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The first generation of video game consoles began in 1972 with the Magnavox Odyssey (which began development in 1968 by Ralph Baer under the code name "The Brown Box"), until 1977, when "pong"-style console manufacturers left the market en masse due to the video game crash of 1977 and when microprocessor-based consoles were introduced.^[1] In Japan, the generation continued until 1980 with the Color TV-Game series.

Some defining characteristics of first generation consoles include:

• Discrete transistor-based digital game logic.
• Games were native components of consoles rather than based on external or removable media.
• Entire game playfield occupies only one screen.
• Players and objects consist of very basic lines, dots or blocks.
• Colour graphics are basic (mostly black and white or other dichromatic combination; later games may display three or more colours).
• Either single-channel or no audio.
• Lacked features of second generation consoles, such as microprocessor logic, ROM cartridges, flip-screen playfields, sprite-based graphics, and multi-color graphics.

History[edit]

Interactive television[edit]

Television engineer Ralph Baer created "The Brown Box" in 1966. Baer conceived the idea of an interactive television while building a television set from scratch for Loral in 1951 in the Bronx, New York. He explored these ideas further in 1966 when he was the Chief Engineer and manager of the Equipment Design Division at Sanders Associates. Baer created a simple two-player video game that could be displayed on a standard television set called Chase, where two dots chased each other around the screen. After a demonstration to the company's director of R&D Herbert Campman, some funding was allotted and the project was made official. In 1967 Bill Harrison was brought on board, and a light gun^[2] was constructed from a toy rifle that was aimed at a target moved by another player.

Bill Rusch joined the project to speed up development and soon a third machine-controlled dot was used to create a ping-pong game. With more funding additional games were created, and Baer had the idea of selling the product to cable TV companies, who could transmit static images as game backgrounds. A prototype was demonstrated in February 1968 to TelePrompTer Vice President Hubert Schlafly, who signed an agreement with Sanders. The Cable TV industry was in a slump during the late '60s and early '70s and a lack of funding meant other avenues had to be pursued. Development continued on the hardware and games resulting in the final "Brown Box" prototype,^[2] which had two controllers, a light gun and sixteen switches on the console that selected the game to be played. Baer approached various U.S. Television manufacturers and an agreement was eventually signed with Magnavox in late 1969. Magnavox's main alterations to the Brown Box were to use plug-in circuits to change the games, and to remove the color graphics capabilities in favor of color overlays in order to reduce manufacturing costs. It was released in May 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey.^[2]

Digital electronics[edit]

The Magnavox Odyssey is a digital console, the same as all other game consoles. However, like all video game consoles up until the sixth generation, it uses analog circuitry for the output to match the televisions of its era, which were analog; also, like all later consoles from the Nintendo 64 onwards, it features analog game controllers. Due to these two facts, many collectors have mistakenly considered the Odyssey to be an analog console, with the misunderstanding becoming so widespread that Baer was eventually led to clarify that the Odyssey is indeed a digital console: all of the electronic signals exchanged between the various parts responsible for gameplay (ball and players generators, sync generators, diode matrix, etc.) are binary.^[3] The type of digital components used feature DTL, a common pre-TTL digital design component using discrete transistors and diodes.

This was also the first involvement of Nintendo in video games. According to Martin Picard in the International Journal of Computer Game Research: "in 1971, Nintendo had -- even before the marketing of the first home console in the United States -- an alliance with the American pioneer Magnavox to develop and produce optoelectronic guns for the Odyssey (released in 1972), since it was similar to what Nintendo was able to offer in the Japanese toy market in 1970s".^[4]

The Odyssey was not a large success due to restrictive marketing, although other companies with similar products (including Atari) had to pay a licensing fee for some time. For a time it was Sanders' most profitable line, even though many in the company had been unsupportive of game development.

 

Pong arcade version

Many of the earliest games utilizing digital electronics ran on university mainframe computers in the United States, developed by individual users who programmed them in their spare time. In 1962, a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology programmed a game called Spacewar! on a DEC PDP-1. In 1970 Nolan Bushnell saw Spacewar! for the first time at the University of Utah. Deciding there was commercial potential in an arcade version, he hand-wired a custom computer capable of playing it on a black and white television. The resulting game, Computer Space, did not fare well commercially and Bushnell started looking for new ideas. In early 1972 he saw a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey, and hired Al Alcorn to produce an arcade version of the Odyssey's ping-pong game (using Transistor-transistor logic), called Pong.

On September 12, 1975, Epoch released Japan's first console, the TV Tennis Electrotennis, a home version of Pong, several months before the release of Home Pong in North America. A unique feature of the TV Tennis Electrotennis is that the console is wireless, functioning through a UHF antenna.^[4]

Home video games achieved widespread popularity with the release of a home version of Pong in the Christmas of 1975. Its success sparked hundreds of clones, including the Coleco Telstar, which went on to be a success in its own right, with over a dozen models and the Binatone TV Master by British company Binatone.

Japan's most successful console of the first generation was Nintendo's Color TV Game, released in 1977.^[4] The Color TV Game sold 3 million units,^[5] the highest for a first generation console.

The first generation of video games did not feature a microprocessor, and were based on custom codeless state machine computers consisting of discrete logic circuits comprising each element of the game itself. Later consoles of this generation moved the bulk of the circuitry to custom "pong on a chip" IC's such as Atari's custom Pong chips and General Instruments' AY-3-8500 series.^[6]

Home Systems[edit]

Comparison[edit]

Name	Magnavox Odyssey	Magnavox Odyssey series* (11 consoles)	TV Tennis Electrotennis	Home Pong
Manufacturer	Magnavox	Magnavox, Philips	Epoch Co.	Atari, Sears Tele-Games
Image		Odyssey 300
Launch price	US$100 (equivalent to $566 in 2016)	US$100–230 (equivalent to $440–1011 in 2016)	¥20,000[4] (equivalent to $346 in 2016)	US$98.95 (equivalent to $435 in 2016)
Release date	NA August 1972 EU 1973 JP 1974 (licensed to Nintendo)	NA 1975—1978	JP September 12, 1975[4]	NA December 1975
Media	Printed circuit board	Various	Inbuilt chip	Inbuilt chip[7]
Accessories (retail)	Shooting Gallery	n/a	Wireless controller[4]	n/a
Sales	330,000[8]	n/a	n/a	150,000[9][10]

* = Does not include the separatedly-listed Magnavox Odyssey and the second-generation Magnavox Odyssey 2.

Name	Binatone TV Master	Telstar series (14 models)	Color TV-Game series (5 consoles)
Manufacturer	Binatone	Coleco	Nintendo
Image		Telstar Colortron	Color TV-Game Block Breaker
Launch price	£35 (equivalent to £262, or $422, in 2016)	US$50 (equivalent to $208 in 2016)	¥8300–48,000 (equivalent to $122–703 in 2016)
Release date	UK 1975 NA 1976 (licensed to Magnavox)	NA 1976—1977	JP 1977—1980
Media	Inbuilt chip	Inbuilt chip (most models) Cartridge (Telstar Arcade, 1977)	Inbuilt chip
Accessories (retail)	Paddles and light gun	Controller styles	n/a
Sales	n/a	1 million[11]	3 million[5]

Pong on a chip[edit]

^[6] The table lists only the most known consoles and relative used chip.

(1) Colors could be obtained adding the AY-3-8515 chip
(2) Colors could be obtained adding the AY-3-8615 chip
(3) PAL version code is 7601
(4) Advanced chip compared to classic Pong-in-a-chip: include a microcontroller and a little RAM.