Sony: Playstation 5
The PlayStation 5 is Sony's ninth-gen game console. It offers 4K gaming and includes 825 GB of high-speed SSD storage. One of the largest consoles ever sold, the massive size of the PlayStation 5 is due to its robust cooling system, which was designed to be much quieter in comparison to the often loud PS4. Powering—and heating up—the system is a custom-built, 10 teraflop AMD SoC with hardware-accelerated ray tracing support. The PlayStation 5's SoC is built using the same x86 architecture as the PS4, which allows for near complete backward compatibility with the PlayStation 4 and improved performance when playing most eighth-generation games.
The PlayStation 5 is sold with either a UHD Blu-ray drive or as a cheaper, all-digital discless version.
Microsoft: Xbox Series X
For its ninth-generation console, Microsoft left behind reinvention and instead built upon the eighth-generation Xbox One. Its new Series X|S platform is an evolution of the Xbox One architecture, now with a more powerful processor and superfast SSD storage. The Series X|S consoles use a new, custom-built AMD system on a chip (SoC) that includes hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The Series X is a no-compromise system built for power whose beefier processor is rated at 12 teraflops (versus the Series S, rated at 4 teraflops). The Series X also remains quiet thanks to a vapor chamber heatsink and an efficient case design built around a single large fan.
The Series X|S are backward compatible with the Xbox One, and many last-gen titles play with improved performance and loading times.
Oculus: Quest 2
Oculus is a virtual reality platform owned by the social media company Facebook and encompasses multiple VR headsets. Oculus’ first commercial headset, the Rift, required the use of a powerful PC and external sensors to operate. In 2019, Oculus released the Quest, a fully stand-alone headset that had a built-in processor, battery, inside-out tracking, and a dedicated games store. Multiple cameras on the Quest headset scan the area around the player, tracking the players’ hands (through the controllers) and the headset's location in 3D space. It was replaced by the updated Quest 2 in 2020, which features better specs and sells for $100 less.
When tethered with a USB-C cable to a PC, users can play PC VR games on their Quest.
Google: Stadia
Stadia is a cloud gaming platform developed by Google that began in late 2019 and allows users to play games through multiple devices. Just like OnLive, users must download a mobile app or use a web browser to access Stadia, which receives a video stream of a game being run from a data center computer. For playing on a TV, a Chromecast Ultra streaming dongle is needed, which is included alongside an official controller in the Premiere Edition bundle. Users must buy games from a dedicated store, though Google does offer a monthly “Pro” subscription service that includes a small library of games as well as discounts for most titles.
In February 2021, Google closed the game studios it created for developing exclusive Stadia content, which cast heavy doubt on Stadia’s future. The Google Stadia was officially discontinued and the service retired a couple years later.
Nvidia: Shield TV
The Shield TV was a high-end, Androidbased microconsole from Nvidia, a major graphics processor manufacturer. The Shield TV was part of Nvidia's Shield line of products that began in 2013 with the Shield Portable (a wireless controller with built-in mobile hardware and a flip-up screen), which was followed by the Shield Tablet in 2014. In 2015, Nvidia released the Shield TV, a powerhouse Android TV box and microconsole that was more gaming focused than other TV boxes available at the time. Thanks to the power of Nvidia's own X1 chip, the Shield TV could output 4K video, stream games from a computer, and play exclusive ports of console games.
The Nvidia Shield TV's Tegra X1 chip would later be used to power the Nintendo Switch console.
Nintendo: Switch
The Nintendo Switch is a handheld and console hybrid that is the successor to both the Wii U and 3DS. Essentially a tablet with detachable controllers, the Switch is a dual system that offers console-level performance as a handheld device, or it can be played as a traditional TV console. This unique and flexible design grabbed consumer attention, which combined with an effective ad campaign to generate substantial prerelease hype. At launch the system sold out quickly, and demand outpaced stock for months. The Switch became one of Nintendo's fastest-selling systems ever, managing to eclipse the Wil U's lifetime sales in less than a year.
When docked and played on a TV, the Switch runs in a high-performance mode that offers higher resolutions and framerates than handheld mode.
Sony: PlayStation VR
The PlayStation VR was Sony's virtual reality headset for its PS4 platform. It required an external camera for tracking and either a DualShock 4 or the PS Move wands for interaction. It released itn 2016 and sold for $399 as a stand-alone headset or for $499 as a bundle that included the camera and PS Move wands.
Oculus: Rift
The Rift was the first commercial virtual reality headset from Oculus, released in 2016 for $599. The headset required a PC, external sensors, and Oculus software to operate. The Rift was discontinued in 2019 and replaced by the Rift S, an updated headset with a higher-resolution display and built-in position tracking.
Steam: Link
The Steam Link was a device from Valve that allowed users to stream games from their computer's Steam library to their TV. Steam, a digital distribution platform for computer games, was created by the game developer Valve in 2003 and is the world’s largest computer games marketplace. The Steam Link was Valve's attempt to bring the couch experience of console gaming to the PC, and it worked with various wired and wireless console controllers as well as Valve's own Steam Controller. The unique and highly customizable controller used dual touchpads and gyroscope aiming to help translate the PC’s couch-unfriendly mouse and keyboard setup to a controller.
Valve, the developer of the Half-Life series, originally created Steam to distribute its own PC games, but the service steadily grew to become the premier digital games marketplace.
Nexus Player
Google’s Nexus line was a series of flagship products used to launch major updates of its Android operating system. In late 2014, Google released the Nexus Player, a TV media box that was the first product to use its new Android TV platform. The Nexus Player offered media playback from a variety of streaming apps such as Netflix, YouTube, Pluto TV, and Hulu. Games were also available from the Google Play store, but the selection was severely limited due to many games lacking controller support. Controller support for mobile games continues to be an issue to this day, as many titles are intended or built only for touchscreen controls.
The Nexus Player was the last Nexus-branded device. As of 2016, Google releases flagship Android products under the “Pixel” branding.
Amazon: Fire TV
The Fire TV was a line of Android-powered TV boxes from the online retailer Amazon that streamed media, played games, and ran apps. At launch, Amazon promoted its Fire TV line as a gaming platform that could play a variety of mobile ports as well as Amazon-produced exclusive titles with an optional controller. However, support for controller-driven games quickly dried up, as Amazon diverted focus toward gaming On its more popular Fire tablet series. Unable to play these touchscreen-based games, the Fire TV line primarily became media streaming devices, and by 2017, references to gaming were dropped from the Fire TV's online product pages.
The Fire TV line was largely replaced by Amazon's Fire Stick platform, a less powerful and cheaper product that focused on media streaming.
Mad Catz: MOJO
The MOJO was an Android microconsole from Mad Catz, an electronics manufacturer that’s best known for its third-party console controllers. At release, the MOJO was an upscale microconsole that used the powerful Tegra 4 processor and sold for more than twice its $100 competitors. While the system didn't have a dedicated game library, the MOJO had limited access to Android games from the Google Play store, which included a variety of emulators for classic game consoles. In 2014, Mad Catz expanded the MOJO’s game library even further to include full compatibility with the Ouya platform as well as OnLive game streaming.
The MOJO controller's “mouse mode” toggle made it possible to play mobite touchscreen games on a TV, though many touchscreen games were not evettable to downtoed on the MOJO.
Sony: PlayStation 4
The PlayStation 4 was Sony’s long-awaited successor to the 2006 PS3. Learning from the PS3’s rough start due to its complex architecture and high price, Sony built the PlayStation 4 to be more affordable and developer-friendly, pairing a straightforward design with a robust graphics processor and fast memory. The PS4 launched alongside the Xbox One, where it sold for $100 less and offered better performance in most games compared to Microsoft's console. The PS4 was an immediate hit for Sony, with gamers and developers flocking to the system. The PlayStation 4 would go on to greatly outsell the Xbox One and Wii U to become the generation's best-selling system.
Unlike the PS2 and PS3, the PS4 was not backward compatible.
Ouya
The Ouya was an Android-based gaming microconsole brought to life through an $8.5 million Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. Built from tablet and cell phone parts, the Ouya mostly played mobile game ports and offered a few exclusives through its dedicated online store. On its release, the system suffered from hardware and software issues, and was plagued by bad reviews and negative press. It sold poorly at retail, and very few of those who did buy the console actually bought games for it, instead using the Ouya for emulators and media playback. After its failure, the Ouya’s assets were sold to the company Razer, and the console was discontinued in 2015.
Each Ouya also functioned as a dev system, meaning owners could use it to create their own games.
PlayJam: GameStick
The GameStick was an Android-powered gaming microconsole that, like the Ouya, began with a Kickstarter campaign. The company PlayJam successfully raised $650,000 in early 2013 and released the console later that year. The GameStick's reviews were tepid at launch, citing bugginess and a limited, locked-down online store mostly made of mobile game ports. The GameStick’s hardware was also less capable than comparable Android-based systems, which made compatibility with future games uncertain. After dismal sales, retail stock was liquidated in 2014, and the GameStick’s online game store closed permanently in early 2017.
The GameStick’s small HDMI dongle was the actual brains of the system.
Nintendo: Wii U
The Wii U was Nintendo's first HD console and the successor to the hugely popular Wii. Built around a large, tablet-like controller with a built-in screen, the Wii U played games with or without a TV and offered the possibility of innovative, dual screen gameplay.
However, casual gamers who enjoyed the Wii ignored the Wii U and moved to mobile games. Average gamers were put off by the console's high price, poor online ecosystem, and lack of third-party support that led to months long game droughts. Unable to attract a wide audience, sales stalled and never recovered, and Wii U support ended in 2017 with only 13 million consoles sold.
Poor marketing caused many consumers to a believe the Wii U's controller was an addon for the original Wii.
Sony: PlayStation Vita
The PlayStation Vita was an advanced, feature-packed handheld console from Sony that was the successor to the PSP. The Vita failed to match the success of the PSP, however, in part due to heavy competition from mobile devices that stole away casual and average gamers, leaving the Vita with narrow appeal. After sales slowed following the system's debut, official and AAA game support dwindled. The Vita became a niche console that was kept afloat by a dedicated user base that appreciated its library of Japanese RPGs, visual novels, and American indie games. Due to low sales, Sony stated that there were no plans for a successor.
The first Vita model used an OLED display that was well regarded for its high contrast and vibrant colors.
OnLive
OnLive was a cloud gaming service that ran from 2010 to 2015 and allowed users to play PC games on a variety of devices. Games were stored and run on data center computers, and the gameplay was video-streamed back to users over the internet. Players could either access OnLive through an app on their phone or tablet, or through software on their computer. Or they could use the official microconsole streaming box to play on a television. While the experience was very susceptible to lag and entirely dependent on a high-speed internet connection, OnLive could drop users into gameplay within seconds and offered PS3 and Xbox 360-level gaming on low-powered mobile devices.
OnLive's “Brag Clip” feature captured short gameplay videos for sharing, a feature leter adopted by the PS4, Xbox One, end Nintendo Switch.
Nintendo: 3DS
The 3DS, Nintendo's successor to its DS Nintendo handheld line, was a new system capable of displaying stereoscopic 3D without the use of 3D glasses. Despite the DS's previous success, the 3DS sputtered at launch, with slow sales that were attributed to the handheld’s high price and a lack of interest in the system's 3D ability. Nintendo responded with a drastic $80 price cut just months later, which, along with the release of flagship Super Mario and Pokemon titles, renewed interest and increased sales. While it didn't match the DS's massive sales figures, the 3DS proved traditional handheld gaming was still viable in the modern mobile age.
The Nintendo 3DS was backward compatible G with the original DS.
Zeebo
The Zeebo was a console produced by the Brazilian toy and electronics manufacturer Tectoy for the South American and Mexican markets. Based on mobile-processor chips developed by Qualcomm, the Zeebo closely resembled a smartphone, complete with a 3G cellular antenna. The console used this wireless cellular connection for its digital maeketplace, which was the only way to buy and download games for the console. Upon its release, the system struggled to make an impact on the South American gaming market, adn its low sales led to large finanial loses for Tectoy, which discontinued the Zeebo two years later.
Tectoy is most known in Brazil for producing and distributing Sega's Master System and Genesis consoles.
Apple: iPhone
Apple unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, a revolutionary touchscreen-based smartphone powered by its new iPhone OS (later iOS) mobile operating system. The next year Apple introduced the App Store, which opened the iPhone to third-party games and applications. The new platform received massive attention, launching an era of casual, touch-based mobile games. The number of mobile games grew exponentially in a short amount of time, as smartphones became ubiquitous and reached an install base that dwarfed that of consoles. This market continues to grow today, and it has eclipsed both PC and console gaming in total revenue.
Nintendo: Wii
In the seventh game console generation, Nintendo abandoned direct competition with Microsoft's and Sony's systems and instead released the Wii: a non-HD console that focused on casual gaming. Based around a unique, remote-shaped controller that tracked motion, the Wii encouraged gamers to play with physical movement. Its pack-in game, Wii Sports, used the controller to mimic activities such as bowling and tennis, and the title became a hit with gamers and nongamers alike. Wil Sports began a phenomenon that widely expanded Nintendo's audience and provided Nintendo with its best-selling home console ever.
The Wii's Virtual Console offered digital versions oN of games from the NES, SNES, and N64 eras.
Sony: PlayStation 3
The success of Sony's PlayStation line led to notable excitement for its next system, the PlayStation 3, but many consumers were put off by its high launch price. The system's cost—$599 for the most expensive model—was the result of a feature-packed design that included an expensive Blu-ray drive and Cell processor. Production issues, strong competition, and lower-than-expected demand led the PS3 to a shaky first year of sales, but as assembly costs dropped, corresponding price cuts helped the system rebuild momentum. The console battled neck and neck with the Xbox 360 for second place in console sales—with the Wii topping the list-and would finish strong with more than 80 million systems sold worldwide.
The $599 launch model offered native backward compatibility through dedicated hardware.
VTech: V.Flash
Two years after the release of the V.Smile children's console, VTech expanded its edutainment lineup with the V.Flash. Aimed at the slightly older 6- to 10-year-old demographic, the V.Flash offered the systern was not as successful as old alate and educational 3D games VTech’s V.Smile line, and the V.Flash offered non-violent and educational 3D games with graphics similar to the original Sony PlayStation. Each disk included a standard game mode, an educational mode, and an artistic creative mode, with games based on properties such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Pixar's Cars, However, the system was not as sucessful as VTech's V.Smile line, and the V.Flash was discontinued after the release of just nine games.
The V.Flash was jointly developed by VTech a and Koto Laboratory, the designer of the WonderSwan handheld.
HyperScan
The HyperScan was an inexpensive game console for kids from American toymaker Mattel — the company’s first system since the Intellivison. The HyperScan's games relied on collectible cards embedded with RFID chips that sold in booster packs of six for $9.99. These cards, when scanned into the console, unlocked game content such as characters and abilities. Though the idea was innovative, the Hyperscan suffered frorn outdated 2D graphics and a small library of awful, clunky games. The HyperScan flopped hard at release, and the console was discontinued and dumped into clearance bins after only a few months.
The HyperScan’s games aggressively locked content behind collectible cards to encourage buying booster packs; one fighting game shipped with 18 of its 20 characters locked behind optional card purchases.
Microsoft: Xbox 360
Microsoft pushed console gaming into a new era with the Xbox 360, a system whose HD graphics rivaled high-end PCs at the time of its release. Designed for the broadband age, the 360 focused heavily on online gaming and redefined the modern console with new features such as a digital marketplace and in-game achievements. With a year's lead, a lower price, and generally better multiplatform game performance than the PlayStation 3, the 360 established Microsoft as a major contender that could go toe to toe with Sony. The console would sell more than 84 million units worldwide and become Microsoft's best-selling system of all time.
Early 360's frequently suffered hardware issues that led to system failure, with bricked consoles displaying the Infamous “red ring of death.”
Microsoft: Xbox
The massive success of Sony's PlayStation had caught the attention of software giant Microsoft, which began development of its own console in the late 1990s. The result was the Xbox, a powerhouse system that had more features and better graphics than both the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube. Microsoft took on heavy losses to get a foothold into the market, paying for exclusive titles and pushing a massive advertising campaign while also selling the system at a loss. Microsoft's aggressive strategy worked, and while not as popular as the PS2, the Xbox beat out the veteran Nintendo for a second-place finish, largely due its performance in the United States.
The Xbox had a built-in broadband adapter for local network and online gaming.
Nintendo: GameCube
The GameCube was Nintendo's compact successor to the N64 and its first console to use optical media. It entered a fiercely competitive market, where it faced off against the established PlayStation 2 and the well-funded upstart Xbox. The GameCube emphasized fun, had quality graphics, and was backed by a strong library of exclusive first- and third-party titles, but the boxy console suffered from a kid-friendly image that kept some older gamers away. Despite its loyal fan base, the system continued a downward trend in console sales for Nintendo, which led the company to rethink its place in the market as it moved forward.
The GameCube's best-selling tithe wes Super Smash Bros. Melee, whieh sold over 7 million copies worldwide.
Pokémon: mini
Released in 2001 and based around a brand very much aimed at today's children, the Pokémon Mini is a gaming system that arguably has no business appearing within the pages of Retro Gamer. But take a second look at thie obscure part of Nintendo history and you might be surprised by how interesting, and how retro, it actually is.
The first and most important point to make about the Pokémon Mini is that it isn't a virtual pet device, it isn't a pedometer and it isn't a Game & Watch-style system with only one game built in. Such assumptions are understandable given the wide of such Pokémon-branded items that have been released to date, but the Mini is actually a fully fledged handheld gaming system, just like a Game Boy. It uses interchangeable cartridges and plays simple dot matrix, monochrome games that have more in common with the technology of 1989 than 2001.
The great contradiction of the Pokémon Mini is that although it plays very simple videogames that use even simpler visuals, the interactive capabilities of the hardware did things the Game Boy Advance (released in the same year) could only dream of and were surely part of Nintendo's momentum toward the eventual creation of the DS and Wii. Hardware features include an intemal real-time clock, an infra-red transmitter for multiplayer gaming and data transfer with up to five other players at once, in-built vibration for force feedback and a shock detector for very rudimentary motion control. All of which are crammed into a tiny 74mm x 58mm x 23mm casing, the smallest handheld ever to be produced by Nintendo.
Why is the Pokemon Mini so undocumented? Undoubtedly it's because of the association with the Pokémon brand. Every single one of the ten commercial games released for the system used the Pokémon licence, positioning the handheld as more of a kids’ toy than a hardcore gaming system. The Mini was only ever sold in toy stores rather than dedicated game shops and although the price tag of £40 was attractive for a new console, £20 per cartridge was very steep for games that offered only a fraction of the entertainment available on other systems of the time. And with the GBA and cheaper Game Boy Color both offering their own fair share of Pokémon fun in addition to a wide range of other games, it’s easy to see why even parents would think twice about buying a Mini for their children.
Following its 14 November 2001 release in the US, the Pokémon Mini made its way to Japan and Europe and enjoyed a regular stream of games — about one per month — until its final release Pokémon Breeder exclusively hit Japanese shelves in December 2002. The one-year shelf life is about twice the lifespan of Nintendo's highest profile failure, the Virtual Boy, but with about half the number of commercial games released, the Pokémon Mini can easily be considered Nintendo's least relevant games console and would have slipped into total obscurity were it not for a strange twist of fate spurred on by a quirky feature in one of Nintendo's GameCube games.
2003's Pokémon Channel was a relatively forgettable virtual pet game for GameCube, except for the fact that it included a simulated software version of the Pokémon Mini, complete with demos of some games as well as a full exclusive game of its own, called Snorlax’s Lunchtime. This official emulator was instrumental in helping a handful of Pokémon Mini enthusiasts reverse engineer the handheld, develop an emulator of their own and begin to produce their own tech demos and homebrew games. And it is these dedicated few who are best equipped to tell us about the inner workings of the Mini and how it might have developed had Nintendo offered more support.
Detlef Hastik is founder of Team Pokémeé, a demo group that spent a year developing their debut Mini production, a homebrew cart tech demo called SHIzZLE that shows off a number of gobsmacking visual techniques previously thought impossible on the hardware, including high-res title screens, 3D text, multiple layered sprites, fractal landscapes, shading, light sourcing, reflective spherical surfaces, sprite rotation and scaling, blocky Starfox-style 3D environments and even digitised video.
"When I discovered the Pokémon Mini in a sale-out box of a local games store in 2004, I first thought ‘eek! Pokémon! What crap',' SayS Hastik. “But the price
of just five euros made me look a
The Pokemon Mini was released in a number of color variations, each named after a different Pokemon.
Sony: PlayStation 2
As the best-selling video game system of all time, the PlayStation 2 dominated the sixth console generation, selling more than 155 million systems worldwide. The success of the original PlayStation helped build hype for the PS2, and the console sold out quickly to massive crowds at launch. With strong third-party support and an extensive library of critically acclaimed games, the PS2 pushed the Sega Dreamcast out of the market and shrugged off competition from Nintendo's GameCube and Microsoft's Xbox. The console would remain popular throughout the decade, with slimmer, redesigned models selling well even years after the release of the PlayStation 3.
The PS2 was backward compatible with the original PlayStation's games, controllers, and memory cards.
SNK: Neo Geo Pocket Color
Although Nintendo has seemingly been the dominant force in the handheld sector, there was a rival. That had the potential to suceed where others, like the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear, had failed. The Neo Geo Pocket Color was a great piece of a kit that offered extensive battery life, high-quality visuals and reasonable software, yet it failed to take the world by storm. We take an in-depth look at the company behind the handheld marvel, the subsequent launches of the machine in different territories, and the cock-up that led to the downfall of a fantastic handheld.
Skin Nihon Kikaku (SNK) first began on 22 July 1978 and was initially founded to develop software and hardware components for business clients, quickly turning to the world of arcade development. Its first arcade titles were Ozma Wars (1979), Safari Rally (1980), and Vanguard (1981). And it was around this time that SNK created SNK Corp of America founded in Sunnyvale, California. While SNK still developed coin-op titles it shifted its focus to console games and signed up as a third-party licensee for Nintendo in 1986. SNK released Ikari Warriors in 1986 for a variety of formats including the NES, but then decided to return to the arcade industry.
In 1989, SNK aimed to re-invent the arcades and manufactured interchangeable game cartridges. Christened the Multi Videogame System (MVS), this arcade cabinet could allow up to six separate games to be installed into one machine. This innovative invention proved vital in keeping the arcades alive, and it meant that SNK went on to release its own home console using the motherboard from the arcade system, which was flexible enough to adapt to home use.
The console was the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (Neo Geo), and although it was the most powerful home videogame console, its high price tag and expensive games meant it was only ever purchased by the mega-rich. Even today, Neo Geo titles can fetch colossal sums of money, with rare titles selling for thousands of pounds. The release of the Neo Geo CD in 1994 saw the first batch of 25,000 rapidly sell out in Japan, but complaints of slow loading times meant sales tailed off and the American launch in 1995 was mostly ignored.
