Much more advanced than its predecessor, the Odyssey 2 was an early competitor to the 2600 and had small commercial success. Notable games, which are the size of cassette tapes include Artillery Duel, Incredible Wizard, and Dog Patch. Unique controllers are a blend between paddle, gun, and joystick. The graphics of this console are a cross between the Intellivision and an Atari 2600. Both sold poorly.Ī cross between a computer and a console, this system is quite obscure and often found broken due to it's fragility. Also released was a computer expansion called the Imagination Machine. This is a true conversation piece for a collection. It does not get any more obscure than this! This very rare system had only about a dozen of carts made for it, and was commercially a failure. Telstar is considered very obscure and rare, although it is not widely collected due to its obscurity. The system was due to come out a year earlier than it did and quickly found itself in clearance bins due to competing systems with superior functions. The 3-sided system consisted of a steering wheel side, a gun side, and a pong side. Not very fun to play.Īt the end of the Pong craze, Coleco made a pong-like system that used strange triangle-shaped cartridges. Only a handful of games were made for the unit as it was quietly phased out of production in 1978. One of the first cartridge consoles to be released, this rare system featured black and white graphics and controls that were mounted on the console itself. This system has the most active homebrew programming scene today, due to its immense popularity, and several new games come out yearly. Some of the top-selling classics on this system include Space Invaders, Defender, Pitfall, Frogger and Warlords. With a huge library of games that can be found relatively cheap, this is an excellent system to play and collect for. The system has two main controllers types: the joystick and the paddle. Also known as the Video Computer System or VCS, this is the first cartridge based video game system to become widely popular. One of the most popular classic consoles of its time. 26 games were made for this system, carts 18-26 are hard to find. Cartridges for this console are colored bright yellow. The built-in pong variant allows players to angle their shots for an added gameplay factor. Often overlooked for having very primitive and blocky graphics, the system has a few decent games. Atari, Magnavox and Coleco made the most popular ones. Hundreds of companies made pong clone systems of various shapes, sizes, and price. Speakers were built into the consoles, which only played the built in pong games. The first commercial success in video games, most of these units consisted of two knobs, system selector, and a cord to the TV. Several games had multiple pieces that required a board game to be played as part of the experience. Odyssey games consisted of a few white blocks, and overlays you put on your tv. The system consists of a base unit and controllers that look more like vacuum accessories than joysticks. Very few companies would be able to move forward in the business after the bubble burst in 1983.ĭesigned by Ralph Baer, this is the world’s first home video game system, predating Pong by over three years. The ‘golden age’ of video games, this was a time period in which many unique video game projects were released on limited finances. The following consoles were released before or during the great video game crash of 1983-1984. And you may read about a few that you will never see.Įach description is linked to further information about that system on Wikipedia or any of several other online video game history sites. It's a great resource for a collector or player interested in "branching out" and a nice overview of many of the consoles that you may see at a classic game event. The PRGE console guide is a list, sorted by era, of every video game console released in North America. Everyone knows the system that they grew up with, we have discovered many of our favorite games on consoles we neither owned, nor even knew existed, prior to collecting them. Game Consoles By Jon Rose and John HancockĬollecting video games is fun, but sometimes a person new to collecting games (or even an old one branching out to a different system) can be pretty overwhelmed by the sheer number of consoles available.
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