sell a consumer product in USSR… 

PLATO games really are leaders… Spacesim, M199H, pedit5, Empire, etc. 

Taito started making games… like "Basketball" and Speed Race (like Monaco GP)

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GAME OF THE YEAR:
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TANK (Kee Games + Atari  = Kataree?)

CHVG: 1973 - Attack of the clones

Chronological History of Video Games:
Begun, the clone wars has... (1973)
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One of many
pong clones

The arcade video game industry floruishes under the PONG breakthrough... and various companies begin producing video games, including Chicago Coin, Midway, Ramtek, Taito, Allied Leisure, and Kee Games (which at this time was secretly owned by Atari).  It was a bit of a wild wild west, with only a few companies actually paying Atari a licensing fee before creating their own version of "Pong".  

There were a few other experiments going on in the arcade's at this time... like "Space Race" and the infamous "Gotcha" chase game by Atari that featured these incredible controllers (see below)

But otherwise, it was mostly a new phenomenon of Pong variants being synonymous with "Arcade Videogames" or Tele-Video Games or other such weird names.  After all, the idea of playing a game on a video screen is still in such infancy, they hadn't even settled on a standard name yet. 

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COMPUTERS:

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Plato system

Believe it or not, there was this pretty amazing, graphically-driven PLATO system back in 1973.  It had a mainframe core, dummy remote terminals, networked multi-user environment and on-screen graphics & typing.  Way ahead of its time it seems, and of course primary used in a few institutes of higher education. Departments were allocated space to create their own "lessons" (and unused modules were often co-opted by students and turned into games).  It was only available in a few places, but those that had access to PLATO at their university were lucky indeed!

It's been shown how these early systems sparked the imagination of many game developers and early programmers. A lot of people tried to duplicate what they saw on PLATO or other mainframes for years to come as the nascent home-computing market slowly became a more viable gaming platform.

EMPIRE

  - Way back in 1973, Empire on the Plato is a networked, multiplayer, arena shooter.  Sure, it's mostly text-based and nothing like what we consider to be arena shooters... but the concept is there.  It's surprising how far back gaming goes!

MAZE WAR

  - A real trail-blazer with a lot of firsts, or early examples.  First-person shooter, multi-player concurrently, in-game avatars, 3D realized maze, etc.  This was obviously only available on limited mainframe systems, but I think this would be a solid contender for the best game of the year!

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CONSOLES:

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The Odyssey is slowing down a little in sales, however, and the price was dropped to $75 to try to kickstart sales.

Four new add-on games are released for the Odyssey, though, in spite of slow sales.  I believe they are quite rare today.  I haven't seen examples or playthroughs on any of these:

 - Basketball, Brain Wave, Interplanetary Voyage, W.I.N.

 - I actually saw a set of all four of these 1973 games go for over $4,000 on ebay!!

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ARCADES:

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ASTEROID - a clone of Space Race... I mention it because the name is similar to the 1979 HUGE hit.  But it will be awhile still before we get the actual Asteroids machine you're thinking of.  The real blockbuster Atari success.  This game wasn't nearly as good.

CHAMPION PING PONG - pong variant

COMPUTER SPACE BALL - pong variant

DAVIS CUP - pong variant

DOCTOR PONG -  Atari Pong in a cocktail version for Dr.'s office... didn't do well?  duh.

ELEPONG - pong variant

ELIMINATION - 2-4 player pong variant

QUADRAPONG - pong variant

PONG DOUBLES - pong variant

PONG TRON

 - Holy Frak!  Were there no copyrights in 1973?  Was there nobody who knew how to program anything but a pong variation?  I know, I shouldn't be so hard on the fledgling industry, but my goodness what a boring state the arcades must've been in during 1973.  Hey Look, "ELEPONG".. wonder if that plays like PONG?  Guess what?  Yes... yes it does.  

I'm tempted to say Atari screwed up by not patenting PONG, but copyright laws weren't really established for video gaming at this time.  And even if they could have received a copyright, it likely would've taken a year or so, and then they'd have to have a legal team going after the cloners.  Instead they tried to just stay ahead of the curve, create new games as well as make as many pong machines as they could.  And, the market grew by everybody jumping in and copying... so there was some collateral benefits.

What to do with old wine barrels?

* PONG IN A BARREL!  - Well at least THIS is a cool-looking game.  The only clone worth looking up, what a great story.  Nolan Bushnell really was a drunken bastard (j/k Nolan, love ya man!)... even hiding his drinking by building games into his old barrels.  Not to be confused with Barrel-Pong - the small barrel on a platform... the ultra-rare Pong-in-a-Barrel is too cool.  

Wait a second, I just now discovered SNOOPY PONG!  How cool is that cabinet?

DUCK HUNT!