Despite starting to struggle financially, SNK decided to release a handheld to compete with Nintendo's Game Boy and would feature ports of its classic franchises.
Bandai: WonderSwan
The WonderSwan was a 16-bit black-and-white handheld game system conceived by Gunpei Yokoi, the former Nintendo engineer that had created the Game Boy. Yokoi's new company, Koto Laboratory, produced toys, electronic games, and the WonderSwan. The system was picked up by Bandai and released exclusively in Japan in 1999. The WonderSwan, like the Game Boy, was an extremely battery-efficient system that could run for more than two dozen hours off a single AA battery. It also had a quirky dual-control method that meant the system could be played either vertically or horizontally, which was useful for the WonderSwan’s puzzle games.
Gunpei Yokoi died tragically in an auto-related aecident in 1997, missing the launch of the system he helped design.
SNK: Neo Geo Pocket
Given its long and rich history in the hardware market, it was inevitable that SNK would join the handheld fray at some point. The company's final console surprises by sharing little in common with its previous arcade-style consoles — the AES, MVS and Neo Geo CD. Released in Japan in 1998, the 16-bit Neo Geo Pocket stunned everyone with its simplicity. Rather than go down the PC Engine GT route and throw plenty of cutting-edge technology at the machine, SNK chose the more functional Game Boy approach, and not surprisingly the Pocket proved perfectly apt for portable gaming. A wonderful, sharp screen that display eight shades of grey crisp, and a responsive analogue nub to replace directional buttons, meant the handheld was well armed to take on the portable versions of SNK's popular arcade hits, particularly its many beat-’em-ups. With scaled-down versions of Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury, Metal Slug and The King Of Fighters released on the machine, the Pocket's commercial assault was heavily supported by SNK IP. However, shortly after the machine's launch in Japan, Bandai would throw a spanner in SNK’s plans by unveiling the WonderSwan — a machine that looked and felt very similar to the Pocket. Thanks to Bandai’s marketing muscle, and the fact the WonderSwan quickly found appeal among both boys and girls, it soon overtook SNK’s handheld in the market, but by then both parties had another mutual threat to contend with: the Game Boy Color. In response, SNK quickly followed up its portable with the Pocket Color in 1999, which added a superior colour TFT display to compete with the Game Boy Color. The Pocket Color did find its way to this side of the Atlantic but, owing to the sheer popularity of the Game Boy Colour and a problematic launch (resulting from poor communication between SNK’s East and West offices), it was slow to find interest from established developers and consumers. With SNK facing falling arcade, Neo Geo and eventually Pocket sales, the company was bought out and fragmented in 2000, later returning to our screens as SNK Playmore, and the Neo Geo Pocket was no more.
The Neo Geo Pocket was a 16-bit portable import console from SNK that was released primarily for the Japanese gaming market. The modest, two-button handheld featured a monochrome LCD screen and played simplified versions of popular SNK arcade games. After its release, the Pocket faced heavy competition from the new Game Boy Color and WonderSwan handhelds which prompted SNK to quickly release a new color version of the system in 1999. However, this only mildly boosted dales, as the Game Boy continued its market domination and the WonderSwan secured important third-party support, putting the Neo Geo Pocket in third place.
While the original Neo Geo Pocket stayed in Japan, its later Color model released worndwide in 1999.
Nintendo: Game Boy Color
After relying on the original Game Boy for over nine years, Nintendo finally upgraded to a colour model, only to replace the machine two years later. Ashley Day looks at one of Nintendo's most short-lived consoles and showcases the games you might have missed the first time around.
Rumours of a colour Game Boy began to circulate almost as soon as the original monochrome handheld was released in 1989. Atari's Lynx proved that colour gaming was possible on the move, which prompted some to question why The Big N chose the less-impressive black-and-white route. Nintendo’s answer, as always, showed that it had done its homework. Colour handhelds, although possible, were not practical: the massive drain on batteries and reliance on oversized hardware forced the user to play at home (close to a plug socket) and completely defeated the point of a portable games console.
Nintendo chose instead to produce a handheld that was cheap to run and light enough to carry around, pledging to only upgrade the console when technology caught up with demand. That strategy proved more than wise as the Game Boy went on to sell over 70 million units despite the lack of colour. A string of hits from Nintendo's familiar brands, as well as new properties like Pokémon, ensured that the handheld fought off all competition and stayed in the hands of gamers for the next nine years until technology finally caught up.
By November 1998 Nintendo made good on Its promise and revealed the Game Boy Color to the world at that year’s E3. The console originally used a tech demo, featuring schools of multicoloured fish, that clearly showed how advanced the handheld was in comparison to its forebears. By featuring a crisp 256x256 pixel TFT (Thin Film Transistor) screen the GBC could output vibrant colour visuals, without eating the batteries, while also keeping the machine small and light. In addition, the processor was twice as fast as the original Game Boy, 56 colours could be displayed from a palette of 32,000 and the unit included an infrared device that could wirelessly transfer data between two machines. Since various coloured machines
Tiger: game.com
Tiger was an arm of toy giant Hasbro that specialised in producing electronic LCD toys. Inspired by the success of the Game Boy, Tiger quickly set about developing a handheld that was years ahead of its time. Stumbling on a trend that wouldn't occur in the handheld market until almost ten years later, the Tiger Game.Com pushed the functionality of mobile gaming into bold new realms. Firstly, Tiger's machine was touch-screen and came packed with a stylus wand that slotted tidily into its casing. With the aid of an internet cartridge, it could access a text browser and e-mail facility. The Game.com's graphics were the same as Game Boy's four shades of grey, but its LCD screen was larger. Despite a keen price point (the original model sold for about $60, while the second, Game.Com Pocket Pro, was a staggeringly cheap $30) and gallant efforts by Tiger to secure such licenses as Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat and Virtua Fighter, the machine struggled to attract enough third-party interest and was eventually dropped by Hasbro in 1999.
Much is written about the winners of each console generation's console wars. But what of the losers? They, too, have equally interesting stories and deserve a page in the history book. With that in mind, Ashley Day look at one of the game industry's biggest losers.
From 1989 to 2009, 20 years of handheld videogame history has been defined by one simple truth: no one can stop Nintendo. Great industry legends like Atari, Sega, Sony and SNK have all tried over the years and all failed to scale the same heights as either the Game Boy or the DS. The story of the Tiger Game.com is no different.
Timing is one of the most important factors in any product launch, and Tiger Electronics must have considered September 1997 as its own window of opportunity for the handheld videogame market. By that time, Nintendo's Game Boy was eight years old and looking a little long in the tooth, while its main competitors, the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear, had died off a couple of years previously. There was an opening in the market and Tiger, a Western company with extensive experience in electronic games, was poised to take advantage.
For many years previously, Tiger Electronics has enjoyed great success in the toy market with its pocket LCD games, which offered simple but fun distractions on the go. And just as Nintendo took what it had learned with Game & Watch and transformed it into an interchangeable cartridge system, Tiger looked to do the same with its own handhelds.
Dubbed Game.com (with a silent dot) Tiger's handheld was named to take advantage of the explosion in popularity of the internet at the time and hoped to create an association with cutting-edge technolagy that would leave the Game Boy looking outdated by comparison. Pitched somewhere between a PDA and a games machine, it offered potential
Apple: Pippin
The Pippin was a hybrid computer and game console platform created by Apple Computer and built and distributed by Bandai. Apple designed the platform to expand its Mac operating systern to the multimedia box and video game markets, but it left almost all aspects of its rollout to Bandai, which built the system, produced games, and handled it advertising. At launch, the system was an immediate disaster due to the Pippin's high price, small game library, limited computer functionality, and sparse retail availability. With abysmal sales in the United States and Japan, Bandai incurred heavy losses that almost crippled the company.
The Pippin's lack of a hard drive meant its operating system had to be stored on every CD and loaded at the console’s startup.
Nintendo: Game Boy Pocket
The Game Boy Pocket was an updated Game Boy that was considerably smaller and could play games for over 10 hours with just two AAA batteries. Released in 1996, the Pocket came at a time when other systems would have released a successor, but the limitations of current LCD technology (plus the Game Boy's complete dominance of the handheld market) led Nintendo to stay with the Game Boy's cheap and simple design for a few more years.
In 1995 Nintendo released five new Game Boy case colors: black, red, yellow, green, and clear.
Casio: Loopy
Twelve years after it produced the PV-1000, Casio returned to the home game console market with the Loopy, the first system developed for and and marketed at girls. The Japan-exclusive, cartridge-based console played simple games with 2D graphics, but its standout feature was a built-in printer. The thermal printer could make color stickers using specially treated paper cartridges, and the Loopy's small library of dress-up and romance games all revolved around printing stickers. Users coule also make their own custom stickers with an optional accessory that imported video from a TV, VCR, or camcorder.
In Japan in the mid-1990s, new photo booths that overlaid images with cutesy graphics and printed on stickers were becoming popular.
Sega: Nomad
"Nomad: (member of a tribe) roaming from place to place for pasture; Wandering." We couldn't think of a more fitting moniker for Sega's second handheld machine. As well as being a portable games machine, Sega's final entry into the handheld market was a member of a big tribe of unsucessful Mega Drive variants. Stuart Hunt discovers what went wrong for Sega's ambitious handheld.
We’re not sure anyone from Nintendo has come out and said it yet, but Sega won that notorious 16-bit playground spat. If vou were on the side of the blue hedgehog, well done, give yourself a pat on the back. What may serve os a shred of comfort to some disappointed SNES fans reading this, though, is that it was the only console war from which Sega emerged victorious during its time in the videogame hardware market. And while we really don't want to keep banging on about the tale of the Mega Drive - we've covered it in two features now - it is important to explain how significant the console was for Sega, to appreciate why it was so desperate to protract the machine's life for so long.
In brief, the Mega Drive was the machine that turned the tide for Sega by helping it to overtake the then seemingly infallible Nintendo. It was also the first machine to make the industry wake up to the fact that it is in the West that the battle for videogame supremacy is either won or lost. With a successful machine firmly bunkered down inside millions of homes around North America, Sega soon realised that its 16-bit machine would give it the edge in the next console war. With this in mind, Sega thought it would be better to keep the Mega Drive alive with various life-support Monstrosities rather than support the Mega Drive in a soft capacity and concentrate efforts on a new machine. But with every disastrous misstep and commercial flop that Sega pushed tentatively out on to an eager and passionate market, customer confidence dropped and its reputation never recovered.
To put Sega's obsession with the Mega Drive into perspective, before releasing the Nomad, the developer had already released a quite astonishing seven separate variants and add-ons for the Mega Drive: three versions of the unit itself (the last variant the Genesis 3, is native in North America only): two add-ons in the form of Mega CD and 32X; the Multi-Mega; and finally the Mega Jet, a screenless portable Mega Drive unit developed by Sega for in-flight entertainment on Japanese airlines. There were also three official ‘clone’ machines by other manufacturers saturating the market place even further: the Pioneer LaserVision variant, which cost a staggering $970 and was one of the most expensive pieces of Sega hardware to ever find a release; the quirky Aiwa Mega CD portable stereo; and finally the Wonder Mega, which was also manufactured by Pioneer.
While the Nomad is one of the lesser-known consoles to come charging from the Sega stable, it is still an important and ambitious bookend to its 16-bit legacy, and serves as a memorable last stand for Mega Drive’s commercial life. Had the Nomad been the first in that long line of abject Mega Drive failures by Sega — for reasons we'll touch on later — it’s conceivable that the Nomad may well have been a far greater success than it was. For one, it would have certainly seen Sega repeat history by releasing a dramatically more powerful machine to market (this time in a handheld capacity) quicker than Nintendo. Also, some of the issues that haunted the Nomad in its short life may not have even existed.
Like the Game Gear, the Nomad was essentially a compact version of a larger TV-based machine. Although based on the technology of Sega’s 8-bit Master System, the Game Gear is actually the more powerful console, boasting a far greater colour pallet - it can display over four thousand colours as apposed to the Master System's paltry 64. And like the Mega Jet, the Nomad was based on the technology inside the Mega Drive.
In terms of specs and performance, the Nomad is practically identical to its 16-bit TV-based cousin. Running from the same Motorola MC68000 CPU, and equalling the machine in memory, graphics and sound output, the Nomad was the most powerful handheld of its time. Its only real competition at the time of its release were the Atari Lynx and PC-Engine GT, both essentially 8-bit machines that housed two co-processors to bump up the quality of their graphics and sound.
Unlike the Game Gear, however, Sega’s decision to base the Nomad around the guts of a TV-based console wasn't down to time restraints and a race to get the machine to market, but rather to capitalise on the strong install base the Genesis had garnered in North America by tempting Americans with Genesis game collections to part with more money. What is particularly notable about the Nomad is that it is the only handheld/TV-based console hybrid to find a release, because while NEC's PC-Engine GT played Hu Cards, unlike the Nomad, it couldn’t be hooked up to a television.
The gestation of the Nomad can be traced right back to Sega’s first foray into 16-bit portable gaming: the Sega Mega Jet. Licensed out by Sega for use on Japanese airlines, the Mega Jet took the shape of an elongated six-button Mega Drive controller but with its own cartridge slot in the top. To play games, the Jet was plugged into small armrest monitors on aeroplanes, and passengers could either play their own games or select one of the four Sega titles packed into the unit. That the device relied on a mains adaptor and a television meant that, other than for the unique job it was designed to do, in a portability sense the Jet was bit of an oddity. Nonetheless, in 1994 Sega released small quantities of the machine into Japanese department stores, and, predictably, like the Mega Drive, the machine struggled to find
Nintendo: Virtual Boy
It's the console Nintendo doesn't want you to know about. The company's most high-profile bomb has been vilified as a headache inducing monstrosity with little merit, but is this assessment fair? Damien McFarran pops a few aspirins and prepares to find out...
Everybody has an awkward secret that they‘d rather not share with the world. Be it an old school photo that showcases your crimes against fashion, or an acutely embarrassing vinyl LP in your record collection, we keep these things hidden in the hope that if we ignore them they might cease to exist. In the case of Japanese videogame giant Nintendo, the Virtual Boy is unquestionably its ‘dirty little secret’. More than a decade after this unusual console sank almost without trace after enduring a period of consumer indifference, it remains a byword for dubious videogame hardware.
The genesis of the Virtual Boy came about when Nintendo was approached by US firm Reflection Technologies in the early-Nineties. Reflection was attempting to find a buyer for its independently produced display technology, and Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi was quick to identify the system‘s potential. He hit upon the notion of using two displays to create a three-dimensional image. In 1992 Nintendo acquired exclusive worldwide videogame licensing rights to Reflection Technologies’ innovative system and Yokoi's Research & Development 1 team set about creating the console that would become the first fruit of this union.
As development progressed, Yokoi and his staff toyed with several different designs. Despite the machine's close ties with the concept of ‘virtual reality’, the idea of having a head-mounted system was ruled out almost immediately. Yokoi claimed that as soon as it was decided that the console would not support motion tracking to detect head movements, the decision was made to mount the system on a stand, rather than affixing it to the player's head.
While R&D 1 furiously tinkered away within Nintendo‘s Kyoto HQ, news of this potentially ground-breaking new console — codenamed ‘VR-32’ — began to slowly trickle through to the gaming press. The biggest news was that it would pack a 32-bit CPU, like the upcoming Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The next revelation was the ground-breaking 3D display, which promised a new standard of immersion. However, the timing of this news — not to mention the entire project — was somewhat perplexing as Nintendo was also making a tremendous amount of noise about its 64-bit ‘Project Reality’ console (which went on to become the Nintendo 64). Bearing this in mind, It’s not surprising that most gamers interpreted the VR-32 as the spiritual successor to the ageing Game Boy, and the fact that Yokoi was involved only served to confirm this assumption. Regardless of this confusion, Nintendo fans were hungry for new hardware and therefore their interest was sufficiently piqued.
However, within the walls of Nintendo’s HQ, Yokoi was unsettled. Nintendo was keen to get the VR-32 on to the market before committing all of its energies to the Nintendo 64, but it has been alleged that Yokoi felt it needed further fine-tuning.
The Virtual Boy was a semiportable console from Nintendo that featured a monochrome, stereoscopic 3D display made from red LEDs. While originally envisioned as a wearable visor with head tracking, various technological compromises and limitations instead reduced the system to an awkward tabletop experience. The Virtual Boy received a tepid reception at launch, with game reviewers criticizing the system's cost, gimmicky nature, and headache-inducing display. After just a few months of slow sales — even after price cuts — Nintendo discontinued the Virtual Boy, making it one of the company’s rare failures.
The Virtual Boy used high-speed, oscillating mirrors to project an image into each eye.
NEC: PC-FX
As the 16-bit generation drew to a slow and agonising close, the industry witnessed a chaotic stampede of shiny new consoles, some of which were markedly more successful than others. Damien McFerran takes a look at one of the more high-profile blunders of the era.
Complacency can be deadly, You only have to look at the changeover between the 16-bit and 32-/64-bit generations for confirmation of this fact. Amazingly, during this period of transition all of the established hardware manufacturers were caught with their trousers down while new boy Sony waded in and effortlessly mopped up their precious market share. Poor old Sega stumbled badly, first with the ill-advised 32X and then with the Saturn, and while Nintendo's fall from grace was slightly less pronounced few would have the confidence to declare that the N64 lived up to the lofty expectations established by the tremendous success of its predecessor, the SNES.
However, by far the most humiliating ‘collapse was that of NEC and its cohort Hudson Soft. These two companies had previously worked together on the legendary 8-bit PC-Engine, which in Japan had managed to beat Sega's Mega Drive into third place and even went as far as to challenge Nintendo's previously unassailable dominance. Unfortunately, like their fellow rivals they drastically underestimated the challenge posed by creating a successor to such outrageously popular hardware.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here; there's a history lesson to brush up on first. As previously mentioned, NEC and Hudson's partnership had proved to be a particularly profitable one and it was almost a given that the dynamic duo would collaborate on new projects together again. Work on what would become known as ‘Tetsujin’ (Iron Man in Japanese) commenced almost as soon as the Nineties had begun, with an official announcement coming as early as 1992, As had been the case with the PC Engine, Hudson provided the custom chipaet (which included five separate co-processors) while NEC would bring its considerable electronics production experience to the table.
Tetsujin boasted fearsome apecifications for the time. Not only was it to be CD-ROM based, it also contained a RISC processor clocked at 25MHz and was supported by 2MB of RAM to facilitate speedy CD access. The system also featured highly advanced 2D capabilities as well as support for full-screen 24-bit video playback. A prototype was demonstrated to selected parties in the same year, with three games being displayed. Two of these were merely tech demos but the third gat delegates really hot under the collar; it was an updated version of Hudson's classic Star Soldier, which ran in what appeared to be full 3D. In reality it was actually displaying 3D objects over a pre-rendered background (the same technique employed by GameArts’ Silpheed on the Mega CD and Namco's Starbiade in the arcades), but it was more than enough to impress the assembled throng and with a successful demonstration of their new hardware out of the way NEC and Hudson feverishly worked on getting the new machine ready for release.
The PC-FX was NEC’s long-awaited 32-bit successor to the PC Engine and was released exclusively in Japan alongside the Saturn and PlayStation. However, unlike those consoles, the PC-FX was incapable of rendering polygonal 3D graphics and instead focused on 2D sprites and full-motion video. It was a fatal mistkae for the system and caused the expensive PC-FX to look underpowered and outdated as the industry quickly transitioned to 3D. Former PC Engine fans flocked to new systems, and after the console placed a distant fourth to the Saturn, PlayStation, and N64, NEC dropped out of the console market entirely.
Anime games with lots of FMV cutscenes made up most of the PC-FX’s small library.
Sega: 32X
How do you take a half a decade's worth of critical an and commercial sucess and flush it down the toilet? Easy: you release a device like the Sega 32X. Damien McFerran digs around in the dirt forr the truth regarding this most unfortunate of hardware releases.
At the start of the Nineties, Sega was arguably at the height of its powers. The dawn of the decade saw the Western launch of the popular Mega Drive console, which managed to gain both commercial and critical acclaim - much to the annoyance of arch-rival Nintendo. Such success was not to last, however; in less than a decade, Sega’s position would be far less dominant and the firm would be forced to limp meekly out of the hardware arena.
Why this disastrous fall from grace occurred is very much open to debate, but if you followed Sega's fortunes in the middle of the Nineties one thing is abundantly clear: the company took far too many risks when it came to videogame hardware. The forward-thinking but commercially disappointing Mega-CD represented the first indication that something was amiss, but industry experts point to the positively disastrous retail performance of the Mega Drive’s 32X add-on as the real straw that broke the camel's back.
Like the Mega-CD before it, the 32X was a device that augmented the capabilities of the 16-bit Mega Drive, allowing it to perform the kind of 3D graphical tricks that would later become the mainstay of 32-bit consoles. However, by the time the machine was launched it was already being outgunned by Sega’s own Saturn, and in less than 12 months it had been dropped from the company’s plans altogether. From an outsider's perspective the failure of the 32X was almost a foregone conclusion, so why did Sega choose to sour its relationship with the gaming public just months before it intended to release the Saturn? Scot Bayless, senior producer at Sega of America from 1990 to 1994, is the ideal man to shed some light on this turbulent time because he was there the moment when Sega’s American division got the telephone call from Sega of Japan CEO Hayao Nakayama that resulted in the birth of the machine.
“We were at CES ‘94 in Las Vegas, and Sega of America’s head of R&D Joe Miller asked a few of us to join him in his suite for a call he was expecting from Nakayama,” remembers Bayless. “There had already been some discussion about an up-gunned Mega Drive with Hideki Sato and his Sega hardware team, but the essence of the call was that we needed to respond to Atari's Jaguar and we needed to do it right away. Joe said he was confident the US team could come up with a design that would do the job, so Nakayama said ‘get it done’ and we were off to the races. Marty Franz grabbed one of those little hotel notepads and drew a couple of Hitachi SH2 processors, each with its own frame buffer. That's pretty much where the 32X started.”
The 32X — which at this juncture was known by the codename Mars - was actually one of two cartridge-based projects in development at the time; the other was known as Jupiter — as the more observant among you will no doubt have noticed by now, Sega had a habit of naming its hardware projects after planets in the solar system.
‘Jupiter started as a ROM-based unit with theoretical specs a bit like the Saturn,” explains Bayless. Although it was to be a more powerful machine on paper, the emergence of Project Mars meant that Jupiter was ultimately squeezed out of Sega's strategy. “I think Sato was really feeling the cost control heat, and the CD-based Saturn was hugely attractive from a cost perspective,” he continues. “Therefore, Jupiter was officially put to bed and Mars was born.”
From an engineering standpoint, the machine certainly had a lot of potential. “The design of the graphics subsystem was brilliantly simple; something of a coder's dream for the day,” says Bayless. “It was built around two central processors feeding independent frame buffers with twice the depth per pixel of anything else out there. It was a wonderful platform for doing 3D in ways that nobody else was attempting outside the workstation market."
