History In 1951,
Ralph Baer conceived the idea of an
interactive television while designing a television set for
Loral in
the Bronx, New York. Baer did not pursue the idea, but it returned to him in August 1966 when he was the Chief Engineer and manager of the Equipment Design Division at
Sanders Associates. By December 1966, he and a technician created a prototype that allowed a player to move a line across the screen. After a demonstration to the company's director of research and development, some funding was allotted and the project was made official. Baer spent the next few months designing further prototypes, and in February 1967 assigned technician Bill Harrison to begin building the project. Harrison spent the next few months in between other projects building out successive modifications to the prototype. Baer, meanwhile, collaborated with engineer Bill Rusch on the design of the console, including developing the basis of many games for the system. By May, the first game was developed and by June, multiple games were completed for what was then a second prototype box. This included a game where players controlled dots chasing each other and a light gun shooter game with a plastic rifle. By August 1967, Baer and Harrison had completed a third prototype machine, but Baer felt that he was not proving successful at designing fun games for the system; to make up for this he added Bill Rusch, who had helped him come up with the initial games for the console, to the project. , the first commercial home video game console. As Sanders was a military contractor and not in the business of making and selling commercial electronics, the team approached several cable television industry companies to produce the console, but were unable to find a buyer. By January 1969 the team had produced the seventh prototype, nicknamed the "
Brown Box". Magnavox designed the exterior of the machine, and re-engineered some of the internals with consultation from Baer and Harrison; they removed the ability to display color, reduced the number of controller types, and changed the system of selecting games from a dial to separate
game cards that modified the console's circuitry when plugged into the console. Magnavox named the console the
Magnavox Odyssey and announced the system's launch date for September 1972. In the late 1960s,
Nolan Bushnell saw
Spacewar! at Stanford University.
Spacewar! is a 1962
mainframe game developed by a group of students and employees at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bushnell had worked at an amusement park, and felt that an
arcade game version of the game would be very popular. The high price of computers capable of running the game, however, meant that any such arcade game would not be economically feasible. By 1970, however,
minicomputers were beginning to come down in price. He and his office mate,
Ted Dabney, agreed to work together to try and design a prototype of the game. By the end of November 1970, the pair had abandoned the project as untenable, as economically feasible computers were not powerful enough. Dabney soon thought of a way to manipulate the video signal on the screen without a computer controlling it, and from there Syzygy Engineering came up with the idea of removing the computer altogether and building specialized hardware to handle everything for the game instead. Graphical capabilities were limited throughout the generation, often supported with physical accessories and screen overlays, but saw some improvement towards the end of the generation. While the Odyssey could only display 3 square dots in black and white, as the generation progressed, consoles started being able to display color as well as more complex shapes and text. Early consoles such as the Odyssey and TV Tennis Electrotennis required players to keep track of scores manually but later, many introduced score counters on the display to assist players in score tracking.
Market saturation and the end of the generation In 1976, General Instrument produced a
series of affordable integrated chips that allowed companies to simplify console production and lower costs. Due to this, many companies had entered the home console market by the late 1970s. A significant number released consoles that were essentially clones of Atari's Home Pong and many were poorly made and rushed to market, causing the home console market to saturate. The demand for the chip was so high that General Instruments could not supply enough to satisfy all the orders it was receiving, causing problems for some smaller companies. The start of the second generation and the next major advancement in home console technology began in 1976 with the release of the
Fairchild Channel F. The technology behind the first generation quickly became obsolete as consumers had the ability to purchase new games for second generation consoles instead of having to purchase new systems when they wanted new content as with the dedicated consoles of the first generation. As people transitioned to the newer systems, some companies were left with surplus stock and were selling at a loss. The combination of market saturation and the start of the second generation caused many companies to leave the market completely. ==Home systems==