Oh yeah... way before Nintendo packaged this into their system we had an electro-mechanical version of duck hunt.  I don't even know how these things work, but wish i could try it out.  Please can you shoot the dumb dog?

GOTCHA

This looked like it might be fun.  This is the first commercial maze game... and even better, the original version looked like a cabinet controlled by two "boobs" as controllers.  Yup, the boob game... an attempt to make a female videogame, since most games had a joystick that resembled male anatomy!  The controversy over video games begins here - but not for content -- because of the female controllers.  It did spawn one of the greatest arcade flyers ever.  hee hee

MISSILE RADAR

  - Another new type of game from Atari.  Shoot missiles to detonate on-coming warheads.  1973 seems like a scary time.

SPACE RACE

 - Atari's second game... at least this was gameplay other than ball & paddle.  You have to run your spaceship from the bottom of the screen up to the top of the screen, avoiding the little streaky white dots floating on by.  Asteroids?  Atari really loved its Asteroids, eh?

WATERGATE CAPER

 - Ahaha....  Watergate was still big news!  "Caper"... too funny.  Try to get away with it?  Actually it's more like some kind of code cracking game which used the de-facto standard analog wheel to spin the dials.

WINNER, THE VIDEO GAME

  - First game by Midway, and graciously they were only 1 of 3 companies that actually paid Atari to license their PONG game. 

MORE NOTES:

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- Midway enters video arcade games with their licensed Pong clone, "Winner".  They go on to out-manufacture Atari.

- Konami also born in 1973, but no games yet.

- SEGA also gets into video game market (vs. mechanical games) with its Pong clone.

Atari is topping $1 million / month.  And still steadily growing.

- LEMONADE STAND - comes out on some mainframe.  precursor to popular genre

- BASIC Computer Games - book written by David H. Ahl.  This collection of type-in programs is the first of many in this format... goes on to becomes a staple on many early computer platforms.

- XEROC Park has the amazing ALTO machine!  So ahead of its time… just expensive!

CHVG: 1972 - Pong

Chronological History of Video Games:
Pong becomes the first smash hit (1972)
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The original Wii Sports!

The first really big year in the history of video arcade games was 1972.  This was because one game went what today we might call "viral"... an action-sports title, the original Wii Sports, a head-to-head competitive bout to the death... Pong!  Basically two paddles, one on each side of the screen, roughly simulating a paddle sports game like ping-pong.  (Oh? So that's where they got the title?)  

But Pong didn't come out until November of 1972, so let's backup a bit and talk about events leading up to its debut.  First, in May of 1972, the Magnavox TV company was debuting in various shows its new TV video sports game they dubbed Odyssey!

The Magnavox Odyssey...  not Homer's.

The Magnavox Odyssey was a creation of Ralph Baer's, but marketed by Magnavox.  It was the first video game console.  It wasn't programmable, but had a finite number of games stored in its circuitry.  These included ball & paddle games, chase the spot type games, and a few light gun games where you shoot at a blip on the screen. To switch between games, you inserted a little card into the system (almost like a cartridge) that changed the jumpers to the game you wanted to play.

Nolan Bushnell founded Atari in July, a name he took from the traditional strategy game of Go.  Originally he liked the word "Syzygy" for his company, but that was already taken.  Because "Atari" was something similar to a check in Chess, Nolan thought it had a good strong feel to it.  I think he picked well.

So being in the video game industry, Nolan obviously attended trade shows and conventions, and was able to view the Magnavox Odyssey on display in Burlingame, CA.  He says he wasn't all that impressed with it, honestly.  Looking at the games on the Odyssey, seems like a fair assessment.  It basically just had some paddle games and the ability to shoot a video blip with the light gun.  But at some point Nolan thought the concept of a ping-pong game (similar to what he saw on the Odyssey) could make a decent video arcade game.

Nolan turned to a new engineer Atari had hired, one smart, enterprising Al Alcorn.  The concept of a ping-pong game was shared with Al, and given to him to complete to get some experience in creating games.  There were other, more difficult games in the concept phase like driving games and such, but this was a good, easy starting point.

The story has been told many times elsewhere, but although Nolan Bushnell signed the guestbook, and did see the Odyssey's ping-pong game, what Al Alcorn created was a far superior game for a few reasons:

Nolan to the right of Pong, and Al Alcorn far right.



1. SOUND.  Al found sounds that already existed in the different transistors, and basically added those to various gaming events.  The ping-pong sound of the blips helped name the game, and I think sound added to the experience without a doubt.
   
   
2. Only VERTICAL movement.  The simplicity of two paddles that could only move on the vertical plane was a limiting factor that I believe aided gameplay.  Magnavox had vertical and horizontal movement, and even a ball control knob... it was just unwieldy.  Was almost like playing a game that didn't have rules.
   