Despite Nakayama’s keenness to square up to the Atari Jaguar, the decision to start work on the 32X
SNK: Neo Geo CD
The AES's costly game cartridges kept the console inaccessible to most people, which prompted SNK to release the Neo Geo CD in 1994. Built from the same hardware as the AES, the new console played more affordable CD versions of cartridge games. However, the system's single-speed CD drive and the need to load large amounts of data into the console’s RAM resulted in long loading times, drawing criticism for repetitive 20 to 40 second pauses. The console was also limited to 2D sprites, which suffered in comparison to the 3D graphics of the PlayStation and Saturn. With niche appeal and low sales, the Neo Geo CD would be SNK’'s last home console.
Atari: Jaguar
The Swan Song
Atari Corporation's last console is a fascinating one. It has a rabid fan base that comes close to the Dreamcast in terms of its sheer ferocity for championing the system, but the Jaguar is also equally unfairly derided as being a spectacular car crash of a console that was doomed from the start. Both of those viewpoints have done nothing to soften the negative image that Atari’s console has built up over the years and the truth lies somewhere in the middle of those two polarising views. Regardless of whether you sit in the 'Jaguar was the first true 64-bit console’ camp or not, there is no denying that Atari's machine was a powerful bit of kit at the time of its release and Atari Corp released it at a competitive price as well. It wasn’t enough, though and despite some solid looking 3D games and some quality conversions af older 16-bit classics such as Flashback and Zool, Atari's console failed to gain traction. Even a later CD-ROM add-on couldn't inject life into the system and it was eventually discontinued in 1996. The relatively short commercial life of the system, and the fact it was Atari's last console, has now made the Jaguar a rather desirable console fram a collector's point of view and the system and games are now rising in price as a result. With the machine rapidly approaching its 25th anniversary, it’s the perfact time te discover Atari Corp's hardware swan song.
When tethered with a USB-C cable to a PC, users can play PC VR games on their Quest.
Panasonic: 3DO
The Need to be Reconsidered
For many the 3DO remains something of a joke, an overpriced oddity masterminded by Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts. Over 20 years after the console's release, Will Matthews argues that it's time for a serious rethink.
If the 3DO was a prophet, it would be Zarathustra. A physicist, it would be Tesla. A WYSIWYG OS, it would be Bill Gates and Steve Jobs saw down at Xerox Parc. Or, to put it another way, 3DO is an underappreciated console that needs to be reconsidered.
For many, 3DO represented a watershed moment for gaming. For British gamers in the early Nineties, the Amiga and the Atari ST remained popular, but were showing their age technologically. What about the SNES and the Mega Drive? In some circles (not all, mind) they were unquestionably seen as toys, host to endless cute platformers and arcadey shoot-‘em-ups. They were by the companies that crushed smaller developers with prohibitively expensive cartridges.
And worse still, they often censored naked women, zombies, blood and violence — the staples of most male gamers. What about the PC? That ran Lotus123 right? It also cost the earth.
Meanwhile, technologies like Surround Sound and CD-ROM were rapidly taking off. Jurassic Park fever was big news at the cinema, while everyone was getting excited by the power of CGI, which has been increasing in popularity since appearing in films like The Abyss. The arcades were also exciting with achingly beautiful games from Namco and Sega like Virtua Fighter, Ridge Racer, and Daytona.
The home gaming response for many was disappointing to say the least. You had Philips‘s CD, Amiga’s AGA chipset and add-ons and cartridge expansions for the aging SNES and Mega Drive. There was nothing to really believe in or to get excited about. The gaming world needed something and it needed something special.
The Amiga loyal, disenchanted with Commodore, wondered where the core developers of Amiga Technology were working. As it turned out, they were actually hard at work on exciting new technology. In a posting on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy in 1992 it was revealed that Dave Needle and RJ Mical were working at NTG, The New Technology Group. They were working on new hardware that would eventually become the 3D0. Designed on a restaurant napkin in 1989, the 3D0 hardware was targeted to be more powerful than than a PC, cheaper than a PC, feature backwards compatibility and have a fairer licensing model for developers. A 3D
Pioneer: LaserActive
The LaserActive was a CD and LaserDisc player that also had the unique ability to become a game console when paired with an optional PAC expansion. With either a TurboGrafx-16 or Sega Genesis expansion installed, the LaserActive could play regular console games, CD games, and even a small library of exclusive LaserDisc games.
The LaserActive was an ambitious attempt to create a universal media machine, but it was also prohibitively expensive — a fully kitted system cost well over $2,000 — and thus sold poorly. With low sales and little consumer interest, Pioneer abandoned the LaserActive format and left the video game market to focus on general electronics.
Most LaserActive PAC expansions no longer work due to leaking capacitors.
Watara: Supervision
Released two years after Nintendo's million-selling handheld, the Supervision could almost be described as a Game Boy Picasso. All the right Game Boy fascia elements can be seen (four shades of grey LCD screen, contrast toggle, A, B, Select and Start buttons); they're just found in different places. The Supervison, which originated in China, was designed to be a cheap alternative to the Game Boy. Its odd open clamshell design featured two different-sized plastic cases that were connected by a swivelling rubber joint which tilted its 160 x 160 pixel LCD display but also prohibited the machine from folding into itself. This meant it was clunkier than its monochrome muse. Originally manufactured by the Asian company Watara, the Supervision was licensed by several companies, includng Audiosonic, Hartung and peripheral manufacturer Quickshot. But with sparse advertising, cumbersome looks and paltry software (only 40 titles were released for the machine), it drifted quickly into obscurity.
Memorex: VIS
The Memorex Video Information System (VIS) was a CD-based multimedia device created by the Tandy Corporation and sold exclusively through the American electronics retailer RadioShack. Based off a modified version of Windows 3.1, the VIS was a stripped-down x86 computer designed for a television. Its software library consisted mostly of educational titles for children and a few ports of DOS games such as Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective. The system, which was seen as expensive, limited, and not very fun, was a sales disaster for Tandy, who ended support for the VIS in 1994 and sold its remaining stock to a liquidation company. Less than two years after its debut, the VIS could be bought for $99 in a bundle that came with 20 software titles.
Sega: CD
Many gamers associate the name 'Mega CD' with 'Abject Failure' while others believe the platform's only failing was to bring CD-ROM technology to the party a generation too soon.
They say that pride comes before a fall but as the broadsides of the 16-bit war were unleashed at the dawn of the Nineties, Sega certainly had plenty to feel proud about. The launch of the Mega Drive (rebranded ‘Genesis’ in the US had transformed the company from plucky also-ran to industry leader virtually overnight. The hitherto unchallenged dominance of Nintendo's 8-bit NES was broken and by the time 1992 arrived, Sega was able to call 50 per cent of the American home console its own.
It was during this exciting period in Sega’s history that Scot Bayless joined the company. He vividly remembers what it was like to work for Sega at its peak: “it was exhilarating. We were sunning about 50 per cent on sheer bravado. One of the great things about Sega in those days was the company’s willingness to just try stuff. We had a T-shirt made with the slogan ‘This may not work, but what the hell’ - that was pretty much our attitude.” Such joyous ebuilience imbued Sega with the confidence to experiment with new technology ~ and in this case, it was the medium of CD-ROM that intrigued the Japanese firm.
Coming straight from Spectrum Holobyte (where he worked on the apie air combat flight simulator Falcon 3.0), Bayless took the position of technical director at Sega of America and was ultimately put in charge of overseeing the US debut of Sega's latest piece of hardware: the Mega-CD. It wasn't the first company to embrace the possibilities of the shiny plastic dise - rival NEC had produced its own CD-ROM add-on for the 8-bit PC-Engine in 1988 - but with the Sega brand in
the ascendancy and the war between the Mega Drive and SNES about to go global, all eyes were on this latest system and the new era of technological brilliance it was about to usher in. “Sega of Japan was already well along the road and the first development kits showed up not long after i did,” reveals Bayless. “My firat reaponaibility was to help get the first demos ready for the big announcement event in New York.”
The machine had been conceived by Sega's top hardware team in Japan, but so fearful was the company of internal leaks that it had been intentionally slow to provide Sega of America with vital technical information relating to the project. This clandestine attitude meant that Bayless and his team had to work overtime to get things ready for the US launch, which was scheduled for 1992. “At that point there were virtually no software tools — only barely functional dev kits and incomplete documents that were being translated more slowly than they were being revised,” he remembers. “There was one stretch when I spent four continuous days in the building — as in didn’t actually leave the premises. I lived off vending machines and coffee while I slogged through a buneh of systems code, trying to get the demos to function reliably.”
Because the hardware development was being done exclusively by Sega's Japanese team, Bayless decided early on that it wes vital that he familianse with the new machine. "One of the first things i did was to go to Tokyo and get up to speed on the hardware,” he recalls. With the relevant tools in place, Bayless and his US team were able to start tinkering around with the console, and it didn't take long for potential problems to arise. "The big headline was that there was a second CPU with its own memory - that was the good news," he says "The bad news was that the data path between the
Memorex: VIS
The Memorex Video Information System (VIS) was a CD-based multimedia device created by the Tandy Corporation and sold exclusively through the American electronics retailer RadioShack. Based off a modified version of Windows 3.1, the VIS was a stripped-down x86 computer designed for a television. Its software library consisted mostly of educational titles for children and a few ports of DOS games such as Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective. The system, which was seen as expensive, limited, and not very fun, was a sales disaster for Tandy, who ended support for the VIS in 1994 and sold its remaining stock to a liquidation company.
Less than two years after its debut, the VIS could be bought for $99 in a bundle that came with 20 software titles.
Philips: CD-i
The CD-i is known though misunderstood by nearly everyone. Although a failure, it has both genuine merit and historical importance, being somethinng of a forerunner to Sony's PlayStation. John Szczepaniak, with assistance from Devin Shockwell, attempts to finally correct the inaccuracies, now considered common fact, regarding Holland's Final Foray into videogame hardware.
Few systems are as unfairly maligned and misrepresented, with regard to the ratio of potential quality and historical significance they had, as the Philips Compact Disc Interactive multimedia system. In some ways it may have been a terribly flawed system, but there were also positive attributes, along with a list of historical precedents and high-quality games. Its history is complex and shrouded in mistruths, while its lack of success seems almost inevitable and the result of gross short-sightedness. It could have spearheaded a revolution, but instead it seems to have become a footnote in Nintendo’s history. There was more to it than those infamous licences.
The company Philips is a Dutch enigma. Formed in the city of Eindhoven, in 1891 (technically the second oldest company in the world to dabble in games, after Nintendo, which is two years older), by brothers Gerard and Anton Philips. It made light bulbs. Philips moved on to other electrical items and — through repeated entries into the electronic multimedia and entertainment market, which had a cascading effect — set Holland apart from the rest of the world as a unique country with a fascinating locally concentrated videogame movement, one of the few, mostly isolated countries along with Japan, America and the UK, which were all in a league of their own.
Philips’ first games hardware was the Videopac G7000 in 1978. Some years later the company became one of the first licensees for the MSX home-computer standard. With the hardware being so popular, Holland’s MSX following became the biggest outside Japan. Philips’ next (and final) form of “games” hardware, the CD-i, would end up being inextricably connected to both Sony and Nintendo — look closely at the history of gaming and you'll find that contrary to ignorant forumite screaming, most supposedly competing companies are
forever jumping in and out of bed with each other in an orgy of behind-the-scenes business deals. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Commodore: CDTV
The Commodore CDTV was a repackaged Amiga 500 computer that included a built-in CD drive and was the start of a wave of advanced, CD-based multimedia machines. As the CD format took off, the electronics industry envisioned a device that turned the living room television into a media hub, where families could learn, listen to music, play games, or watch movies. However, the technology was expensive, and most consumers would have rather invested that money into a computer that was far more versatile. The CDTV, with its incredibly high price, failed almost instantly and was an early casualty of the multimedia TV box format.
With an optional keyboard, floppy drive, and mouse, the CDTV could be used as a standard computer.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Your favorite machine.
Here it is: the system that Retro Gamer readers have voted the greatest of all time. As soon as voting began it was clear that one of the great rivals of the 16-bit era would Win, and the leader changed frequently. In the end, the SNES finally triumphed over Sega's Mega Drive by a whisker.
In hardware terms, the SNES proved to be a contemporary powerhouse. It could display more colours than the competition, and offered special effects, tike transparency. Its custom hardware also allowed for a graphical layer featuring scaling and rotation, the famous Mode 7 technique — possibly the most famous custom hardware inclusion of all time. It's sound hardware played back actual samples, leading to richer audios in games like ActRaiser where symphonic sounds could be achieved. Its CPU wasnt the strongest, but this was a drawback its developers overcame. The control pad was a revelation too — even now most game controllers offer the same diamond formation of four face buttons, as well as shoulder buttons.
While many systems have suffered from slow launches or late declines, there was never a bad time to be a SNES owner. When Retro Gamer readers voted for the greatest games of all time back in issue 150, they put Super Mario World right at the top, and that was available as soon as the Super Famicom launched in Japan. The fierce competition in the console market drove the development of many classics in the early Nineties, from first-party originals like Super Mario Kart and Super Metroid, to third-party hits like Street Fighter II and Secret Of Mana. Even when the rest of the world was looking towards the PlayStation and Saturn, SNES owners were enjoying games like Yoshi's Islond, Earthbound, Kirby Super Stor, Terranigma and Street Fighter Aipha 2. From massive hits like Donkey Kong Country to offbeat cult classics like Unirally, the SNES always had great games across all genres.
But perhaps more than anything else, the SNES is readers’ fevourte console because it was the last console to arrive before gaming started to change. The SNES came at a time when competition in the market was between gaming companies, rather than enormous tech giants. It came at a time when arcades ruled the gaming world and 3D was anovelty. No FMV intros, no DLC, just great games for years. Long live the SNES.
Chris Sutherland
ex Rare programmer
Question: What first impression did the SNES leave on you?
Answer: My first encounter of the SNES, as a player, was watching and playing Super Mario World after a Super Famicom appeared in the Rare office in 1991. Although Mario World's visuals are clean and bright it was still clearly a step up from the NES, and as i ran, jumped and flew Mario through various levels and castles I remember thinking that at last we'd be able to play games with visuals comparable to what was in the arcades!
My first software engineering encounter with the SNES was a little later; it was in August 1993 when I moved from Battletoads Arcade onto anew top-secret project in a building that was locked off from the rest of the company. Prier te that, others had been working on the console at Rare, and so i had some rought knowledge of some of the specs, but it is always exciting to start working on anew piece of hardware?
Question: So specifically, what is it about the SNES that you like?
Answer: I love the way these older generation consoles, like the SNES, were built as dedicated games machines - they allow you quite easily to have a good number of things whizzing around the screen, and at a lower cost than had you tried to build a ‘general purpose’ system like a PC. The trade-off for that power is that you have some limits on the number of things that can be whizzing around, or the
NEC: PC-Engine GT
Proving that power comes at a cost, the NEC PC Engine GT (renamed the TurboExpress in the West), at a wallet-tearing $299, was one
of the most expensive handhelds to come to market. Its design is a clear mesh of Game Boy meets Game Gear — taking the Game Boy’s portrait shape but spraying it with the mean dark look of Sega‘s handheld. The PC Engine GT is essentially just a mobile PC Engine, and as such was compatible with all the machine's HuCards — which lent themselves brilliantly to mobile gaming. That meant that when the PC Engine GT came to market it was instantly supported by an impressive array of varied software. However, and this is a warning to importers out there, the GT is one of the few handhelds - other examples being the Sega Nomad and DSi) — that adhere to region lockout, seeing that with the exception of the DSi) these handhelds were just portable versions of their territorial-adhering TV-based cousins. With its colourful active-matrix screen and large library of games, the PC Engine GT (from a technical and software standpoint) blew away the competition. But that impressiveness meant somewhere there had to be a catch, and sadly that snag was a hefty price tag and poor battery consumption (a pathetic two hours’ play from six AA batteries). Quality control also proved to be a huge problem for the GT late on in Itfe. While the GT Engine projected games in glorious rich colour, its display suffered from poor resolution and dead pixels, and the sound output was notably poor, doing nothing to help persuade consumers it was worth the lofty asking price. Ultimately it was the GT's price that really prevented it from penetrating the market, along with its risky software tie with the PC Engine; as the GT only fed from software developed for its big brother, when the PC Engine took a battering after the Super Nintendo's launch in North America, its slump in popularity took with it the hopes and ambitions of NEC’s handheld.
Hartung: Game Master
The Game Master was a European handheld console that was commonly credited to Hartung, a German toymaker. Often described as a “Game Boy clone,” the Game Master more closely resembled the older Epoch Game Pocket Computer, as both shared a similar processor and lowresolution, two-color screens. Whether Hartung actually created the handheld is unknown, but it is more likely the system and its games were developed in Hong Kong and rebranded for various European markets. The Game Master was only around a short while before it was replaced with more advanced handhelds such as the Mega Duck and Watara Supervision.
Game Masters appeared under a variety of colors and branding. in the UK it was the Systema 2000.
Amstrad: GX4000
Why the GX4000 was great...It's hard to give a valid reason for why the GX4000 was great because it wasn't. It was deeply fkawed. It's poor quality controllers and paltry range of games led to terrible sales and there were nails in the coffin before it was even launched. But, although the console flopped, having cartndge capabilities in the Plus range of computers was a bonus. It allowed Amstrad to keep the CPC going for a few more years and it helped latter-day developers get more graphical power from their disk-based games.
Gary Bracey is sitting at a table. Around him are some of his colleagues from Ocean Software and sitting a few seats away is Alan Sugar, boss of Amstrad. Next to him is Malcolm Miller, Amstrad‘s chief executive and they are all gathered at the electronic giant’s headquarters in Brentwood, Essex. It is 1990 and they are ready to do business. A product is about to be launched that promises to take on the world and cement Amstrad‘s power as a major force in computing.
Due to his immense success in electronics — the CPC, the PCW, the PC, the hi-fi and the Sky TV dishes — Sugar is confident. At stake is the future of the Amstrad CPC, a series of machines bom with the 464 in 1984 and evolved with the shortlived 664 and the better received 6128. Not one to stand still, Sugar proposes to do away with the black rectangular machines that had proved so popular in France and Spain and that had alowed Amstrad to compete against the Commodore 64 and Spectrum in the UK. Riding into town to replace them, he told the Ocean contingent, were the shiny sheriffs - the Amiga-esque, white coloured new models that took the CPC, bolted on a cartridge port and enabled them to compete with anything else the market could throw at them in opposition.
But, more importantly, there was the standalone, keyboardiess machine: the GX4000 gaming console, that dispensed with the tape and disk drives and monitors. This, Sugar explained, was the future of gaming, a system to beat Sega's Master System and the NES and so his abrasive manner was out in force. His new battalion was going to take no prisoners and he wanted everyone to know it.
“He had this bullish attitude,” Gary recalls. “Although he was polite with the guys from Ocean — after all, he had called them together to ask them a favour — he was nevertheless straightforward in his approach and he was confident that the products he had were worid-beaters. Actually, when I see him on The Apprentice, I think about how mellow he has become.”
Following Sugar’s introduction and the hard sell in which he made projections about how much money Ocean would make, Amstrad’s technical gurus took over and continued to sell the console to Bracey and his gang. Getting the Manchester-based company on board was essential for Amstrad. It was one of the biggest publishers in Europe, a powerful software house that was hot on producing games based on film licences, the recognisable games, which would help to sell the new console.
“Alan Sugar was perfectly fine with us,” says Gary, “since he was trying to get us to support him. It was important to him because he personally pitched the machine to us and asked to develop titles for it. The big thing he pushed was the fact that, because it was cartridge-based, piracy would be less of a problem. It was quite a meeting.”
Bit Corp: Gamate
You may consider your FM Towns Marty, MSX or WonderSwan to be off the beaten track as far as videogame hardware goes, but you haven't seen anything until you’ve witnessed the understated glory of the Gamate. Damien McFcFerran unearths the story behind this most obscure of handhelds.
When Nintendo launched the original Game Boy to a rapturous reception in 1989, it was almost a foregone conclusion that other companies would follow suit and concoct their own portable systems. Arch-rival Sega quickly pushed the Game Gear onto store shelves, and industry veteran Atari contributed the tremendously powerful Lynx, but less famous pretenders to the throne also appeared, including the little-known Gamate, manufactured by a tiny Asian firm known as Bit Corp.
“Bit Corp was one of Taiwan's first videogame companies, active since at least the early Eighties,” recounts Alex Evans, webmaster of gaming curio website NeoFuji and arguably the world’s leading source of Gamate knowledge. “It developed a number of games for the Atari 2600, many of which saw release in Europe. With the rise of the Famicom in the mid-Eighties, Bit Corp moved onto that system with Duck Maze - the first Taiwanese-developed Famicom game - in 1987 and published at least four more titles in the following two years. Bit Corp also produced hardware, mostly clones of other popular consoles, but they tended to be a cut above the generic copies that their contemporaries were producing. Aside fom the obligatory Atari 2600 and Famicom clones, it released two computers — the Bit-60 and Bit-90 which were on based on Atari 2600 and ColecoVision hardware respectively and maintained compatibility with each console’s cartridges. Bit Corp also exploited the similarity between the ColecoVision and Sega's SG-1000 to create a hybrid console called the Dina 2-in-1, which was sold as the Telegames Personal Arcade in the US."
Taking this history into account, it's clear Bit Corp had a lot of experience with videogame hardware, and was therefore perfectly positioned to capitalize on the new-found public appreciation for portable gaming. Unsurprisingly, given the company’s penchant for plagiarising the work of other firms, the resultant Gamate shared many similanties with Nintendo's groundbreaking handheld. 'While it's difficult to determine exactly what kind of CPU the Gamate has, it appears to be a custom part, and the manual only states that same amount of RAM, same control configuration and very similar graphical and audio capabilites to the Game Boy,” explains Evans. “It even takes inspired by Nintendo's machine, but | don't think it’s an exact Clone, as some have speculated - the screen resolution seems to be slightly different, for example.”
One area where the Gamate was differed from the Game Boy was the way in which its games were delivered, with Bit Corp favouring a card-style format similar to examples previously seen on the NEC PC Engine and Sega Master System. Much like NEC and Sega's cards, they're roughly credit-card sized, only somewhat thicker, and the majority of the card is actually solid plastic that only serves as a place for the label to go." says Evans. "The PBC is only about a third of the entire card’s length, and consists of two small chips on a thin board, covered in epoxy and glued down. I’m not sure why this format was chosen - a more traditional Game Boy-style cartridge would have offered more space for larger ROM chips and extra features like a save battery, allowing the developers to create larger, more complex games - but it certainly stands out in people's minds as a pretty unique feature and it's always nice to be able to store your games in your wallet.”
