Game history 70s - 80s

Continuing from an older post about the history of computers from 1850 to 1970, here is a post about games history from the 60s to the 90s

To recap, the idea of video games didn’t exist until 1947, when the infamous ‘cathode ray amusement device’ was displayed. This ‘amusement device’ is rather farfetched from any video games you might see today and was essentially a 2D tennis simulator, where a light would bounce over a white line. You had to really use your imagination.

Before the 70s began, the biggest and most available console was the odyssey. It retailed around $412 in today’s economy, which, looking back, seems a little pricey.

(People pretending to have fun playing pong)

It was a revolutionary idea having a device in your home that could play games on your T.V, even If it involved putting plastic layouts over your TV screen to play the different games.

(The controller for the Odyssey, yep, that’s wood on it.)

All the things we take for granted about video games today, such as decent controllers  and a lot about the mechanics of video games was established by the release of bad consoles and bad games. Failures in the video game market (not that the Atari 2600 failed) paved the way for the successful and innovative games consoles we have today.

The 70s was where video games really started to grow as a market and discover it’s true potential. Pong was released in 1972 by Atari, which certainly looked a lot like the odyssey in graphics, but it had its own console entitled ‘Home Pong’. Another improvement was the addition of a score counter on top of either player’s side of the screen.

Other strange consoles began to fill the market, with the Fairchild being the only half decent console between Pong and The Atari 2600. The Atari 2600 was the first console to use game cartridges and is renowned as one of the most classic video game consoles. It’s sounds and primitive graphics are incredibly nostalgic and take you back to a time where using your imagination with video games was essential.

(Frogger on Atari 2600.)

Here is frogger on the Atari 2600. The games available for this console were colourful and easy to play. They were the closest thing people would have to an arcade in their own home for a while to come.

The innovation of Nintendo’s famous game controller was still a while away, and the consoles that followed the Atari 2600 all seemed to follow a similar aesthetic, with joystick and some kind of strange pad, varying from a phone like number pad on the Atari 5200, to a mini keyboard with numbers up to 6 on the ‘CreatiVision’.

(RIGHT: Creativision. LEFT: Atari 5200 with it’s famous unresponsive broken phone like controller.)