   
3. NO "english"... but different bounce angles.  Again, that ball control know which they called "English" on Odyssey was silly.  Pong made a far superior game by changing the angle of the ball return based on where it hit the paddle.  Closer to the center - more direct return.  Closer to the edges - a much steeper angle of return.  So now you had some control over the direction and angle of return if you could fine-tune where the ball hit the paddle.  Excellent!
   
   
4. SCORE.  Pong actually put the score on the screen, and let you play to a score of 11 to win the game. Seems rudimentary, but the Odyssey did not have on-screen scoring.  Had to do all that manually.
   
   
5. SPEED UP gameplay.  If the rally continued, and the angles of the return were steep a few times... the game actually got faster.  This was necessary to test the limits of players skills, and make the game more exciting.  Without this speeding up, the game would've been far less entertaining.

So there you go.. not enough credit given to Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell for these innovations.  Magnavox eventually sued Atari for patent infringement... and I feel there were enough changes with Pong to win the lawsuit.  But then again -- there was very little established yet around what was and wasn't protected by law.  Atari settled out of court and kept on making Pong.

About 2500 PONG units are produced before the end of the year, making as much as $40/day in their locations, an extremely high coin-drop.  It's success spreads quickly! 

For a game this rudimentary and basic, it's importance is justified.  Pong launched the video game industry by being the first big success in commercial arcade games.  Pong accompanies Dragon's Lair and Pac-Man as one of the three Video games on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

MOVIE:  A Pong unit appears in the 1974 movie 'The Parallax View' and in the 1975 movie 'Rancho Deluxe'.

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STAR TREK

What?  There was supposedly a Star Trek game way back in 1972?  Ah, but wait... it isn't really a "Star Trek" game, it appears it's just a bootleg clone of Computer Space (see 1971 article).  Apparently the Borg have already begun trying to assimilate the arcade world, making a homogenous mess.

I need to point out that this must be where Star Trek's long-standing tradition of sucking at video games begins.  It's a long streak, unbroken for many years.  Great times.   

It appears there was another STAR TREK game sort of coming into its own in 1972.  This one is a strategy/tactics game written for the computer mainframe systems of the day and mostly accessible only by college students at these universities.  The text version actually becomes quite popular, being re-created on many systems and home computers over the years.  The Borg Star Trek game... not so much.

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COMPUTER GAMING:

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HUNT THE WUMPUS (Basic)

One of the earliest text-adventure games ever created, written in basic for mainframe computers like the DEC PDP-1.  You are put into a maze of interconnected tunnels, with bats, pits, and the Wumpus beast.  You have to shoot arrows to kill the Wumpus before you die in a pit, or are eaten alive.  This simple game becomes a mainstay of early microcomputers, and gets printed in type-in listings of computer magazines.  It's a long, rich history, with many many variants and ports.

HAMMURABI: 
Another classic game that is hard to pinpoint its exact beginnings.  But certainly its worth noting here for one of the earliest versions, again pre-dating the home computer revolution.  Try your hand at managing a small kingdom for 10 years, buying & selling acreage and feeding those hungry peasants. It's a resource-management game, and will get re-imagined, and re-created on just about every platform to come for the next 20 years easily.  

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CONSOLE GAMING:

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Odyssey is commercially released in August of 1972.  Sales are struggling.  Supposedly 100,000 units are sold in that first year, but I believe its more like 100,000 units were distributed to dealers around the country, because its well-documented that sales were sluggish.  

In an ironic twist, it's the popularity of Pong that actually helps sell Odyssey systems, as people find out its the closest thing to being able to play Pong in your home.  But, since Atari didn't start shipping their production units of Pong until Nov. 29, 1972... I can't see how Pong got really popular until at least early 1973.  And that would mean Odyssey didn't start moving units faster until 1973.  Furthermore, sales figures for Odyssey were supposedly much lower in 1973, which to me indicates the dealers had to move all those initial 100,000 units before even starting to order more... and that took time.

The Magnavox Odyssey is an interesting system because it is the first console gaming system ever. I find the idea of little cartridges to trigger the right jumpers, and the fact that it even had a light gun is pretty remarkable. Unfortunately... without a CPU, there was no such thing as artificial intelligence.  Every single Odyssey game requires a 2nd person.  Whether it's moving a target, or a pong paddle pusher - nothing gets done without that 2nd player.  

Playing any 1st generation console is a challenge, as they are tough to find and can be quite expensive.  Mainly they only hold interest for a collector, a real classic game nut (who has to have them all) or a game reviewer wanting to review the oldest of all the videogames.  You can look up some pretty fun reviews of the "Odyssey 1" as its referred to on YouTube.