While Bit Corp clearly wished to emulate the performance of its more illustrious rival, the humble origins of the company resulted in a few comers being cut, the most obvious being the poor-quality screen. This effect would have a dramatic impact on the public perception of the device. “The LCD display on the Gamate has the same probelm as the original Game Boy, only about ten times worse: it suffers from shocking motion blur. "This actually renders some games, such as the vertical shooter Tornado, nearly unplayable, because small, fast-moving objects like bullets become invisible. Some later models of the console feature a slightly improved screen, which goes some way towards alleviating this issue; it isn’t perfect, but at least you can see everything. Bit Corp appear to have been using both the good and bad screens at the same time, so it may well have been a case of them using two different screen suppliers simultaneously for one reason or another, rather than making a conscious effort to fix the problem.”
Given Bit Corp’s diminutive stature and lack of budget, there was never any question of the company marketing the Gamate in territories outside its homeland. However, thanks to the success of the Game Boy and the sudden interest in portable gaming, Bit Corp was able to secure several distribution deals, which got the device into an impressive number of different countries, albeit with relatively low-key results.
“The Gamate appears to have been released in most major videogame markets, possibly excluding Japan,” says Evans. “I know for sure it was sold in the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, North America, Argentina, Uruguay, Taiwan and possibly Mainiand China, although units probably made their way into many more countries via local distributors.” Joystick manufacturer Cheetah took on the UK distribution duties, clearly hoping that Game Boy fever would rub off on this plucky new challenger, and it certainly had a fighting chance: the unit itself launched at a very reasonable £59.95 — £10 less than Nintendo was selling its machine for — and software retailed for around £15. Sadly the critical reaction wasn’t favourable, with EMAP‘s Computer & Video Games magazine highlighting the lack of big-name titles, poor screen and generally dire quality of software as being the main reasons to leave the console on the shelf. The Gamate never got off the ground in the United Kingdom and Cheetah eventually abandoned the format — although that didn’t quite mark the end of the console’s British aspirations. “Interestingly, it seers to have been released in the UK twice,” reveals Evans. “First by Cheetah, then again by Maplin, though it looks like they had similar trouble shifting them. I've seen game boxes with 99p stickers on them — games that now go for £50 or more on eBay.”
Elsewhere in Europe the Gamate found a somewhat warmer reception. “The Italian distributor ot the machine, GiG, was actually quite a major player in the toy business,” explains Evans. “They were the official distributor for the NES in the country, so presumably were able to use their marketing clout
SAM: Coupe
Designed to bridge the gap between 8-bit computers and the 16-bit machines of the future, the SAM Coupe struggled and was swept away on a tide of apathy. Martyn Carroll discovers what went wrong.
To call the Coupé a ‘Super Spectrum’ is tantamount to blasphemy in SAM circles. It’s a lazy phrase, after all, based on the fact that one of the computer's four video modes mimicked the idiosyncratic output of the Sinclair machine, thereby allowing the SAM to run Spectrum software. Using the machine as a Spectrum emulator was a bit like shoving it in first gear and gave no indication of the true power under the hood. The SAM's motor was a 280B processor that ran at almost twice the speed of the Spectrum's Z80A, and it came with a minimum of 256KB memory, with 512KB quickly being standard. Audio was provided by a six-channel stereo sound chip, while the top-end graphics mode had a resolution of 256x192 and could display up to 16 colours from an available palette of 128. Its capabilities were more in line with the Atari ST than the creaky old Speccy, hence the fans’ contempt for the ‘Super Spectrum’ moniker.
Yet the SAM’s association with the Spectrum shouldn't really be sniffed at, as it was crucial in marketing the machine to potential owners. Four-page advertising features that appeared in magazines like Crash and Your Sinclair revealed just why you needed the new machine. “You've been building up your Spectrum software collection for years,” ran the ad. “You want a computer with better sound, better graphics, more power — but you don't want to lose your software. The Coupé is the computer for you.” It was a sound strategy. The SAM launched in 1989 when the Spectrum hardware was seven years old and really beginning to show its age. All Amstrad had done since acquiring Sinclair was bolt a tape player and disk drive onto the existing 128K model in a bid to prolong the machine’s life. It
had worked up to a point, yet some publishers were starting to talk about dropping 8-bit support and focusing on the 16-bit formats instead. Spectrum owners looking to upgrade were naturally drawn to the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST or a PC-compatible, so the idea
of a powerful new computer in the same league as the 16-bits, yet still able to play all the old Speccy games, was pretty damn persuasive. It also guaranteed that plenty of positive SAM editorial appeared in the Sinclair magazines.
However, there's more to the relationship between the two machines than just software compatibility. If you look closely at the SAM you'll see that the Spectrum’s DNA runs right through it. The two men behind it, Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon, both worked for Sinclair Research before founding their own company, Miles Gordon Technology (MGT), in 1986. MGT specialised in designing neat peripherals for the Spectrum, such as the DISCiPLE floppy disk drive, which was presented as the professional alternative to Sinclair's flaky Microdrive storage system. Sales of the DISCiPLE, and its successor the +D, provided MGT with the funding to finance the SAM project.
View-Master: Interactive Vision
The View-Master Interactive Vision was a VHS-based entertainment console designed for young children. The Interactive Vision worked in conjunction with a VCR and offered limited interactivity with a small library of VHS games. The system overlaid simple graphics over a VHS tape as it played, offering either story choices or brief action games, and gave the illusion of different outcomes by switching between one of the two audio tracks encoded on the tape. Ultimately, the Interactive Vision's high price relative to consoles like the NES and its limited replayability led to the system being discontinued within a year.
Atari: Lynx
It's easy to see why Atari thought thought the Lynx was going to steamroll Nintendo's Game Boy. It was: not only ridioulously powerful compared to Nintendo's rival handheld, it also boasted full colour graphics, a selection of truly stunning arcade conversions and all sorts of cool innovations that ranged from a backlit display to rotating the system 90 degrees for vertical games, and even the option to flip the control scheme so you can play it left or right-handed. In short, it was a powerful, funky bit of kit that should have been the most desirable gadget of 1989.
History painted a different picture, however, and we now know that the Lynx lost out spectacularly to the Game Boy, and eventually came in third, behind Sega's Game Gear, which had launched several months later in 1990. Atari might have had sheer grunt on their side, but a lack of varied games, limited battery life and steep price drop simply couldn't save it, even when Atari redesigned it. Atari's console bowed out of the market with about 3 million units sold, but has gone on to become a great console to collect for due to its small library of games that include many impressive arcade conversions.
Finaru: Furantier
Shrouded in a complex langauge and ocean of hentai, Japan's retro computer games have been overlooked by the West. John Szczeoaniak digs deep and explores this final frontier.
There is nothing new in retro games any more. There is nothing left to discover. Well, maybe there are a few things, as Stuart Campbell proved with his Tetris article in issue 64, But thanks to the internet, nearly any game of any age can be downloaded and emulated, almost every piece of information documented... Except perhaps the world of Japanese home computers, arguably the last uncharted frontier for English-speaking retro enthusiasts. During the Eighties and Nineties, while the rest of the world went with Apple, Atari, Commodore and IBM for its computers, Japan isolated itself and adopted non-compatible, domestically produced ranges. This was partly due to difficulties with converting Western computers to handle the Japanese language, and it resulted in an evolutionary bubble with some amazing hardware and games, very few of which left Japan.
Ignoring systems that saw a Western release, such as the MSX (covered in issue 60), conservative estimates put the number of officially released Japanese computer games at well beyond five thousand. If you want to play them, however, you'll have to work at it as they're not easy to find. And those you do find are hidden under incomprehensible text and alongside ‘eroge’ (erotic games, or hentai).
Searching the internet with Romanised titles often turns up nothing, while using the original kanji names will only bring up Japanese websites, which Babelfish renders gibberish. Even downloading complete file archives, which are always missing titles due to a lack of definitive listings, will often present you with folders in kanji and kana (assuming your computer can even display them), making finding a good game a case of trial and error.
But nothing compares to discovering that Holy Grail: hearing music and seeing sights few others have, and clicking in that Saturn USB pad for some of the best gaming of your life.
A forgotten era
We're focusing on three hardware manufacturers in terms of personal computers that saw interesting games: NEC, Sharp and Fujitsu. Each developed their own unigue and non-compatible range of 8-bit micros and then more powerful follow-ups. Like the diversity found with IBM and Macintosh computers, counting the variants is pointless after they top 50 different models.
Along with these three manufacturers was the MSX standard and its seemingly infinite variations, including models by primarily mainframe developers Hitachi and Toshiba, and a strange selection of failures from the early-Eighties: Tomy’s Pyuta range (or Tomy/Grandstand Tutor in the West), Casio's PV2000, and Sord’s M5 computer range (one of which saw a European release). Plus others too poorly documented — even in Japan — to mention.
Japan's 18-year-long computer bubble is difficult to summarise } due to poor documentation, ; excessive hardware variations, and an abundance of doujinsoft (hobbyist games). Videogame publishing in particular between 1979 and 1985 was chaotic, and some argue that all games prior to 1985 were doujinsoft. Many publishing companies in the early days were simply computer shops with guys programming games in the back — often just as a hobby — and then selling them out front. Nihon Falcom started in 1981 selling Apple computers, before shifting focus to developing and publishing games, while Koei started as a single guy, Kou Shibusawa (aka Yoichi Erikawa), mailing out his home-programmed tapes to whoever ordered them. Japan had parallels with England's early computer scene, in that if you could program and had a good idea you could find success. Enix, which always had a good nose for finding them, held a contest enticing hopeful bedroom
coders. So did ASCII.
The mid-Eighties saw the first big shift. Game Arts’ Thexder was released in 1985 and became the benchmark for commercial quality, and the following year brought a big upgrade for the PC98. Subsequent years saw increasingly
VTech: Socrates
The Socrates was an edutainment console from VTech, a company then known for its electronic learning products. While VTech's other educational devices were inexpensive faux computers, the Socrates was more like a gaming console and had a small library of learning games that taught spelling, math, and basic logic. At launch, the system was more expensive than consoles from Nintendo, Sega, and Atari, and it suffered from slowdown that caused long pauses between actions. Sales of the system were below VTech's expectations, but the Socrates lingered on the market for the next few years before being phased out by the mid-1990s.
Sinclair: ZX81
It's been said that the only difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is the way you use them. For Sinclair Research, the short-lived ZX81 served its purpose as a stepping stone to the ZX Spectrum superbly, and provided a solid pathway into the wonderful new world of home computing for a generation of gamers.
It was only on the shelves for two years, but the ZX81 made a significant - if dichotomous - impact between 1981 and 1983, inaugurating a huge number of curious technophiles into the previousty prohibitive world of home computing. Without this ostensibly minor upgrade to the ZX80, the extraordinerity prolific 8-bit revolution that quickly followed might well have known a significantly smaller congregation.
When discussing historical relevance it feels somehow trite to reduce matters to monetary concerns, but in the case of the ZX range of computers, the pnce tag genuinely was a momentous achievement for Sinclair Research. Home computing in the late Seventies and early Eightes presented e monumental financial investment that was entirely supported by a niche customer base. Computers weren't the necessery, easily justifiable home appliance they are today, so anyone wanting to dabble in the new world of amateur code had to dig deep into threadbare pockets to satisfy their curiosity.
While other manufacturers vindicated their product's astronomical costs with impressive, bullet-pointed lists of powerful processing capabilites, Uncie Clive aimed to astonish with a simple, lightweight price tag, and a was this disunctly British philosophy that put the ZX80 - the first machine to crack the £100 price barrier - into so many homes only a year before the ZX81.
All the astute pioneers in the computing and videogaming world during this embryonic phase knew the importance of attordabulity. Silicon was electronic gold, and if computer designers wanted to reduce costs they had to lighten the loads on their PCBs. At precisely the same time as Sinclair Research was pouring its talants into ridding itself of excessive hardware, across the Atlantic Nolan Bushned was offering huge incentives to reduce chip count in new games. It was exactly this minimalist thought that had prompted Steve Wozniak to reinvent Breakout and to create the Apple computer.
Sinclair: ZX80
When people write about the Spectrum, it’s almost mandatory to prefix the machine with the word ‘humble’. As in the humble Speccy, with its limited colour palette, primitive ‘beeper’ sound, a maximum 48KB of memory, and its silly rubber keyboard. But when placed alongside its primitive forebear, the ZX80, the Spectrum looks more like that all-powerful WOPR thing out of WarGames.
In comparison, the ZX80 featured a monochrome display, no sound output, a measly 1KB of memory and an awkward membrane keyboard. To hamstring things further, the processor at the machine's heart was required to do everything, from reading keyboard inputs to updating the screen, and it obviously couldn't multitask, so the display would flick off when a key was pressed or the CPU was busy executing a program, which, to all intents and purposes, ruled out animated games. Only a couple of years separated the release of the ZX80 and the Spectrum, but there’s almost a generation gap between the two machines — a clear sign of the speed at which the personal computer market was moving in the early Eighties. Component costs were tumbling, innovation was rocketing, and computers that were actually useful in an everyday sense were invading homes and businesses. The ZX80 may have been quickly superseded, yet it played a key role in demystifying and popularising the micro, particularly in the UK. It also provided Sinclair with the impetus to expand the ZX line. After all, we wouldn't even be banging on about the Spectrum were it not for the groundwork laid by the ZX80.
The development of the ZX80 can be traced back to 1978. In June that year, Clive Sinclair’s micro-computing arm Science of Cambridge released the MK-14, a kit computer with a calculator keypad and an 8-digit LED display that retailed for £40. Although the assembled kit was of little practical use, it was the perfect, low-cost training aid for students or hobbyists who wanted to learn about microprocessors. It’s difficult to determine just how many kits were sold — reported figures vary from 10,000 to 50,000 — but it was successful enough to show Sinclair that computers were a market that could be tapped, even if it was just to raise funds for other ventures within his business.
In 1979, following Sinclair’s resignation from his Radionics firm, of which the government's National Enterprise Board had taken a controlling interest, he focused his attention on Science of Cambridge and began to plan a successor to the MK-14. Looking to the US, he saw the big three machines — the Apple II, the Tandy TRS-80 and the Commodore PET — and while they were proper desktop computers designed for real-world application, they were also hugely expensive. The retail prices were even more prohibitive in the UK, where import dealers would, in time-honoured tradition, simply swap the dollar sign for a pound sign and effectively double the price. Sinciair’s notion of selling inexpensive consumer products certainly didn’t embrace computers retailing at £1,000, nor even half that amount. In fact, he distanced himself from the Newbrain micro project while still at Radionics because its planned scope meant that he wouldn't be able to sell it cheap enough to attract a wide enough market. So he set about developing the ZX80 as a capable, low-cost computer that he could retail for that magic, consumer-pleasing price of £100.
It was a noble aim, but Sinclair was a businessman and he knew that any product still had to turn a tidy profit.
Sega: Genesis
For all its achievements, the Mega Drive will perhaps be best remembered for being the first console to finally break Nintendo's ironclad grip on the market (even if it was for the briefest of moments. It might have trailed behind the PC Engine in Japan, but things were very different for Sega's console in the West, thanks to strong developer support from the likes of Electronic Arts, a string of killer arcade conversions and a little blue hedgehog by the name of Sonic.
Trip Hawkins
founder of Electronic Arts
Question: Why was the Mega Drive so important to EA’s early success?
Answer: Way back at Apple in 1978, Steve Jobs and I agreed on the need for a 16-bit processor and targeted the Motorola MC68000, which was in some ways the Spiritual successor to the 6502. While the 6502 dommnated through the Eighties, we put the 68000 in the Lisa and Mac. My biggest love affair was with the Amiga, but Commodore mismanaged the business and it did not help that it cost over $1,000. Of course, I also cared about graphics and sound chips and had seen what great
things Rob Hubbard and others had done with the SID chip in the C64. The Amiga was so great that we were able to licence the coin-op code base for Marble Madness
and do a simple translation to port it to the Amiga and have it look and play the same. In 1988 I heard that Sega would be bringing a console to market at a price under $200 that would have a 68000 and good custom graphics and sound chips. I led EA to make a bet on it and we helped it take off. The rest was history. You could say it was an overnight success that took more than a decade.
I'd known for all those years that to make the games I really wanted to make and to play, we would need a 16-bit system with custom graphics and sound chips. For there to be a meaningful market a lot of them would have to be sold, which made pricing critical. The Genesis/Mega Drive was the first machine to have all that. Other choices at the time were either inferior 8-bit systems or too expensive. Also, the Mega Drive was perfect for EA Sports, where it is ideal to play with a friend in the same room and to have enough graphics speed for team sports. It even came with two joysticks!
Dave Perry
cofounder of Shiny Entertainment
Question: Can you recall your first encounter with the Mega Drive?
Answer: Nick Bruty and I were a two-man team making games for ZX Spectrum, Amiga and Atari ST. The main flow of games we created was for Probe Software (run by Fergus McGovern), games like Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, Dan Dare III and Paperboy II etc. Fergus managed to get us a Mega Drive and the licence to the movie The Terminator by James Cameron. Most exciting day ever!
Of course, we accepted the project, but we had no experience on this device. I had no idea how to program it and the manual was mostly Japanese. We also had no tools to make games for it. Back in those days, we felt invincible, so we just started typing!
Question: What was it like to work with compared to home computers?
Answer: Programming on consoles was the best because they were a walled-garden, not constantly changing. Same with the controllers, only a few buttons, and so the environment was as pure as could be. Interestingly, I never personally made a PC game through my entire career. I did learn how to program 8086 assembly language, but never got around to making a PC game.
Question: How important was the Mega Drive to the success of Shiny Entertainment?
Answer: Shiny was funded by Playmates Toys, they made the toys for Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and wanted to invest into games. The Mega Drive was the perfect platform as it allowed us to make games for their target audience. The result was not only getting to make Earthworm Jim on Mega Drive, but we also got a line of toys, a TV show, Marvel comic books, even licensed Halloween masks and underpants!
Question: Why was Sega able to briefly top Nintendo with the Mega Drive?
Answer: Nintendo has always focused on the younger gamers and so when Mortal Kombat had blood and violence they created a red line. While that made sense, all they saw was gamers wanting to sell their ‘Nintendos’ and buy ‘Segas’, let's just say they didn't welcome censorship.
Question: Why do you think the Mega Drive remains so popular with our readers?
Answer: Mega Drive was the source of countless hours of entertainment for people. Wherever I go, people that grew up with it remember our games like Earthworm Jim and Disney's Aladdin and gush about how much they loved Mega Drive gaming as a kid. This was before iPhones,iPads, Netflix, it was the centre of many people's entertainment universe.
The Mega Drive was Sega's first sucessful console. Some argue it was also its last, hailing a bellerophon styled rise and fall. It represents so many things, to so many people, for so many reasons. John Szczepaniak tries to capture some essence of what it all meant.
Nintendo’s fate has often been intertwined with the Mega Drive system. It has long had a history of benefiting from Sega in one form or another, often due to the direct competitive challenge it posed. The SNES would have oo been nothing without the MD; the reverse is also true. It was the Mega Drive that pushed Nintendo's into updating its aged NES hardware, and it was also the Mega Drive that changed the market forever, cutting a trail towards the situation today. It is undeniably one of the most important pieces of hardware in gaming history. So it should have come as no surprise to find that MD games would support Nintendo's soon-to-be-released Wii system. In a moment of irony, it must be noted that Sega had already dabbled in downloadable MD games with The Sega Channel, making its announcement quite apt. The decision was obvious. Later Sega systems would prove difficult, technically, and also the MD was far more successful than the Master System. As will be shown, the MD can be credited for many things — it was a magical high Sega never again reached.
The Japanese debut was October 29, 1988. The widespread American release was less than a year later in 1989, while the United Kingdom had to wait roughly another year before it arrived in November 1990. To fully understand the importance of the Mega Drive’s launch, you need to know what the intemational climate was
like during the decadent Eighties.
Sega had already entered the console fray previously, with the successive releases of its SG-1000 Mark I, II, and III systems in Japan (1981-1985), the 3rd model of which was redesigned as the Master System for Westem countries. To be bluntly honest, despite it being technically superior to the Famicom/NES, it was a commercial failure that never gained more than a 5% market share. Only in Brazil was it able to officially eclipse Nintendo's 8-bit hardware, Throughout the mid-to-late Eighties Japan's console market was controlled almost entirely by the Famicom, Anerica was gripped by the NES, again with near total market dominance. Thr NES was also available in Europe and the UK, through Britannia was more enamoured with 8-bit micros than high-priced consoles.
In 1987 Hudson Soft and NEC jointly released the PC Engine against the Famicom, two years later redesigning it and releasing it in America as the TurboGrafx 16. When Sega decided to position its MD as a third competitor, the odds must have seemed impossibly high. According to David Sheff, Hiroshi Yamauchi dismissed Sega as not being a threat. Yamauchi was more concerned with NEC, which was investing roughly $3.7 billion into R&D, an amount greater than Nintendo's then annual sales. Sega meanwhile was only a $700 million dollar company, and one founded by an American. As an underdog scrapping against NEC for second place, Sega and its MD were underestimated,
Worlds of Wonder: Action Max
The Action Max was a light gun-based quasi console created by the American toy-maker Worlds of Wonder. The system did not run or play games itself, but it instead worked in conjunction with a VCR that played prerecorded VHS movies made of on-rail, light-gun shooting segments. The Action Max only registered whether a shot hit or missed and would display a player's score. This setup was incredibly limited, as onscreen gameplay never varied, no matter how well or poorly the player performed. The Action Max was on the market only briefly before Worlds of Wonder declared bankruptcy, which effectively ended the console and sent it to the clearance shelf.
The red Score Signal receiver attached to the TV screen via suction cup and would flash when a target was hit.
LJN: Video Art
LJN was a toy company and software developer that made products based popular movie, wrestling, and comic franchises in the 1980s and early 1990s. Its first and only foray into videogame hardware was the Video Art, a console for children that focused on digital coloring. Users drew onscreen with the joystick, picking from 1 of 16 different colors. Other cartridges were available that functioned as digital coloring books, with themes ranging from dolls and animals to licensed characters from Disney, Looney Tunes, and Marvel. There was no interactivity other than coloring these pages, making the system very limited in scope.
The PlayStation 5 is sold with either a UHD Blu-ray drive or as a cheaper, all-digital discless version.
Atari: XE
The Atari XE Game System (XEGS) was a repackaged and consolized version of Atari's 6SXE computer, itself an updated model of the 1978 Atari 800. Unlike the Atari 5200 (also based on the Atari 8-bit computer line), the XEGS was directly compatible with many Atari computer games and peripherals. However, few unique games were developed for the system, as most of the XEGS's library was relabeled, older game stock. With stale games, little advertising, and waning interest in 8-bit computers, the XEGS was another misstep for Atari. Official support dried up quickly, and remaining stock was liquidated a year or two after its release.
The Atari XEGS came with the built-in game Missile Command.
NEC: TurboGrafx-16
The TurboGrafx-16 was a rebranded and redesigned PC Engine that NEC released for the American market. At launch, the console faced off against the established NES and the newly released Sega Genesis. NEC's American division was ill suited to handle the stiff competition, and after low initial sales, NEC of Japan drastically cut funding for American operations. The move crippled the TurboGrafx-16, which was forced to endure with barebones support for the rest of its life. With little advertising, few third party titles, and many of its best games stuck unlocalized in Japan, the TurboGrafx 16 would end up a distant third to Sega's and Nintendo's consoles.
Only one controller port meant users had to buy a separate adapter for multiplayer games,
Acorn: Archimedes
Although it never achieved the same level of sales as home-console rivals Atari ST and Amiga, Acorn Computers’ Archimedes still enjoyed an impressive library of exclusive games of which every fan of classic gaming should be aware. Thanks to its powerful CPU and colourful graphics, the Arc gave its owners their own mirror universe of games to enjoy, encompassing every genre.
By the mid-Eighties, British company Acorn Computers was riding the crest of a wave having secured a contract to produce an education-orientated computer, the BBC Micro. However, the ever-evolving nature of technology dictates that nothing ever stays the same for long, and by 1985 the 8-bit BBC Micro, which had put the company so prominently on the map in 1981, was beginning to look hopelessly old-fashioned when compared with such competition as Commodore's 16-bit Amiga. Following the success that it enjoyed in the education sector, and propped up by shareholder PC manufacturer Olivetti, Acorn began ploughing research funds into a successor to the Beeb. The first stage of the project that became the legendary Archimedes was under way.
Dissatisfied with the microprocessor chips that were in available at that time, the engineers at Acorn took the rather courageous decision to boldly design their own using a fashionable new approach called the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC). The RISC
design methodology involves removing instructions that are infrequently used, in order to create a chip that is less complex. The result of Acorn’s efforts, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) — which was later changed to the Advanced RISC Machine — chip, was one of the best performing chips of its generation, and about four times as fast as the 68000 that powered machines such as the Amiga. In fact, the performance of the finished chip surprised even Acorn engineer Sophie Wilson, who reveals that: “What we didn't expect was that a chip designed for 4MHz would run at 6MHz and, with some tweaking to critical paths, 8MHz.”
The next surprise for the designers was that they had difficulty measuring the power usage of the first ARM as it drew so little. The ARM chip became the heart of Acorn’s new machine, and thanks to its efficient design, it went on to become the lasting legacy of Acorn Computers. For example, the ARM is now the most common CPU found in embedded applications such as mobile phones.
And it didn’t stop there, because Acorn also created a set of powerful custom chips to power the graphics, sound and input/output. The graphics architecture lacked some of the Amiga’s more elaborate features — such as a blitter, copper chip and hardware sprites — but it was still capable of matching the Amiga’s sprite-plotting prowess thanks to the far faster processor. The lack of a copper chip was apparent in some conversions of 16-colour games, such as Gods and Twin World, as they lacked the colourful graduated skylines of the Amiga versions.
Another limitation was the fixed palette in 256-colour modes, which gave games a look that favoured primary colours. However, the most common gaming mode of 320x256 pixels with 256 colours still exceeded the baseline capabilities of most of the competition.
After a false start involving a US-based design team, Acorn Computers was left with a serious problem, because the hardware would be finished a long time before a potential operating system. The
Atari: 7800
The Atari 7800, once thought of as the saviour of Atari, was a victim of poor timing. Martin Goldberg reveals how it meant to launch the next generation of 8-bit consoles, but ultimately became an 'also-ran' in the post-crash era.
The company responsible for the 7800's internals, General Consumer Corporation (GCC), had first come to the attention of Atari in June of 1981. Missile Command
had been very popular on campus, until some obsessive students began scoring too well on the game. In typical smart guy hacker fashion, and long before today’s common console mod kits, three MIT students decided to modify the arcade game to make it harder. Feeling a sense of entrepreneurial drive, they came up with the idea of making a standard kit out of it and selling it, giving arcade operators the ability to breathe new life into their ageing Missile Command machines in the form of new gameplay items and difficulty settings. So that June they started advertising, and by July Atari was already launching a lawsuit and, by August, a restraining order.
Most small companies at the time would have folded right there, but not the people at GCC. They were MIT students, after all, and had a strong sense of being smarter than the average guy. Their defence against Atari's suit would be just another interesting puzzle or challenge — things that are entertaining to them. After going several rounds with GCC in federal court, realising that it may be better to tap the talent pool at GCC than squash it, Atari’s parent Warner worked out a deal in 1982 in exchange for dropping the lawsuit: GCC would design games for Atari. Atari was forced to drop its lawsuit but did so with prejudice, becoming a reluctant contractor to a company that it was just actively trying to shut down. The now-classic games Quantum and Food Fight were a result of this deal, as were several games for Atari's 2600 system. During that time, having designed a Pac-Man modification kit called Crazy Otto, GCC was able to leverage the Warner settlement to approach Bally/Midway with a bluff on the possibility of letting it officially release the game. The bluff was that it had won its lawsuit with Atari - and it worked beyond its wildest expectations. Midway was actually interested in seeing Crazy Otto developed into a full sequel to Pac-Man, and so Ms Pac-Man was born.
By the end of 1983, flush with cash from its growing coin-op and consumer videogame design business, GCC took on its most ambitious project yet: designing a home videogame and computing system.
With no experience in chip, console or computer design, but full of bravado from the company’s successes, several GCC employees flew out to California to take a month-long crash course in VLSI (very large scale integration) chip design. The goal was to be able to design the custom chip needed to drive the company’s new project, codenamed Spring. Jokingly named after the MIT ‘Pre-Spring Fling’ dance, it was intended to be a modular computer, IBM-compatible, and have graphics and sound capabilities to rival any upcoming computers or consoles. As former GCC employee Steve Golson put it in a 1994 interview, “Spring was going to be a home computer/game-playing machine to beat them all”.
Shortly before the design and layout process, Atari had come out with its ‘high-end’ gaming system, the Atan 5200. GCC paid attention to how it played out, and in the fashion that had become typical of the company, thought that it could do better. “So we get one of these things, they sent it out to us, and we saw they screwed up. They screwed up in so many ways,” Steve Golson also noted. Besides the controller issue and poor game library, most notably missing from the 5200 was 2600 backwards compatibility. It had been advertised the past June at the Consumer Electronics Show, but now was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile the ColecoVision had come out, and besides enhanced graphics and great arcade ports, it offered full 2600 compatibility via an expansion peripheral. With the ColecoVision beginning to clean up, GCC thought that it had the answer. As Steve Golson put it: “We're the smart guys on the East Coast, and we're just going to save their butts.” And GCC was going to have Atari release it whether it wanted it or not, because Warner superseded all management at Atari.
The pitch was for a 2600-compatible system that included souped-up graphics capability by the addition
The 7800 was Atari's third console and was originally meant for release in 1984 as a hurried successor to the troubled 5200. However, new management at Atari and other issues shelved the completed 7800, and the system wouldn't see a release until mid-1986. When it did launch, Atari was unprepared to compete with Nintendo, and the 7800 struggled to attract new gamers with its small qame library filled with rehashed arcade ports. Ultimately, poor support from a weakened Atari, a lack of third-party titles, and the extreme popularity of the NES pushed the Atari 7800 to a distant second place in North America.
Atari: 1040ST
While Atari already launched the 16-bit 520ST in 1985, the company's introduction of the 1040ST in early 1986 was a watershed moment for the home computer market - for the first time, a complete computeer with one-megabyte of RAN was available for less than $1000. However, for gamers the most attractive inclusion was the floppy disk drive, which carried over to the new Atari 520STF, and then the later inclusion of an RF modulator for TV output in the STFM models.
Thanks to its affordability, always a key part of the business model that Atari owner Jack Tramiel employed, the Atari ST line was particularly popular in the home computer market of the late Eighties - and this was especially true in European countries. While the Amiga’s audiovisual hardware made it preferable for some players, high value software bundles such as the Power Pack and Mega Pack positioned Atari's machine strongly with gamers. However, the rise of the PC market and Atari's decision to focus solely on the Jaguar saw development of the ST line discontinued in 1993. Despite this the machine remains popular with hobbyists, particularly amongst musicians due to it;s utility in the production of MIDI music.
Nintendo: Famicom Disk System
Virtually unknown in the West but revered by hardcore collectors worldwide, The Famicom Disk System is a piece of Nintendo history. Damien McFerran takes a look at the machine on which such esteemed Nintendo franchises as Zelda and Metroid made their first appearances.
Given what we now know about add-on hardware for games consoles, the very concept of the Famicom Disk System seems hopelessly flawed. Since this Japan-only system hit the market in 1986, we've seen the equally ill-fated Sega Mega-CD, Sega 32X and Nintendo 64DD all come and go without making any impression on the market. However, one should never underestimate the benefit of hindsight; back in ‘86 the rules were still being written, and certainly from Nintendo's perspective, the idea of expanding the potential of its bestselling Famicom home console — or NES, as it’s better known in this part of the world — seemed like an eminently sensible move.
To get a better understanding of how the Famicom Disk System came to be, you need only survey the Japanese gaming industry back in the mid-Eighties. It's no exaggeration to say that Nintendo was the dominant force, effortlessly brushing aside rival companies and snapping up third-party support from all of the nation’s finest code shops. By 1985 Nintendo was finding that gamers were so ravenous for new product that it was almost impossible to keep up with the intense demand; given this passionate interest in all things Famicom-related, it’s easy to see why Nintendo started to investigate other avenues of making cash. Expanding the functionality of the millions of Famicoms already sitting in homes up and down Japan was the Most logical course, so it was decided that the existing base unit should be augmented by a separate piece of hardware, permitting bigger and better games. With this objective in mind, Nintendo cast its gaze towards the home computing sector for inspiration.
“Floppy diskettes were quickly becoming the new standard for storage media on personal computers,” explains avid Famicom collector Corbie Dillard. “Nintendo saw this technology as a viable solution for not only storing the games themselves, but also allowing game data to be saved directly to the diskette, so the company went ahead and created a proprietary diskette — dubbed ‘Disk Card’ — based upon Mitsumi's Quick Disk format.” Fellow enthusiast Laurent Kermel who is employed at DreamWorks Pictures as a 3D and CGI artist when he’s not collecting rare Famicom items — explains just how much of a technological advancement these unassuming disks were: “Famicom disks represented a revolution. They offered twice the storage capacity of existing cartridges and were a lot cheaper to produce. Players could also save their game’s progress without relying on cumbersome passwords; it has to be remembered that cartridges with save functionality using inbuilt batteries simply didn't exist at that time.”
The most refreshing element of this increased storage was that it cost the end user less to purchase a Disk System game than a standard Famicom cartridge. “Because Disk Cards were cheaper to produce than cartridges, some of these savings were passed on to the consumer,” says Dillard. “Disk System titles retailed for around ¥2,500-3,000 — quite a bit less than the ¥5,000-7,000 price tag for new cartridge titles at that time.” As well as offering increased capacity for larger games and the ability to record in-game progress, the Disk System promised a more compelling aural experience thanks to an additional audio channel for FM synthesis. “This allowed programmers to add yet another layer of sound to a game and was generally
Sega: Master System
The Master System was Sega's remodeled and enhanced rerelease of the SG-1000 console for the worldwide market. Now with more RAM and an upgraded video processor, the Master System offered better graphics than its main rival, the NES/Famicom. Though it was technically superior and offered a competitive game library with exclusive Sega titles, the Master System couldn't break into the Nintendo-dominated North American and Japanese markets. However, the console took off in Europe and South America (where Nintendo was weak) and outsold the NES to become the generation's console leader in those parts of the world.
Sega: Mark III
The Mark III was Sega’s third iteration of the SG-1000, which featured improved graphics hardware and more RAM as well as a new slot for games on data cards. The console served as the basis for the Master System worldwide, and it was later rebranded as the Master System in its native Japan.
Nintendo Entertainment System
The NES truly announced Nintendo's arrival in the console business.
Inside the 8-Bit Console
When Masayuki Uemura came to the UK in 2016 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the NES, we sent Paul Drury to get the inside story of Nintendo's iconic first cartridge-based console from the man who designed it.
Masayuki Uemura, the NES’ creator, gives his head a little shake and laughs. “I thought the NES taking off was impossible,” he admits. “I think Mr. Asakawa, [first president of Nintendo Of America], never thought it would either. But in the entertainment industry, the unexpected happens. I feel so grateful people still play the NES. I can’t believe I'm here!”
Professor Uemura is sitting opposite us in the conference room of the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham, speaking through his affable interpreter Akinori ‘Aki’ Nakamura. He has been invited by the NVA to give a talk about the creation of the Famicom, renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for its Western release, and seems genuinely surprised with the love that the console still generates three decades after it made it to our shores. The every has been sold out for weeks because though in the UK the NES itself never sold in thie huge numbers it did in America, we all know what came next. Its worldvide success — 62 million units shifted puts it in the top ten of bestselling consoles of all time — led to the SNES, N64 and the Wii and first introduced us to such perennial favourites as The Legend Of Zelda, Final Fantasy and, of course, the all-conquering Super Mario Bros.. The NES truly announced Nintendo's arrival in the console business.
Retro Gamer has been granted a meeting with the man behind Nintendo’s first cartridge-based machine before his talk later in the evening. Uemura and Aki, both dressed in smart suits, bow politely and offer us their business cards. We nod awkwardly and in lieu of a calling card of our own, we present them with some locally brewed ale, which elicits slightly bemused but appreciative smiles. The mood suitably lightened, Uemura explains that just like Ralph Baer, the father of the home
Sinclair Research: ZX Spectrum 128
The ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum followed in quick succession, but Sinclair bumbled and stumbled when it came to extending the ZX line, eventually releasing the Spectrum 128 in 1985 amid fears that the company was facing financial ruin. Martyn Carroll looks back at the computer that nearly never happened.
Back in the mid-Eighties, alliteration-loving journos used the term Super Spectrum to describe every new computer that Sinclair Research was rumoured to be working on. First to receive the honour was the LC-3 (Low Cost Colour Computer), but this was more of a colour ZX81 than anything else. Then there was Pandora, a portable Spectrum with a flat-screen monitor, and Loki, a Z80-based computer that would go toe to toe with the ST and Amiga. There was also a project predating Loki that was being developed with the codename ‘Super Spectrum’. Sadly, none of these computers made the perilous leap from development to production and very few firm details exist.
“Sinclair was a rather secretive place,” says Rupert Goodwins, who worked at the company as a programmer and helped develop the Spectrum 128's system software. “There were always projects on the go or in suspended animation, and ideas from abandoned projects often got revived in some form. Most of this stuff, if it existed at all, only got as far as breadboard prototypes. The decision to develop it properly, which would have meant serious money on integrated circuit design and system software, was never taken.”
Money was not something Sinclair had a great deal of at the time. The QL, Sir Clive’s great obelisk of hope, failed to wow the business machine market when launched in early 1984. It was an expensive failure and one that would have an impact on all future projects. Even so, punters and the press were surprised when, after all the speculation involving secretive new products, Sinclair could only muster up the Spectrum Plus. The Plus was just a standard Spectrum stuffed into a new case with a moving QL-style keyboard replacing the old rubber membrane. The hardware was unchanged, making it more Spectrum 1.1 then 2.0. The upgrade wasn't even launched as such - it just crept on to disgruntled retailers’ shelves in October 1984.
This play-it-safe approach had nothing to do with the QL shambles, however. In fact, the focus shifted back to the Spectrum because the QL failed. “Clive always felt that games computers were a bit beneath the dignity of the company,” reveals Rupert. “The Spectrum was seen as yesterday's computer and he wanted to stride ahead with wafer-scale integration, business machines and AI. There was a lot of snobbery involved. But when the QL misfired, more attention was paid to working out what had been a success and seeing how it could be best developed. Bright, shiny, noisy and cheap suddenly became desirable attributes.”
“But then we hit other problems with Sinclair — a near-inability to get products out, lots of infighting and, in the latter days, all the money going away. I mean, we couldn't even get any memory expansion packs or disk interfaces out of the door — stuff that oneman bands were pushing out of sheds all the way from Penzance to Prestonpans.”
For a while, it looked like a proper Spectrum successor might never happen, but then the solution — to the lack of money problem, at feast — arrived from overseas. The Spectrum was performing really well in Spain, where it was distributed by Madrid-based firm Investronica. Charles Cotton, Sinclair's sales and marketing director, claimed that the machine accounted for more than half of all home computers sold in the territory at the time. While the Spanish market was smaller and less developed than the UK's, the results were good enough to convince Investronica to invest in the development of a new machine. With fresh impetus and much-needed funds in place, Sinclair and Investronica worked to develop an upgrade that exploited the Spectrum's popularity as a gaming machine.
“The market wanted more memory and better sound in order to help produce more engaging games,” says Rupert. “And that was done in the most mechanical way possible... take a standard sound chip, gate in some more RAM, futz around with the system software and get it out as soon as possible.” The result of all this futzing around was the Spectrum 128.
The 128 may have been a quick and dirty upgrade but it did address most of the Spectrum's shortcomings. Perhaps the biggest criticism levelled at the original machine was its weedy sound capabilities. Rather than a dedicated sound chip, the Spectrum featured a small CPU-contolled speaker capable of playing a single note at a time. It was known as the ‘beeper’ because that’s effectively what it did. For the 128, Sinclair replaced the beeper with the three-channel AY-3-8912 chip. Unlike the beeper, sound could be channelled through a TV without additional hardware, so you could finally pump up the volume, and sound output no longer impacted on the CPU, allowing for proper in-game music.
Next on the additions list was more memory. When the Spectrum launched in 1982, 48K was seen as a generous amount, but as we now know, you can never ever have enough RAM. When it came to the amount of extra memory, 128K was a given really as Commodore, Amstrad and Atari had already released 128K versions of their 8-bit machines.
The third main addition was 128 BASIC. The updated version introduced a number of new commands (to control the AY chip, for example), but the most obvious change was the overdue retirement of the one-touch keyword entry system. This idiosyncratic input method, where whole commands were entered by pressing one or more keys, was ditched in favour of a standard entry system where you typed out each command in full. An improved full-screen edit function was also added, enabling users to easily amend BASIC listings using the cursor keys.
Updating BASIC proved to be a rather big headache for all those involved. It was absolutely vital that the Spectrum 128 would run the huge library of existing Spectrum software, so the team had to ensure that it was fully compatible with the 48K ROM. They eventually did this by including the complete 48K ROM and allowing the user to switch from 128 to 48 mode on start-up, thereby circumventing the new 128 features that might cause compatibility problems with older software. This workable solution was complicated by the fact that the original BASIC source was broken. “The biggest shock I had when I started work was that the Spectrum source code within Sinclair was in an unusable state,”
Amstrad: CPC 6128
When the Amstrad CPC 6128 was introduced in 1985, some gamers dismissed it as a serious computer. But while it certainly looked the business, behind the straight-laced exterior was a machine with lots of added fun, as David Crookes explains.
Sitting atop a chunky slab of plastic, the CPC 664's white and blue keys and the clumsylooking addition of a disk drive exuded such ugliness that you couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor sods who bought it. It was a step up from Amstrad’s iconic cassette-based 464 in the sense that it added a three-inch drive of the like seen in the Oric Atmos, some extra BASIC commands and both the AMSDOS and CP/M 2.2 operating systems. But while it sold around 10,000 units, within five months it was replaced by the 6128 - a machine which not only doubled the memory of its predessor but looked far sleeker, too.
And so it was that the CPC 6128 came into being. It was launched in America in 1985 and it came to Europe shortly afterwards, making its UK debut at a glitzy press conference in London with BBC newsreader Richard Whitmore overseeing proceedings. Boasting the same three-inch drive, the only real features to distinguish the 6128 from the 664 were the 128K of RAM and a better, plain white, springier keyboard. The extra memory was an important addition, however, as it was used as a RAM disk or to store data such as gaming levels. In some cases, the 128K versions of CPC games would carry sound not heard in their 64K counterparts and all of this allowed developers to give their titles a little boost from time to time.
Before its unveiling, Mr Whitmore led the assembled journalists and dealers through a potted history of Amstrad. But it was Sir Alan Sugar himself who whipped the covers off the 6128 to show his new machine in all its glory. In doing so, he declared the 664 “well and truly dead” and he said the new arrival was due to “a leap in technology”. He later stated that the 6128 was aimed at a more serious buyer, although the decision to make the machine compatible with 464 and 664 software created an instant back catalogue of games for the new machine.
"There was a simple reason for launching the CPC 6128,” says Cliff Lawson, who worked on the product launch of both the 6128 and 664. “It could be produced for the same money as the 664 so Amstrad decided it would be wise to go for the better product. It offered the punter more and it was, dare I say, much prettier, too.”
The 6128 was one of two computers to be unveiled by Amstrad at the same time. The other was the PCW8256, pitched mainly at businesses. That machine came with a monochrome monitor, 256K of memory, a built-in disk drive, a printer and word-processing software, but it wasn’t compatible with the CPC and there was no intention of opening its appeal to gamers. The PCW retailed at £460 and, as the trurnpets blared for the 6128, the 464 was cut in price, bringing its cost down to £199 for the green-screen version and £299 for colour. In some sense, it meant that the 6128 was a halfway house — part business, part pleasure — bridging the gap between the PCW and the 464.
One of the first games to take advantage of the added capacity that the extra 64K of the 6128 offered was Sorcery+. Released in 1985, players of this disk-based joystick-only game saw many enhancements over the original Sorcery, including an extra 35 screens. Amstrad loved the lush look so much that it used screens of the game in its promotional literature and yet such enhancements didn't become the norm.
Although it was possible for both 464 and 664 owners to buy a 64K memory pack, which could be inserted into an expansion slot at the back of both computers (Datel Electronics would advertise Dk'tronics’ 64K memory on a monthly basis), sales were not sufficiently high enough for all developers to put in the extra effort of creating additional enhancements. The gaming benefits of purchasing extra memory were not heavily pushed either, so whether or not a game carried the extra power depended on the whim of the developer or, in some cases, the near impossibility of making a game as impressive in 64K as it would be using double that memory.
Commodore: Amiga 500
Founded in 1982 and still going today, in one way or another, Amiga created some of the best-loved Computers of the Eighties and Nineties, despite the blunders of its most famous parent company, Commodore. The complete story of Amiga could fill several books, but here Ashley Day tries, as best he can, to fit the whole 31-year saga into just eight pages... Depending on who you ask, the death of the Amiga can be attributed to one of several years. Some strictly assert that the popular home computer came to an end with the abrupt closure of its parent company, Commodore, in 1994. Some cite the closure of the last commercial Amiga magazine, Amiga Format, in 2000 as the truest sign of the computer's demise. A select group of faithful fans, meanwhile, simply cannot let go and would remind you that the Amiga brand itself is very much alive and well and that a new line of hardware will emerge when the time is right. indeed, it’s almost impossible to definitively say where the story of the Amiga ends, but we can definitely point to where it began. it was the summer of 1982 and, as with many great business ventures, the genesis of the Amiga was about to start with a phone call. On the dialling end was Larry Kaplan, ex-Atari Programmer and founding member of Activision. Picking up at his end was Jay Miner, the design guru behind the Atari 400 and 2600 VCS. Both men had achieved great things in the games industry, but both felt as though their abilities had been held back by a lack of vision from their respective managers. Miner, an ambitious hardware designer, had been eager to create something using the new Motorola 68000 processor in 1980, but Atari was much more keen on working with cheaper, less powerful chips, like the 6502. And so he left to work in the medical industry. Kaplan, likewise, had been a game creator at Atari but was dispirited from receiving neither credit nor royalties. In 1979 he had left to form Activision but was unhappy that he was still essentially a programmer of Atari 2600 games, and therefore still lining the pockets of his former employer, albeit indirectly. Kaplan had been approached by a consortium of investors a Texas oil baron and three dentists — looking to plant $7 million into a new videogame company, and proposed to Miner that the two work together in the production of a new games console, He had seen the NES at CES of June 82 and believed that he could create something much better. His plan was to produce exclusive games for the system, while Miner would design the hardware. Miner agreed and the new company, then named Hi-Toro, was soon established in Santa Clara, California, along with former Tonka Toys marketing man, David Morse, who came on board as general manager. Things were off to a good start but, before the year was out, Hi-Toro was hit by one...
Atari: ST
The short life of the Atari 520ST
It was the machine that single-handedly revived the fortunes of an industry veteran. Damien McFerran speaks to the man responsible for masterminding the greatest comeback since Lazarus.
Following the videogame crash of the early-Eighties, Atari was in horrifying shape. The company’s failure to successfully build on
the triumph of its popular 2600 console — a machine languishing in obsolescence by this point - coupled with a generally poor quality of software available had triggered a catastrophic meltdown hat very nearly destroyed the entire videogame industry. After the dust had settled, Atari's parent corporation Time Warner had incurred a cataclysmic $500 million loss and was predictably keen to offload its flagging games division. What occurred next has gone down in videogame folklore as one of he most startling turnarounds in the history of the medium.
Trading Places
Ironically, the man behind the product that would resurrect the ailing Atari brand had previously been instrumental in sullying the fortunes of the company, Shiraz Shiyji worked at rival Commodore during the early Eighties and helped build the C64 — the home computer that stole away vital market share from Atari's 400 and 800 range, as we as its 2600 console. “I became interested in electronics from my early childhood in Tanzania and my education in the UK,” says Shiraz when asked about how he became entangled in the fabric of Atari's history. “I attended the University of Southampton and obtained a first-class honours degree and then moved to Stanford University in the US to pursue a PhD in electronics. I was granted a masters and passed the qualifying exam but left before obtaining my degree as | was running out of funds. I started working in Silicon Valley and obtained experience in hardware and software.” By 1984 Shariz had risen to the role of director of engineering at Commodore and it was at this point that fate intervened.
Although Commodore was undoubtedly causing Atari some serious headaches, things weren't exactly harmonious in the bedroom. "Jack Tramie was president and CEO of Commodore and Irving Gould was the chairman,” explains Shiraz. “Irving was the largest shareholder and Jack was the second largest. In January 1984 there was a showdown between the two of them over the role of Jack's sons at Commodore.” Polish-born Tramiel had founded the company in the Fifties after enduring a particularly difficult early life — he was interned in Auschwitz concentration camp for five years during World War II — so his insistence on keep it in the family’ is understandable. However, Irving refused to budge and tnis forced Tramiel’s hand. He called a board meeting and tendered his resignation. "I was tremendously disappointed and shocked at this decision,” remembers Shiraz.
However, it wasn't long before the two men were reunited. "I soon met with Jack and discussed the possibility og joining him if he was to start a personal computer company," recalls Shiraz. “There were a number of senior execs at Commodore with experience in
finance, manufacturing, design, engineering, marketing and sales that felt the same way, so I told Jack he could count on a core team to start a company. At this time Warner Communications was thinking of selling or disposing of Atari as it was losing a lot of money. Jack made an offer for the company by injecting $30 million - $25m from himself and $5m from associates, such as myself. Eventually the deal was struck and that is how I came to be the vice president of advanced development at Atari.”
Rising to the Challenge
Having switched sides in dramatic fashion, Tramiel had a new company to command in the shape of Atari Incorporated. He now needed
a product that would get the firm back on its feet. Thankfully Shiraz and his team already had ideas forming. “The core team of engineers and developers were thinking of the next personal computer,” Shiraz says. “The work on the ST didn't really start until Atari
was actually purchased, but the main ideas of using a 32-bit processor as well as support for music and graphics were already important for us.”
Shiraz duly started work on the new project codenamed ‘Rock Bottom Price’, or ‘RBP’ for short — an indication of Tramiel’s desire to produce a cheap yet powerful home computer. “We moved everyone into the Atari facilities on Borregas Avenue in Sunnyvale in July 1984,” says Shiraz, who had to dig into his own pockets to ensure development went smoothly. ”I paid for airline tickets and hotel bills for my hardware team using my own personal credit cards and was not paid until much later. I think the real development began in August; we didn't usually get home until 11pm some nights, and sometimes it was well after midnight.”
This punishing schedule was made even more demanding because Shiraz knew exactly what would happen if he failed to
deliver the goods on time. “If we did not come through we would have had to close shop,” he states, matter-of-factly. “You can imagine I really felt the very heavy burden of responsibility. We had no choice but to deliver a product that was superior in terms of performance and price." Amazingly, this intense pressure seemed to bring out the best in the team. “I felt very confident and comfortable that I and the team were up to the task,” states Shiraz. “After all, I had a core hardware team of four engineers from Commodore that had worked for me in the past so I knew what they could do. We integrated with people from Atari and had a very small but efficient team that worked very hard to get the hardware done in record time. Somehow, although there was much pressure on us, I did not have any sleepless nights. This is because of the trust I had in the team.'
The engineers at Atari originally envisaged the machine as a
RDI: Halcyon
The RDI Halcyon was an unreleased game console that was the brainchild of Rick Dyer, a zealous inventor and game maker. Dyer wanted to create a lushly animated and epic fantasy game called Shadoan, but first he created a smaller-scale spin-off. That game, Dragon's Lair, was a hugely successful LaserDisc-based arcade game.
That gave Dyer the capital he needed to create his own LaserDisc system that would realize his full-length Shadoan game. The console was incredibly ambitious and expensive to make, and only a few systems were manufactured before bankruptcy shut down Dyer's company just prior to the console's release.
Sega: (SG-1000) Mark II
After the SG-1000’s lukewarm reception, tweaks, such as a front-facing expansion Sega quickly redeveloped the console and port and fully detachable controllers. They released the Mark II just a year later. The Mark I! also copied some of the Famicom's updated system was the same internal design, replacing the joystick with joypads but featured a new aesthetic and a few that could be stored on the console's sides.
In 1984, Sega also released a keyboard add-on for the SG-1000, which allowed for BASIC programming and limited computer functionality.
Mattel: Aquarius
The Mattel Aquarius was an 8-bit computersold by Mattel that was developed and produced by the Hong Kong electronics company Radofin, the manufacturer of Mattel's Intellivision. Upon the Aquarius' release in 1983, the computer was derided by reviewers for its lack of features, low specs, and extremely limited graphics capabilities.
The Aquarius was a massive flop for Mattel, who gave up on the new computer after just a few months. Mattel paid Radofin out of their manufacturing contract and completely cut ties with the system themselves.
Amstrad: CPC 464
GREEN-SCREEN MONITOR
Arriving late to a hardware generation is never a smart move unless you've got a pretty impressive trick Up your sleeve, but With the CPC464, Amstrad did just that. While the machine's development was, by all accounts, a somewhat bumpy road. Launching with an all-in-one package made up for its late arrival to market - a built-in tape deck and bundled monitor (in both affordable green-screen and luxury colour variants) offered a level of value and convenience that its peers couldn't match, and Amstrad's debut gained traction staggeringly fast as a result. Sticking to European territories proved a smart move, too. More powerful hardware meant the CPC had a clear edge over Spectrum machines in terms of visuals (although this wasn't always utilised), while its focused marketing managed to offer a foothold against Commodore's somewhat diluted global advances. While it was billed as an all purpose computer, the CPC was clearly a games machine first and foremost, especially in the case of the 464.
And while it couldn't offer all that much in the way of true exclusives, the early Amsoft range was, aside from a couple of titles, little to write home about - it did have a huge number of games available at launch and the quicker processor allowed for some superb arcade ports that often put their peers to shame. And while later Amstrad machines may have seen the company fail to repeat its original success, that will not change the fact that it managed to prove that being late to the party wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
Palmtex: Super Micro
The Super Micro was a handheld gaming console from Palmtex, a California-based game distributor that had early success with importing Nintendo Game & Watch systems in 1982. Soon after, Palmtex began work on its own handheld. Development of the system started as the 1983 crash was underway, which caused a dire financial situation for Palmtex as video game sales declined. Short of investor interest and funds, the Super Micro limped out the gate with little advertising to a depressed market. With only a few thousand units sold, the Super Micro is a rare console for modern collectors, though be aware most units now suffer from hardware failure.
Epoch: Super Cassette Vision
The Super Cassette Vision was the follow-up to the Cassette Vision, a successful 1981 console by Epoch that had been quickly eclipsed by a new wave of third-generation systems in Japan. The new 'super" console was updated with a microprocessor-based design that brought it to parity with systems. However, despite exclusive games based on popular anime series such as Doraemon and Lupin the 3rd, the Super Cassette Vision fizzled out in the crowded Japanese market. By 1987, Epoch had quit the home console industry to focus on producing games for other systems.
Epoch: Game Pocket Computer
The Game Pocket Computer was the first true handheld console and was released by Epoch exclusively in Japan in 1984. Unlike the Microvision or Super Micro systems that placed their processors in their game cartridges, the Game Pocket Computer had a built-in microprocessor and ran game code from interchangeable ROM carts. The system featured a black-and-white, 75-by-64-pixel LCD screen, which provided more fidelity and more dynamic games than previous handhelds. However, Epoch's Game Pocket Computer failed to catch on with Japanese gamers, and the handheld was discontinued after releasing only five games.
Casio: PV-1000
The PV-1000 was the first home console from Casio, a Japanese electronics company known for producing calculators, watches, and dedicated LCD handheld games. Released exclusively in Japan, the PV-1000 was another console based on a clone of the Zilog Z80 processor (the SG-1000 and Super Cassette Vision were also Z80-based) but actually had worse performance Compared to other systems. The graphics and sound quality of the PV-10O0 were more akin tO a second-generation console, with few colors and harsh, grating music. The PV-1000 sold poorly, and Casio discontinued the system mere months after its release.
Sharp: Twin Famicom
Sharp, the Japanese electronics company, had worked with Nintendo since the 1960s as a components supplier. That relationship expanded into hardware licensee in the 1980s, when Sharp produced a few unique model variants of the Famicom. One was a Sharp television with a Famicom built in, while the Twin Famicom line combined the Famicom Disk System and console into a single unit.
The Twin Famicom line was released in both red and black case colors.
Nintendo: Famicom
The Famicom, short for "Family Computer," was Nintendo's first game console and released exclusively in Japan. Despite heavy competition from other new 8-bit consoles and computers, the Famicom stood out with a strong lineup of first-party games and an innovative controller. By 1985, the console had completely dominated the market, and third-party developers willing to sign restrictive exclusivity agreements just to get their gamnes on the system. With runaway success in Japan and a library of exclusive hit titles such as Super Mario Bros., Nintendo geared up to release the system worldwide, which would kickstart a new era of console gaming.
The Famicom's hardwired controllers had a cable length of only 30 inches.
Sinclair Research: Sinclair QL
You're probably wondering why the Sinclair Quantum Leap deserves coverage in Retro Games. It was, after all, a business machine with bugger all games, right? Well that's where you'd be mistaken. Join Martyn Carroll as he celebrates the QL's 25th anniversary year by lifting the lid on its best kept secret.
When looking back at the QL, it’s easy to get bogged down in the reasons why it was a commercial failure, so let’s start by getting that out of the way. The QL wasn't a disaster of C5 proportions, but it barely made a dent in the business machine market when released in 1984. On paper, the QL looked like the perfect package. It was powered by a Motorola 68008 processor, came with 128KB of RAM, housed two internal microdrive storage devices, featured its own multitasking operating system (QDOS) and structured BASIC language (SuperBASIC), and came bundled with a complete office suite. The best bit? All this was yours for £399, at a time when a similar specced IBM PC would have set you back upwards of £2,000.
In order to undercut its rivals so severely and stil turn a profit, Sinclair was forced to make crucial compromises to the machine's design. David Karlin was the QL's chief design engineer and he believes that economics compromised the project: “The price point prevented the inclusion of peripherals of an appropriate quality, an essential — and ultimately fatal — omission for the business market.” Rather than the core 68000 processor, Sinclair opted for the cheaper 68008 version, which had a smaller address and data bus, limiting the performance of the chip. The biggest cutback, though, was the inclusion of Sinclair's famously unreliable microdrives rather than a standard floppy disk system. “Overwhelmingly, the QL failed because of the microdrives,” comments David. "I still think it’s highly probable, and thought so at the time, that the QL would have made a much bigger mark had it dropped the mictodtives and been bundled with a decent monitor, a floppy disk drive and a printer at, say, £799 instead of £399."
To compound matters, the QL was treated to a trademark Sinclair launch — everything went wrong. Punters waited months for their machines, and when the first models finally arrived they were plagued by software bugs and reliability issues. All of this was diligently reported by the computing press and Sinclair's once strong market image took a battering. Sir Clive predicted that 200,000 QLs would be sold in 1985 alone, yet by the middle of the year, the total sales figure stretching back to its launch in early 1984 stood at just 60,000. Sinclair took drastic action and in September 1985 the price of the QL was slashed in half in a bid to capitalise
on pre-Christmas sales. At £199, it moved within easier reach of the hobbyist market and positioned itself as an upgrade option for Spectrum owners. And with that the demand for QL games grew.
Sinclair seemed to have a love/hate relationship with games. On one hand, the success of the Spectrum was fuelled by the abundance of low-cost gaming software available, while on the other, insider rumblings suggested that gaming was seen to be beneath the dignity of the company. David disagrees with reports that gaming was a dirty word within Sinclair: “There were lots of people in the company who understood the gaming market very well and put plenty of work into ensuring that the Spectrum thrived in it, and the QL did its best. If anything, I swam against the tide within the company by focusing the QL resolutely on business.” David's initial intention was to develop a pure business machine designed to be hooked up to a monitor, but his hand was forced as the project progressed. “Partway through development, i was told firmly not to alienate it so far from the Spectrum’s market, at which point things like the TV interface and joystick ports were added. Retaining a tape port a la the Spectrum was discussed but discarded — the microdrives were supposed to be good enough.”
Even with the compromised configuration, the QL wasn't built with gaming in mind, yet it had enough raw power under the hood to be a competent pixel pusher. The 68008 processor was clocked at 7.5MHz, and, despite being hamstrung by narrow buses, it could still carry out complex calculations across the full 32-bit instruction set. There were two generous video modes - 512x256 with four colours and 256x256 with eight colours — and unlike the Spectrum's rudimentary display, each pixel could be assigned its own colour value, which meant no ugly attribute clash. On the downside, the hi-res display occupied 32KB in memory. which was a meaty chunk of screen RAM to funnel around the QL's contended innards.
Oric Products international: ORiC-1
The ORIC-1 has suffered from years of bad cruticism, usually from owners of supposedky superior machines, those who mock have probably never used an ORIC, let alone owned one. In an effort to set the record straight, Martin Carroll traces the fascinating history of the much-maligned computer.
The ORIC-1 lived in the shadow of the Sinclair Spectrum. By the time Oric Products International launched the machine at a party in January 1983, the Spectrum had been available for six months with Sinclair unable to meet the huge demand, despite manufacturing 20,000 machines a month. The Spectrum was built on the success of the ZX81, and Sir Clive seemed certain to retain his grip on the UK home micro market, particularly the fiercely competitive sub-£200 sector.
But the men behind the Oric-1 were not new to the market, Dr Paul Johnson and Barry Muncaster formed Tangerine Computer Systems in October 1979 and had some success with the Microtan 65, a kit computer powered by the 6502 processor. It was popular enough to spawn two successors — the Tiger and the Microtan 2. The Tiger was designed as a business machine to rival the Sirus and Osbome systems, and was to feature three different processors. The Microtan 2 was to be a low-cost, self-contained computer aimed at the low-end consumer market. The Tiger never progressed beyond the design stages, but the Microtan 2 evolved over time into the Oric-1, a computer to square up to the Spectrum.
Tangerine Dream
With financial backing secured (thanks to British Car Auctions), the design of the Oric-1 began in Apri 1982, Tangerine became Oric Products Intemational, with Technical Director Dr Paul Johnson adopting the role of chief designer. He was assisted by Andy Brown and Chris Shaw, who were responsible for the ROM, Paul Halford who wrote the cassette routines, and Ian Redhead who helped with the hardware. Paul Kaufman, who ran Tansoft (the company’s software arm) and also edited the Tansoft Gazette, wrote the sound handling routines.
Oric gave itself a head start by opting to use the 6502 as the machine's beating heart. It already had in-house experience of the CPU, having used it in the Microtan 65, and it also meant that existing Microtan software could be ported over. For the system specs, Oric looked at the Spectrum and identified its limitations. There was the 'zombie flesh’ keyboard for a start. Instead of 40 rubber keys, the Oric-1 featured 57 plastic keys that moved individually. It couldn't be classed as a proper keyboard, but it was hardwearing and friendly on the fingers. And then there was the Spectrum's non-standard one-touch
French connection
The Oric brand was surponsingly strong in France, with the Oric-1 and Atmos dominating the country’s computer market. Around 50,000 Oric-1s were sold over there in 1983, and it was voted Best Home Computer in October of that year. Some truly excellent software was released by French publisher Loriciels, and the leading magazine Théoric stood head and shoulders above the UK offerings. So it was no great shock that following the collapse of Oric in the UK, the pieces were picked up by a French company. The new owners continued to sell the remaining Atmos stock, but their focus was the Oric Telestrat, an advanced computer aimed at the French market (it was designed to be used with the Minitel online network that existed in France). The Telestrat went on sale in September 1986 and hardly made an impression (the £400 price tag can’t have helped). In total only 6,000 were sold, making it the rarest of the Oric computers. It you want a Telestrat
then be prepared to dig deep - one recently sold on eBay UK for an impressive £250.
Acorn: Electron
After the roaring success of the BBC Microcomputer, Acorn was a company going places. It had conquered the schools market almost unchallenged, and with a cheaper, cutdown sibling to the Beeb designed for home use on the way, it was massively confident that it could dominate the marketplace. Four months ahead of the Electron’s launch, joint managing director of the company Chris Curry was in bullish mood. “We are not placing any limits on the size we can grow to,” hhe told The Times. “We see the Electron as a very powerful threat to the existing dominance by Sinclair and the Commodore VIC-20. We hope to get half the home computer market.”
“It was absolutely manic — an insane time really,” recalls Tom Hohenberg, Acorn’s former marketing manager. “There were exhibitions going on all the time, and there'd be 50,000 to 60,000 people besieging the stands. The BBC Micro was selling like hot cakes - we couldn't make them quickly enough — so there were huge hopes for the Electron. Half the size, half the price, and the same sort of power. We were buzzing.”
Lessons had clearty been learnt from the supply problems that had beset the BBC. Thankfully, due to the machine's tie-in with the broadcaster, the Beeb stll went on to become very successful. Six months ahead of the Electron’s launch, Curry told The Guardian that the new model would not even be advertised, let alone sold, until they were “completely confident that stocks are available”. “More than almost anybody else we have suffered in the past from problems of lack of product when the demand is high,” he said. “We are not going to let it happen again.”
Launch day arrived on 23 August 1983, and anticipation was massive. The first review of the new machine was in, and so glowing that Acorn quoted it extensively on the full-page advertising it took out in the newspapers. “Compared to other micros in its price range, the likes of the Spectrum, Oric and VIC-20, the Electron wins on all counts,” What Micro? magazine said. “It has better graphics, a better keyboard, and faster and more versatile BASIC. Acorn had better be ready for a rush, there's going to be one.” If only Acorn had paid closer attention to that last line.
Acorn’s strategy was to show parents that the Electron was a way of bringing their learning at school on the BBC into the home, and a £300,000 TV ad was commissioned to make the point. “It took three days to shoot, and was quite an epic production,” says Hohenberg. “There were lots of kids and several sets. We
Sega: SG-1000
The SG-1000 was the first console from Sega, a Japanese amusement company known for its video arcade games. Released primarily in Japan, the SG-1000 started new console generation that offered more complex video games with larger, more colorful, and more detailed sprite graphics.
Sega's system faced heavy competition from Japan's burgeoning console market, and it was ultimately overshadowed by Nintendo's new system, the Famicom. Though the SG-1000 wasn't a complete failure, Sega continually modified and updated the system to remain competitive, eventually rereleasing it as the revamped Master System for its Worldwide debut.
Sega's system faced heavy competition from Japan's burgeoning console market, and it was ultimately overshadowed by Nintendo's new system, the Famicom. Though the SG-1000 wasn't a complete failure, Sega continually modified and updated the system to remain competitive, eventually rereleasing it as the revamped Master System for its Worldwide debut.
ASCii Corporation: MSX
The Japanese MSX Computer started life as the world's first standardised computing hardware but ended up being nothing more than a historical footnote. It did have some bloody good games, though, As Ashley Day remembers...
One of the greatest things about the 8-bit micro age was the sheer variety of machines and games available. The boom in popularity of home computing led almost every electronics firm of the day to manufacture their own games machines, and the UK was flooded with all manner of wonderful hardware and games to play on them.
It was a great time to be a games fan but also one of the most turbulent. There were the playground arguments about whose machine was best, of course, but there was also a huge problem for parents who, faced with so many choices, often didn't know which computer to buy. Game developers had the same problem: with new machines hitting the market every month, how could they know which would become successful and, therefore, which they should develop their games for? And those kids in the playground, they could only share and trade games if they happened to be using the same hardware as their friends.
Surely, the solution to these issues would be one universal hardware format that could eliminate the concerns of consumers and developers and ensure that no matter what game you bought, it would work on your own machine. It was a good idea in principle; after all it had worked for the home video industry, as competing tape manufacturers gradually gave up on their own formats in the Eighties and came to support JVC's VHS standard.
One man with the vision to realise the dream of a unified gaming platform was Kazuhiko Nishi, a prominent figure in the Japanese games industry from its very inception. In 1977 he founded a publishing company called ASCII Corporation, which specialised in games magazines and launched the country’s first micro-computer periodical, named ASCII, in the same year. In 1979, he joined Microsoft and became the vice president in charge of the Far East and, later, the director and vice president in charge of new technologies, all while maintaining a controlling interest in the ASCII Corporation. And it’s during this time that he proposed the MSX standard.
On June 27, 1983, the MSX was officially unveiled to the world as a collaboration between ASCII and Microsoft. The forrner would control and license the hardware specification, while the latter would program the format’s operating system and BASIC language. Impressively, the MSX group had already attracted a huge number of Japanese manufacturers to the cause, and big names like Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic and Yamaha, among many others, announced that they would release their own MSX machines in Japan.
The plan was simple yet brilliant. Every licensed manufacturer would be allowed to create any kind of computer they wished and badge it with the MSX logo as long as it incorporated a strict number of features. These were a Zilog Z80 processor, running at 3.58MHz; a minimum of 8kb RAM: a Texas Instruments TMS9918 Video Display Processor; a General Instruments AY-3-8910 sound chip; and a 32kb ROM containing the MSX BIOS and Microsoft's MSX BASIC. Compatibility between machines was achieved by making sure all models also featured the same keyboard, cartridge slot, and expansion ports, but manufacturers could also add their own USPs like additional cartridge slots, tape drives, extra RAM, and so on. Many of these extra features were dictated by the way each company decided to position their own MSX model within the market. Some, like the Toshiba HX10, were sold simply as game machines and were produced to the lowest possible specification to remain affordable and were usually packaged with a pair of joysticks. Yamaha, meanwhile, marketed its MSX models as companions to the company’s
Atari: 800XL
Broadly considered the finest all-rounder in Atari's 8-bit home computer range, the XL was also the biggest seller in global terms. But despite top-calibre software support from the likes of LucasFilm, EA and Epyx, it never penetrated the computing market to the extent of its nearest rival, the C64. Mike Bevan takes a well-earned look at the history of Atari's underachieving 8-bit wonder.
In the fifth issue of fondly remembered C64 magazine Zzap!64, which hit newsstands in September 1985, Archer Maclean penned a tips guide for his classic shoot-’em-up Dropzone, which contained the oft-quoted (and misquoted) following comment. “The Atari, being the Porsche of home computers is capable of running Dropzone 2.5 times faster than the 64 and can handle any amount of blobs on screen. However, the 64 is still a respectable BMW 316 (S reg).” It was an unusual statement to find in a Commodore-oriented publication, and while Retro Gamer prefers to remain neutral in any debate regarding the technical superiority of either of the two competing machines, Archer may well have had a point.
Compared to the more popular home computers of the day, such as the Z Spectrum and C64, Atari's computers were often regarded as high-end, and came equipped with an equally high-end price tag. In 1984, the newly released Atari 8OOXL, the computer designed to compete with the C64, was priced at around £250, considerably cheaper than its older sibling, the Atari 800, had been on launch in the US, but far more expensive than the Spectrum (£130) or C64 (£199). A higher price point than the more popular machines, and an over-reliance on the expensive cartridge format plagued Atari computer software. However, many classic games that originated on the Atari 8-bit computers, were faster and more refined than the now often better-known conversions on other contemporary platforms. But by the mid-Eighties, Atari had found to its cost that high-quality software, flashy technical specifications and above average build-quality simply wasn't enough to win in the fight for the hearts and minds of hobbyists and computer dealers whose main concern was competitive pricing.
In hindsight, Atari's relative failure with its 8-bit home computer range, at least in terms of longevity compared to its rivals, seems harsh when you consider that they were very much ahead of their time in conception. Work began on the company's first two home computer systems, the Atari 400 and 800, after the release of the 2600 console in 1977. “We knew we needed to leapfrog the 2600 before somebody else did,” says Atari designer Joe Decurr. “We saw the Apple II, Commodore and Radio Shack machines coming, and we wanted to design a machine that would support home computer characters and bitmap graphics.” Another member of the 400/800 dev team was Jay Miner, future ‘Father of the Amiga’, who headed design of the graphics display/output chips known as ANTIC and CTIA. A third custom chip (POKEY) handled peripheral input/output and sound, and these separate co-processors freed up the main CPU, improving performance. An industry first, the concept of separate dedicated chips to drive graphics and sound would be taken to its logical extreme when ex-Atari employees, including Jay, were hired by Commodore to produce its first 16-bit home computer.
Debuting in the US in autumn 1979, the Atari 400 and 800 computers sold for $549 and $999 respectively. The 400, with its membrane keyboard was geared towards the home hobbyist and games market and was intended to ship with 4K of RAM. The 800 was designed as a higher-end or business machine, and came equipped with 8K of memory. Both computers were capable pieces of hardware
GCE: Vectrex
Until 1982 all home systems had one thing in common: They output a raster display. The Vectrex, in its sleek black exterior, was about to change all that mat Allen takes a look at a console that has arguably gained in popularity with time, and is now considered an essential part of any gaming collection.
The Vectrex, when you took at it in today’s gaming environment, is a complete aberration: different to anything that came before it or has come after it. While there are & few other examples of the display/machine hybrid, it is the only one to stand out in its own fight, and the only machine to offer a dedicated vector based gaming expenence. The fact that it also had one of the shortest lifespans of any machine makes it doubly interesting. If you thought the Dreamcast didn’t have that much of 8 commercial life, then pity the poor Vectrex, which was dead within 18 months of launch. Yet today it has a cult following, and a homebrew scene second im size to that of the Atan 2600.
The men primarily responsible for creating the Vectrex we ove today wene Jay Smith and Gerry Karr. Smith had a long and detailed technical beckground that started while working on the Apoilo space program. “I was really a gadget maker, and not too long after that. I went to work at Mattel Toys,” he states. “We got into maxing electronic toys, and trom electronic toys to videogames, which were just coming onto the scene."
Smith was also head of two companies that are often labeled together as Smith Engineering/Western Technologies, which, for the purposes of this article, are abbreviated to SE/WT. The real break for Smith came with the Microvision, which picked up by Milton-Bradley (MB) for distribution in 1979. It was while dealing with MB that Karr met Smith; Kar woould later work on the Microvision before being hired for what would become the Vectrex project and be responsible for much of the technical design.
"We really didn't have any idea at the time that this would become a classic. What we were trying to do was push the envelope, move it to the next level, do something unique, make your contribution that way, and provide another outlet,' admits Smith. Vector machines such as Asteroids and Tempest were popular in
The Vectrex wvas an unusual game console that featured a built-in 9-inch television screen. The system's dedicated screen was necessary for rendering the Vectrex's vector graphics, which displayed smooth white lines against a black background and were seen in arcade games like Battlezone and Asteroids. The result was unique compared to conventional sprite-based graphics but was limited to black and white, which the Vectrex tried to remedy with color screen overlays. While the console had potential and a dedicated fan base that's still active today, the 1983 video game crash cut the system's life short, and the Vectrex was discontinued in 1984.
The Vectrex's controller stored away under the screen when not in use.
Atari: 5200
Launched in 1982 as Atari's high-end system to bring the full arcade experience to the home, the 5200 instead turned into Atari's two-year detour on the way to the release of the 7800. Martin Goldberg reveals all.
The Atari 5200 may be unfamiliar to UK gamers, h never saw a PAL release. What should have been the system to bring Atari into the Eighties, had it been released when originally proposed in the late Seventies, instead became a long and winding path to missed opportunities and bad execution. Stepping into the 5200's
internal design gives the key to its origins and sheds some light on the troubled path it took as a concept and design, before it was finally released to market in October of 1982. Internally, the 5200 is an Atari 400 PCS (Personal Computer System) - the lower-end machine of Atari's late Seventies/early Eighties computer line - which is not a random fact being thrown at you when you take into account how the 400 was initially proposed.
Codenamed ‘Candy’, the Atari 400 was initially meant to be a lower-end game console to complement the higher-end ‘serious’ computer, codenamed ‘Colleen’. The vision of the design team leader, Jay Miner, the new game console was to replace the team’s previous console, the Atari 2600. Miner’s idea was to leverage the new custom sound and graphics chips that they were designing, for a console with a keyboard directly on it, the idea being that game programmers would be able to develop right on the console itself, rather than the then-arduous process of developing on 6502 simulators running on time-sharing mainframes and then burning the games to an EPROM to test on the real thing. As team member Joe Decuir recalled: “We knew we would need to leapfrog the 2600 before somebody else did. It had to support home computer character and bitmap graphics. We saw the Radio Shack the Apple II, Commodore, and Radio Shack appliance machines coming."
The 2600's time being limited was echoed by the slow slaes that 1978 Christmas seacon and the rallying cry of Atari head at the time Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell thought that, much like Atari;s previous plethora of Pong machines, the 2600's time on the market was limited to around two years before the company had to introduce a new console. It was the same gut instinct that he had gone on since the early coin-op days of Atari, when to stay ahead of the ‘me too’ competitors it had to continuously innovate and release new machines or fall behind. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — Atari was a Warner Communications company now and not a private game-engineering firm. Warner's vision was one of stability for its company, and getting better sales out of its products on the market at the time. It was a time when Atari itself was tanking, going from profits of $40 million in 1977 to what would be just $2.7 million in 1978. Bushnell being an absentee manager popping up with random directions and epiphanies didn't help, and in February 1978 Warner brought in a consultant to help make the company profitable again: Ray Kassar. Kassar and Bushnell spent the rest of 1978 butting heads, and Bushnell's stand at the Warner budget meeting that November would be his last. Getting in a shouting match with Warner's heads over drastically reducing the price of the 2600 to move it faster, they realised that he had to be completely taken out of the loop. After a feeble attempt to retain control of Atari by having a management meeting with Warner executives left out, the parent company decided to put Bushnell out to the corporate pasture, forcing him to retire.
By 1979, Kassar was in charge, and he put in place the idea to market the 2600 year-round, in direct opposition to Bushnell’s plan — something executives at other videogame companies had been calling for since early in 1978. Atari also licensed the smash arcade hit Space Invaders, which, when released in 1980, gave the 2600 the shot in the arm it needed, and Atari was back up to $80 million in profits for that year. Kassar also put into place his vision for Atari's new computer, and in the process axed the idea of a replacement for the 2600. Kassar’s vision for Atari's computer line was coloured by his former position at the textile manufacturing
The Atari 5200 was a slightly modified version of Atari's 8-bit computer series repackaged into a game console. Despite the system's impressive graphics, sound, and Atari's strong brand name, the 5200 was ultimately a troubled console that failed to emulate the 2600's success. The 5200 lacked its own identity, due to most of its library being direct ports of Atari 8-bit games, which themselves were ports of arcade games available on every other system, including the 2600. With Atari and most game developers still focused on the popular 2600, the 5200 struggled to establish itself and was abandoned after the 1983 crash left Atari in shambles.
Rather than being a true successor to the 2600, Atari's 5200 served as a premium companion, offering higher-quality versions of many 2600 games.
Dragon Data: Dragon 32
Not just a computer to play games on, the professional-looking Dragon 32, complete with the best version of Microsoft Basic. Was to rival Spectrum's Sinclair. Martyn Carroll charts the history of this chunky 8-bit micro home computer, manufactured in the former steel town of Port Talbot, and discovers why it's much more than just "That Welch Computer"...
The Dragon 32 made its UK debut in August 1982. It was a product of Dragon Data, the Swanseabased subsidiary of toy manufacturer Mettoy. The rise and fall of Dragon Data is fascinating: a story of success and struggle, buy-ins and buyouts. Our focus is the machine itself, so we're not going to get bogged down in all the boring corporate details.
In short Mettoy was struggling financially and formed Dragon Data to diversify its business. It realised that the UK home computer market was about to explode and was shrewd enough to see that Sinclair, Acom, Onc and the other manufacturers were struggling to meet the huge demand. Christmas 1982 would be a critical period and if Mettoy wanted to wrestle the market share from Sinclair it needed to act fast and have a challenger waiting ringside. That's when
it came up with a cunning plan.
Another Cup of Coco
It's reasonably well known that the Dragon 32 is a clone of the Tandy Color Computer (or CoCo as it's commonly known), a machine that achieved success in the US. They share most of the same innards, being based around the Motorola 6809 family of chips (processor, video circuitry and memory management). Even the keyboard layout and various ports are essentially the same. They're so similar that you'd assume Dragon Data simply licensed the CoCo design for use in the UK — but you'd be wrong. What actually happened was that Dragon ‘borrowed’ the Motorola chipset configuration on which the CoCo was based and then made a few tweaks to differentiate the Dragon 32.
The changes made not only prevented the Dragon 32 from being a complete clone of the CoCo, but rather audaciously they served to improve on Tandy’s two-year-old machine. Early CoCos shipped with as little as 4KB of RAM, whereas the Dragon 32 came with 32KB of RAM as standard (hence the name). This allowed Dragon to licence Microsoft Extended Color Basic — the out-of-the-box CoCo made do with Microsoft's standard Color Basic interpreter. The serial port of the CoCo was replaced with a parallel interface for speedy, standardised printing. And externally, the Dragon 32 featured a deluxe fully moving keyboard while CoCo users had to cope with a cheap calculator-style keyboard.
Commodore: 64
The story of the C64 is fundamentally one of two innovative chips created in 1981 at the Pennsylvania based Commodore subsidiary, MOS Technology. But the System's success was secured by a third chip and a leap of faith on falling memory prices. And the machine's dominance was ensured by Commodore boss Jack Tramiel obsessing over its cost and insisting on a quality keyboard sourced through his Japanese operation.
The Commodore 64's well received predecessor, the VIC-20, had been delivered thanks to a similar balancing of cost and quality. MOS engineering manager Albert Charpentier was responsible for designing the VIC-20's video chip, which had first been pitched to console manufacturers. Albert’s plan was to have another crack at the console market with a better graphics chip. “The VIC chip was done so I started to work on the VIC-II chip,” Albert begins. “The original premise of the chip was: ‘Ok, the VIC was good, but it wasn't good enough to entice the game community to buy into it.’ We looked at different arcade games from Taito, Konami and Atari. We looked at the features those games had so that at least we would be able to imitate arcade graphics with the VIC-II. Processors back then weren't as capable as they are today. It was a struggle to smoothly move things across the screen so that’s where we put in what we called the ‘sprite concept’ so you could simply define the character, put in an X and Y coordinate and it would appear wherever you wanted it. So it really supported the processor so that you could smoothly move objects around the screen.”
Entex: Adventure Vision
While not a direct sibling, this rare tabletop machine could serve as the spiritual stopgap between Smith's Microvision and Vectrex machines. Designed by Entex, then a well-established maker of portable LCD and LED games, the Adventure Vision took the appearance of a tabletop arcade and used interchangeable game cartridges that slotted tidily into its control dashboard. The games were controlled using a small silver joystick; either side of it sat two clusters of four fascia buttons to ensure the machine was accessible to both left- abd right-handed gamers. Like the Vectrex, the Adventure Vision is memorable for using an unusual method to project its games onto its screen. Whereas Smith's vector machine drew clean, striking white vector lines. Entex's visuals were made up of flickering red dots courtesy of a spinning mirror that would amplify a strip of 40 red LED lights to a 150 x 40 resolution. With a library of just four games - including a port of the arcade classic Defender and the Asteroids clone Space Force - plus its distinct, deep red visuals in some ways the style and ambition of the system shares many similarities with Nintendo's Virtual Boy.
The Adventure Vision may boast (if that's the right word) the smallest library of games on this list, but that hasn't stopped it from being popular with collectors. The Adventure Vision is memorable for using an unusual method to project its games onto its screen.
The Adventure Vision was a cartridge-based tabletop console from the American toy company Entex. The system's unique display used a strip of 40 red LEDS that were reflected onto a mirror oscillating at high speed, which gave the illusion of a full 150 by 40 dot image shown at 15 frames a second. This design gave the Adventure
Vision a dramatic resolution boost over comparable dedicated LED devices but also made the system difficult to play in bright environments. Ultimately, the Adventure Vision was overlooked by most gamers and was able to sell only a small amount of units before the video game crash put Entex out of business.
The Adventure Vision is one of the rarest consoles for collectors, easily selling for more than $1,500 at auction.
Coleco: ColecoVision
From the same company that would inflict the Cabbage Patch Kids upon the world, the ColecoVision entered an industry on the verge of collapse. Damien
McFerran speaks to the man behind the machine that could have ruled the world.
There are some striking similarities between the ColecoVision and Sony's all-conquering PlayStation. Both machines were released by companies that nominally operated outside the videogame industry - Coleco began life as Connecticut Leather Company before moving into children’s toys, and Sony was, and still is, a purveyor of consumer electronics, movies and music. Both platforms were also more powerful than their closest competitors and relied heavily on third-party licences, with Coleco signing up some of the best arcade titles of the era, while Sony secured victory with the assistance of talented studios such as Namco, Square and Konami. However, it’s there that the similarity ends: while the PlayStation went on to dominate the 32-bit era, the ColecoVision‘s potential was stymied by the videogame crash of the Eighties — a cataclysmic event brought on by market leader Atari’s poor business strategy.
The ColecoVision hardware was the brainchild of Eric Bromley, a talented designer and engineer who had previously headed up R&D divisions within various coin-op firms, the most notable of which was Midway. He was in between jobs when Coleco’s Mel Gershman asked him to come in for an interview. “He hired me within 15 minutes of my arrival,” beams Bromley today. Coleco’s output at that time was mostly electronic toys and play equipment, the former being something that caught Bromley’s eye. “Coleco made one of my all-time favourite games: Rod Hockey,” he explains. “They also made swimming pools, Holly Hobbie ovens, girl’s playhouses, and various types of snow-riding items.” However, with videogame sales booming and millions of dollars up for grabs, Coleco was looking to enter the market with its own home machine; the company knew the potential because it had already tentatively dipped a toe in the water during the Seventies with a range of handhelds and a simplistic TV game.
"The game with which we had our initial success was Telstar, which was promoted in 1976 as the first arcade home videogame under $100,” says Bromley. The talented designer had an even grander vision in mind, but bringing it to fruition was difficult. “Coleco CEO Arnold Greenberg and I desperately wanted to make an arcade-quality, cartridge-programmable videogame,” states Bromley. “I had started to do the preliminary design and costing for the ColecoVision three years — maybe even more - before its debut in 1982, but it was always shot down as too costly. Marketing a product at a magical retail price point was the key to everything Coleco produced; it was their mantra. Our team had developed a design around a Texas Instruments video chip and a sound chip from General Instruments, but it was RAM-intensive and therefore way above the cost limits.” With the profit margin being the deciding factor, the situation remained static until 1981. “I picked up a copy of the Wall Street Joural and saw an article about how the cost of RAM had declined,” explains Bromley. “I retrieved the latest cost analysis and substituted the new pricing. It came very close to the target price point. I ran to inform Arnold Greenberg and burst into his office without even asking his secretary; before he could react I showed him the new figures. Ten minutes later we were working on a new project with the working name ‘ColecoVision’. We were going to find a really good name for it as soon as we could show something to our sales and marketing people.” They never came up with a new moniker, and the working title stuck.
With the financial resources in place to make his dream a reality, Bromley set about engineering what would be considered the most powerful gaming machine of the period. “The key to the ColecoVision was that this was the first home videogame that could display
Sinclair: ZX Spectrum
Few 8-bit systems are as iconic as the humble Spectrum. Graeme Mason looks at the machine after its release in 1983 and asks what made the Speccy so popular with developers, publishers and the public alike.
It's September 1983. A young man stares wide-eyed from behind the counter of his computer shop on Bradford Street, Walsall. The man’s name is Steven Wilcox, and he will soon have a big role to play in the 8-bit computer game market; for now, however, Steve is excitedly trying to calculate how many ZX Spectrums he can sell in one day.
“Whenever I hear these days of consoles such as the Wii being in huge demand and selling out,” he says today, “I'm always reminded of the Spectrum and the frenzy there was about it.” Somehow, the future founder of renowned publisher Elite Systems had managed to secure a large stock of the immensely popular computer for the Christmas period of 1983. Word had escaped and families were travelling from miles away just to get their hands on one of the iconic micros. Steve's younger brother, Richard, was in the shop as normal, experimenting with the computers and games.
"For me, as someone who had been into computer gaming for some years,” he says, “it was like a validation. It was the beginning of gaming becoming mainstream.” The Spectrum, released in April 1982, was still causing a sensation over a year later.
On the frontline
This is ene of many stories from the ZX Spectrum's early days at the frontline. 165 miles further north, in Stockton-on-Tees, was Ian Richardson, who would go on to work for well-known software houses such as Ocean and Gremlin Graphics, and he tells a similar tale: “It really felt that Sinclair drip-fed the market, plus there weren't many places stocking them at the time, other than WHSmith and Dixons.” Ian worked in his father’s shop, TopSoft Computers. “My dad was interested in starting a retail business, and my love of computers ~ and especially gaming — persuaded him to open a computer shop. I explained carefully to him that it was not easy getting software in our hometown, as you were restricted to places such as Smiths and Woolworths.
Sinciar Research designer Rick Dickinson, responsible for the and feel of the Spectrum, remembers the situation clearly: "There was a Spectrum frenzy. Stores solid out quckly, with queues of people appearing whenever there was news of fresh stock.” The computer's popularity took Sinclair aback. “We were surprised, as it exceeded our highest expectations in terms of demand,” continues Rick, “and despite our factories theoretically being able to meet demand, it was more a question of the supply chain and how quickly stock could be replenished.” It was a popular rumour within Sinclair that dunng these early days, there were at least three lorries laden with Spectrums on the road at any one time, and a reported 12,000 units sold in each week of 1983.
Also working in sales early in the Spectrum’s life was Gary Bracey, future software development manager for Ocean. “I started a computer games retail business in Liverpool, basically because of the ZX Spectrum,” says Gary. “Although | had previously experienced the ZX81 and Acorn Atom, the Spectrum was really the one that brought these machines into the mainstream.”
Future Ocean colleague, artist Mark Jones, was also captivated by the computer, although frustratingly for him, as with many others, the machine lay tantalisingly out of reach. "I was one of the last of my friends to get a Spectrum,” he recalls with an air of mock sadness, “until one day | came home from school and my mother motioned me towards a box in the living room: there was a brand new 48K Spectrum!” Despite his excitement, Mark quickly discovered the problem that afflicted many Spectrum owners: most homes still only had one television! “I set the Speccy up as quick as | could, as i knew i didn’t have long before Dad came home," says Mark wistfully. Danger Mouse and Newsround I could do without, but i just had to cram some time in getting to know my new toy!"
A world of colour
Others were impressed on a technical level. Sinclair Reseach employee-in-waitng Rupert Goodwins, having previously purchased a ZX81 kit directly from Sincair, remembers receiving a flyer through the post for the new machne. "I devoured the leaflet for every last
Tomy: Tutor
Marketed toward children as an easy-to-use educational tool, the Tutor struggled to gain a foothold in America, where it was overlooked in favor of popular computers from Atari and Commodore. It fared better in its native Japan, where it received two updated revisions, but Tomy ended support for the Pyūta in 1985.
Marketed toward children as an easy-to-use educational tool, the Tutor struggled to gain a foothold in America, where it was overlooked in favor of popular computers from Atari and Commodore. It fared better in its native Japan, where it received two updated revisions, but Tomy ended support for the Pyūta in 1985.
VTech: CreatiVision
The CreatiVision was a hybrid computer and game console released by Hong Kong electronics company VTech in Europe, Asia, and Australia. While the system had decent hardware and gaming performance, the Creativision failed to stand out among a plethora of dedicated computers and consoles, and was eventually outclassed by rival products such as the Cornmodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. The CreatiVision also suffered from a small game library mostly made up of clones of popular games. After the Creativision's underwhelrming sales, VTech abandoned the hybrid system to focus on dedicated computers and edutainment consoles.
The CreatiVisiion sold under a number of different names around the world. In Australia, it was known as the Dick Smith Wizzard.
Emerson: Arcadia 2001
The Arcadia 2001 was a console distributed by the Emerson Electric Company in the United States. Like the Interton VC 4000, the Arcadia 2001 was the beginning of a line of European and Asian clone console based around Philips' Signetics chips, though this series had more RAM and a slightly better video processor. With its late 1982 release, the Arcadia 2001 presented an outdated and uninspired experience as new, powerful systems like the Atari 5200 and ColecoVision were coming out. In this heavily competitive market, the Arcadia 2001 went unnoticed, and Emerson quickly dumped the system and left the gaming market altogether.
Other systems in the Arcadia 2001 clone family included the Schmid TVG Lift Har Controllen 2000, Tchibo Tele Fever, and Tunix Home Arcade.
The development of the ZX80 can be traced back to 1978. In June that year, Clive Sinclair’s micro-computing arm Science of Cambridge released the MK-14, a kit computer with a calculator keypad and an 8-digit LED display that retailed for £40. Although the assembled kit was of little practical use, it was the perfect, low-cost training aid for students or hobbyists who wanted to learn about microprocessors. It’s difficult to determine just how many kits were sold — reported figures vary from 10,000 to 50,000 — but it was successful enough to show Sinclair that computers were a market that could be tapped, even if it was just to raise funds for other ventures within his business.
BBC: Micro
It was the computer that inspired a generation of programmers and introduced scores of children to computing. David Crookes talks to BBC Micro designer Steve Furber about how the iconic machine was made.
The phone rings and Steve Furber picks it up. He listens to what the person on the other end has to say; he begins to feel uneasy. But the caller, Hermann Hauser, is desperate. As the co-founder of Acorn he is about to receive a visit from the BBC, which wants to create a new computer. Acorn is in the running to make it. But time is tight. He wants Steve Furber and his colleague Sophie Wilson to produce a functioning machine in less than a week.
“Can you have a processor like this for Friday?” Hauser asks, but Steve ts clear. “No,” he answers. He calls Wilson and gets the same answer. But in both cases, he pulls a trick. “He told us both that the other had said yes so we felt we had to agree,” laughs Steve. “We were then committed.” The BBC Micro was about to be born.
Many people have fond memories of the BBC Micro. It was the machine used in countless schools up and down Britain, the red keys and black/beige combination being an exciting pointer to the future. Steve, however, did not have the pleasure of playing around with computers when he was at Manchester Grammar School in the 1960s. Nor did he have a bank of machines available to him when he moved
on to study the Mathematical Tripos at St. John’s College, Cambridge.
Steve was interested in the emerging technology, however, and while he was working on his PhD, he began to find the idea of computers rather fascinating. He decided he wanted to write his thesis electronically and in order to be able to do so, there was just one option available to him. He had to build his own machine. “In those days if you wanted to write a thesis electronically you had to build a computer and then you had to write a text editor. Then you could start writing the thesis. That’s the way it was,” he explains.
He found designing computers to be a lot of fun. In 1978, he was appointed the Rolls-Royce Research Fellow in Aerodynamics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which gave him even more of an excuse to play around: suddenly it made it a practical thing for him to do. Steve was also a member of his university's processor group, which was full of many other students who built computers for the hell of it.
"I ended up with a hobbyist machine," he says with fond recollection. "It used a 6502 processor and it was built in a substack. It had ths ite 160mm by 100mm Eurocard (the Europe standard format for PCB cards) and I hard wired the components to connect them. The machine had a memory card and a display card and the key principle of operation was that the machine was designed so that the processor and the display had shared access to the memory.”
In 1978, Acorn Computing was formed, rather handily, in Cambridge and Steve worked there on a casual basis before becoming an employee in 1980. The timing could not have been better because the BBC was about to embark on an ambitious project — one that Steve would prove to be an integral part of.
IBM: Personal Computer
For generations, the PC remains a constant in the market, through big-boxed floppy disk games to today’s era of digital distribution. For many of you, the era that evokes the most nostalgia is that of DOS games running on 486 processors, but we're celebrating everything to do with PC here - all the way through to digital platforms like Steam.
Entex: Select-A-Game
The Select-A-Game was a portable game console from Entex, an American toy company known for its dedicated handheld and tabletop gaming systems in the early 1980s. Unlike those single-game devices,the Select-A-Game offered a variety of titles through interchangeable cartridges.
Like many other Entex sports handhelds, the Select-A-Game had dual controls that allowed two players to go head-to-head in most games. The system was short-lived; it was available for less than a year before Entex stopped production on additional games and a larger tabletop version.
Only six games were released for the Select-A-Game: Baseball 4, Pinball, Pac-Man 2, Football 4, Basketball 3, and Space Invader 2.
Epoch: Cassette Vision
The Cassette Vision was a game console released exclusively in Japan by the toy company Epoch. Similar to the Telstar Arcade, the Cassette Vision placed its user controls on the system itself and used its game cartridges to hold the system's main processor. Graphics for the Cassette Vision were primitive and outdated, with low-resolution visuals that resembled early second-generation game systems and advanced Pong consoles. Despite these limitations, Epoch's inexpensive Cassette Vision and its small library of simple games connected with Japanese gamers and sold well, as did a cost-reduced mini version of the system that came out in l983.
Epoch was a Japanese company most known in America for its LCD handheld systems in the early 1980s.
Commodore: ViC-20
The VIC-20 was a home computer from Commodore, an American electronics manufacturer that had shifted from calculators to the nascent computer market. Commodore focused heavily on a low-cost product offered to the widest audience through common retailers and department stores. Compared to contemporary computers, the VIC-20 was compact, affordable, and easily attainable. A hit with young hobbyists and families, the VIC-20 introduced an entire generation to personal computing but its amazing success would soon be overshadowed by Commodore's next computer, the Commodore 64..
The VIC-20 was named after its custom graphics and sound processor, which stood for "Video Interface Chip."
Entex: Select-A-Game
The Select-A-Game was a portable game console from Entex, an American toy company known for its dedicated handheld and tabletop gaming systems in the early 1980s. Unlike those single-game devices,the Select-A-Game offered a variety of titles through interchangeable cartridges.
Like many other Entex sports handhelds, the Select-A-Game had dual controls that allowed two players to go head-to-head in most games. The system was short-lived; it was available for less than a year before Entex stopped production on additional games and a larger tabletop version.
Only six games were released for the Select-A-Game: Baseball 4, Pinball, Pac-Man 2, Football 4, Basketball 3, and Space Invader 2.
Nintendo: Game & Watch
At the dawn of the Eighties, Nintendo was only just starting to explore the industry it would eventually dominate. Long before the NES, SNES and N64 there was the Game & Watch - the series of handheld titles that would ultimately sire the all-conquering Game Boy, Damien McFerran explores the history of pocket-sized gaming.
When you look back on the history of videogames it’s not uncommon to discover amusing anecdotes regarding defining moments in the industry. For example, rumour has it that Namco’s Pac-Man a a was conceived when the game’s creator Toru Iwatani glanced at a pizza with one slice missing, and there's an equally famous tale that suggests that Nintendo’s renowned Mario was named after the landlord of the company’s American offices, who happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to the Italian plumber. Whether or not these stories are actually true is a moot point, but it’s impossible to deny that they lend our hobby a sense of wonderment, and we it's remarkable to think that these toweringly popular ideas can be born from such humble beginnings.
The genesis of Nintendo's Game & Watch series is recounted in an equally whimsical tale. According to legend, Nintendo engineer Gunpei Yokoi came up with the concept after observing a bored Japanese salary man absent-mindedly fingering his pocket calculator while travelling to work. If the story is true then this seemingly innocuous encounter ultimately gave birth to portable videogaming as we know it today. Yokoi was tragically killed in a roadside accident in 1997, and although he would gain worldwide fame and adoration as the creator of the Game Boy, many view his earlier LCD legacy with the most fondness.
Yokoi started working at Nintendo in 1965, assuming the modest role of assembly line engineer. The Nintendo of that era was a very different beast to
the one that we know today; the main focus of its business was ‘Hanafuda’ playing cards. According to yet another of those irresistible yarns, Yokoi created an extendable arm in order to amuse himself during the long working hours, and popular this device happened to catch the eye of company president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was inspecting the factory at the time. Yamauchi was on the lookout for a product that could turn around Nintendo's fortunes; the playing card market had slumped badly in the mid-Sixties and the president had tried all manner of different tactics to turn a profit.
Yamauchi was instantly intrigued and tasked the young Yokoi with turning his extendable arm into a bestselling product. It was a risky move that was by no means guaranteed to succeed, but the re-christened ‘Ultrahand’ proved to be a runaway success, shifting more than 1.2 million units worldwide, and would prove to be the first in a long line of popular toys to spring from the mind of Nintendo's new star employee. These novel creations would eventually earn Yokoi his very own department within the company, known as Research and Development 1 Group.
Towards the end of the Seventies, Nintendo started to disregard toys in favour of videogames, and it was during this time that Yokoi had his aforementioned chance meeting with the bored businessman and his calculator. It was ideal timing: LCD technology was cheap and videogames were big business. However, up to this point quality gaming was restricted to either the arcade or the home. Several companies had already produced portable games, but they were usually rudimentary LED-based units with uninspiring gameplay and were too bulky to be deemed truly mobile. Yokoi watched the efforts of companies like Mattel and Tomy with interest; he had his own ideas for the portable gaming industry.
The Game & Watch series was a collection of more than 50 dedicated handheld and tabletop games that Nintendo produced over a 10-year period. The series was a clever reworking of pocket calculator technology, which used flickering, fixed graphics on an LCD screen to give the illusion of movement. The devices were low-powered, cheap, and drastically smaller than previous LED-based handhelds, and the design was quickly imitated by rival manufacturers. The Game & Watch series expanded over time to include dual-screen systems; a two-player Micro Vs. series; the full-color, mirror-based Panorama models; and the rare, see-through Crystal series.
The Game & Watch series was the birthplace of the iconic D-pad, first seen in the 1982 game Donkey Kong.
Mattel: Intellivision II
In early 1983, Mattel released the updated Intellivision Il, a compact, modern-looking redesign of the original Intellivision that featured removable controllers and an external power supply. Months after the console's release, the industry was hit by the video game crash, which caused considerable damage to Mattel's gaming division. Even after dramatic price cuts, layoffs, and internal restructuring, Mattel suffered hundreds of millions in losses by the end of 1983, which led the company to sell off the Intellivision line and quit the gaming industry.
Add-ons for the Intellivision included a voice-synthesis module, a modem, a music keyboard, a computer keyboard expansion, and even an adapter that played Atari 2600 games.
Mattel: Intellivision
When the toy giant Mattel decided to investigate the possibility for a home videogames console in 1977, it was looking at new ground that nevertheless had a big flag already planted on it. The arcade colossus Atari was getting ready to launch its 2600 console, and although Mattel had identified a suitable product from General Instruments (the Gimini 6900) that it could base its own console on, the company decided that it would instead focus on handheld games. These sold well and established the Mattel Electronics brand, to the point that by 1979 the company had mustered the will to take on Atari. A team of engineers headed by Dave Chandler then worked to build the final Intellivision hardware for a test launch later that year.
The console itself would fit into any late Seventies living room thanks to its mixture of gold and woodgrain panels. The gold carries over to the two built-in controllers, each of which includes a directional disc and number pad, with a slot for game-specific overlays. This classic design would be abandoned in favour of the significantly uglier Intellivision II prior to the videogame market crash in 1983, but later formed the basis of INTV Corporation's INTV System III.
The Intellivision was a console created by the toy company Mattel that actedas a sophisticated and more expensive alternative to the Atari 2600. Mattel
highlighted the differences between these two consoles with an aggressive ad campaign, directly comparing the Intellivision's superior sound and more detailed graphics to the 2600's. These ads, along with a strong library of sports and strategy titles, positioned the Intellivision as Atari's main rival. Mattel's game console chipped away at the 2600's market share, and while not able to truly compete with the juggernaut Atari, the Intellivision beat
other systems to come in second place.
The Intellivision was test-marketed in 1979 and released nationwide in 1980.
Atari: 400/800
The Atari 800 was the first in a line of 8-bit home computers created by the gaming company Atari. Like the VideoBrain, Atari's 8-bit computers mainly offered its first-party programs and games on cartridges, though floppy disk and cassette drives were also available. With superior graphics, sound, and gaming support compared to contemporary computers, Atari's 8-bit line earned the reputation as hobbyist computers that played games rather than serious business machines. VWhen the Commodore 64 arrived and established itself as a premiere gaming platform, Atari's computer growth stagnated and never regained its former prominance.
The Atari 800 offered two cartridge slots and four controller ports.
Milton-Bradley: Microvision
Milton Bradley is more commonly known for its tangible approach to game playing, with the US company building up a solid reputation in the West for its popular range of board games. But seeing the profits that videogames could potentially yield, the company dipped its playing pieces into the videogame market, with varying degrees of success. Milton Bradley most famously entered the videogame with the release of the Vectrex in 1982 — the world’s only videogame machine built entirely around vector technology. And whie the Vectrex isn't a handheld per se, it is a console that was designed with manoeuvrability in mind. Resembling a mobile arcade unit, the Vectrex display/machine setup comprised a wonderfully slim built-in monitor and a fold out control pad, which made the machine compact and easily mobile. It should come as no great surprise then that its creator, Jay Smith, can be traced back to being the true inventor of the first portable games machine with a device he released two years before Nintendo unveiled Game & Watch on the world. Smith, who started working for Mattel before establ?ishing his own company, Smith Engineering/Western Technologies, set about working on an ambitious new device to allow kids to play electronic games on the go. The Microvision, as it was known, had a monochrome black and white 16 x 16 pixel LCD display that used overlay cards to give the illusion of colour in its games. With its small library of 12 titles, and each 2K sized game cart housing the CPU chip that ran the machine, isolated, the Microvision was simply an empty shell with an LCD display, on/off switch and contrast button. Even the fascia buttons (the number of which would vary depending on the game you were playing) were integrated into the game packs themselves. The Microvision was released in America and Europe, and was bundled with the Breakout clone called Block Buster. Software for the machine ceased in 1981.
The Microvision was the first handheld cartridge-based game console. Built by the American toy and board ganme company Milton Bradley, the Microvision was an ambitious idea held back by the technology of the late 1970s. Due to the limitations with available battery-powered processors and liquid crystal displays (LCDs), the Microvision ran fromn 9V batteries and only supported a resolution of 16 by 16 pixels. Nevertheless, expectations for a handheld device at the time were low, and people enjoyed the Microvision's quick, simple games. After strong initial sales, interest died down, and the device was discontinued in 1981.
The Microvision's game cartridges covered most of the system itself.
Fairchild: Channel F System II
Fairchild withdrew from the video game industry in 1978, shortly after it had just completed a remodeled Channel F. This new streamlined version, the System II, now played sound through the TV speaker and had controllers that could be removed. The system and Fairchild's entire Channel F inventory were sold to Zircon International in 1979, which continued to sell the system until the video game crash.
Zircon international took over selling the Channel F in 1979 and released the console's six final games.
Unisonic: Champion 2711
The Champion 2711 was an extremely rare casino-based console created by Unisonic, an American electronics company that sold calculators and Pong consoles in the 1970s. Created around a graphics processor that could display only static columns of text, numbers, symbols, and playing cards, the Champion 2711 was mainly limited to card games. Baccarat and Blackjack were built into the system, while titles such as Poker, Bingo, and Concentration were available separately. The system was sold only in limited quantities for a brief period, as Unisonic quickly exited the gaming market after its release, likely due to the collapse of the American Pong market.
With sales in just the hundreds, the obscure Champion 2711 is likely the rarest console ever released. Only a few listings have ever appeared on the
auction site eBay in the past 15 years.
APF: Imagination Machine
The imagination Machine was a keytboard add-on that turned the MP1000 into a full-fledged computer. The add-on contained an extra 8 KB of RAM and a cassette drive for loading and saving BASIC programs. System expandability was offered through an optional dock that sat behind the keyboard, which could be outfitted with another 8 KB of memory or connected to an acoustic modem or floppy disk drive. Priced at only $599 (which included the MP1000), the Imagination Machine was an inexpensive computer when it debuted in late 1979. A new streamlined design, the Imagination Machine II, which combined the keyboard and game console into a single unit, was completed in 1981 but was never released, as financial issues caused the closure of APF that same year.
Early home computers often used common cassette tapes to store and load programs.
Atari: 2700 Prototype
The Atari 2700 was an unreleased 2600 variant that replaced its toggle switches with touch-sensitive controls and added radio frequency (RF) wireless capabilites. The updated wireless controllers ran off a single 9V battery and featured joysticks that could be twisted like paddles. Though the system was fully designed and ready for production, it was canceled after testing raised concerns about the 2700's RF signal strength and its ability to affect nearby consoles and wireless devices.
The 27O0's wedge design would later be used as the basis for the Atari 5200.
APF: MP1000
The MPl000 was a game console released by APF Electronics, a New York company known for its calculators and popular line of Pong consoles. The shift from Pong to the microprocessor- and cartridge-based MP1000 was a big leap for APF, which took on heavy losses to develop the hardware and create gammes for the system. With the rapid downturn in the calulator and Pong markets-plus the failure of its PeCos One personal computer-the cash-strapped APF struggled to support its new console with advertising and a wide distribution. After an underwhelming reception, APF pivoted to marketing the MP1000 as a computer with a keyboard add-on.
Every MP1000 came with the built-in game Rocket Patrol.
Interton: VC 4000
The VC 4000 was a European console released by the German electronics company Interton and was the first in a series of clone consoles released by multiple companies throughout Europe and Asia. These systems were based on Philips' line of Signetics chips, and they used a ready-made console design that Was available to other manufacturers and as a "build it yourself" computer kit. The VC 4000 and its clones shared a game library made of play-alikes of popular games and arcade titles. The family of systems failed to make a lasting impact on the market, and most were abandoned after their initial release.
Some VC 400O clones included the Grundig Super Play 4000, Hanimex HMG-1292, and Acetronic MPU 1000.
Magnavox: Odyssey 2
The Odyssey 2 was the cartridge-based successor to Magnavox's original Odyssey. The large system was unique for its built-in membrane keyboard, which, though underutilized, provided the Odyssey 2 with more functionality than most other consoles. However, the Odyssey 2 lacked the third-party support of its competitors, and many games were visually similar due to heavy reuse of built-in art assets. While a modest seller in America, the console was a contender in Europe, where it was sold as the Philips Videopac G7000. It would be Magnavox’s last console, as the company pulled out of the industry in 1984 following the video game crash.
Plans for an Odyssey 2 were finalized, but it was canceled due to the video game crash.
The Magnavox Odyssey was the world's first consumer device that let people play interactive games on their television. Limited by the era's primitive technology, the Odyssey's games utilized white squares and lines that players could move around on a black background. The console's standout game was a simple two-player version of tennis, which was the direct inspiration for Pong. While it would be Pong, not the Odyssey, that launched the video game craze, Magnavox's system was an amazing achievement for its time and set the stage for the modern age of video games and consoles.
The Odyssey² was the cartridge-based sucessor to Magnavox's original Odyssey. The large system was unique for its built-in membrane keyboard, which, though underutilized, provided the Odyssey 2 with more functionality than most other consoles. However, the Odyssey² lacked the third-party support of its competitors, and many games were visually similar due to heavy reuse of built-in art assets. While a modest seller in America, the console was a contender in Europe, where it was sold as the Philips Videopac G7000. It would be Magnavox's last console, as the company pulled out of the industry in 1984 following the video game crash.
Plans for an Odyssey 3 were finalized, but it was canceled due to the video game crash.
VideoBrain
The VideoBrain was a home computer developed by Umtech, a Californian computer manufacturer. The system came with two joysticks and prominently used ROM cartridges that ran a small library of business, educational, and gaming titles. With a simplified interface and a reliance on ready-made software, Umtech envisioned the VideoBrain as an easy-to-use computer for all ages. However, at the time the home computer market was led by hobbyists who valued versatility, BASIC programming support, and cheap writeable media like cassettes. Unable to find an audience, the VideoBrain was discontinued within a year.
Designed by a former Fairchild engineer, the VideoBrain used the same F8 processor as the Channel F.
PC-50x Series
The PC-50x Series was a hardware standard that was used primarily by Hong Kong electronics manufacturers in the late 1970s, similar to the Coleco Telstar Arcade, the cartridge housed the system's processor, and each cartridge contained a different General Instruments chip. These second-generation "Pong on a chip" GI processors contained more advanced versions of Pong, shooting, tank, or racing games. Up to 10 different play modes were available on each cartridge, and a PC-50x Series console can easily be identified today by its 10-button game selectors. The systems were sold throughout Europe until the early 1980s, where the gaming market was slower to adopt American-made consoles and had avoided a Pong-console crash.
The PC-50x Series lineup included more than two dozen different models.
Bally: Professional Arcade
The Professional Arcade was the first and only console by Bally, an amusement company known for its pinball and slot machines. The system was more expensive
than competing consoles but offered the ability to create and save BASIC programs onto cassettes with an inexpensive adapter. This feature produced a small, dedicated fan community of hobbyist programmers who created and traded their own games. However, despite its enthusiastic fans, high failure rates, poor retail presence, and limited advertising led to low sales, which resulted in Bally selling the system and its rights to Astrovision in 1980, which also had
little success with the console.
The Professional Arcade was also knOwn as the rebranded Astrocade.
Atari: 2600
A major milestone in videogame history was marked in July of 1977 when the first Atari Video Computer System rolled off a production line in California. However, Atari's think tank — Cyan Engineering — had been discussing ideas for a programmable game system as early as 1975. In light of the long lead time required by the console — now better known as the 2600 -it's perhaps unsurprising that Atari recruited the first member of its launch games team — Larry Kaplan — almost a year before mass production began. “I was working in Silicon Valley, this is August of 1976, and Atari put an ad in the newspaper for programmers,” Larry begins. “Atari at the time was a coin-op company, but there was a new consumer division — that was six people — and I interviewed with them to be a game programmer for their new system, the 2600.”
Soon after, three additional coders joined Larry, and the small group were given preproduction hardware on which to develop the 2600's launch titles. This gang of four subsequently became six, and following the console’s autumn launch, the team switched from assembly code to assembling consoles for what they thought might be the 2600's only Christmas. “We had a development system that we worked on, and the whole of 1977 was doing games,” remembers Larry. “It was knd of a tough situation because production was way behind. So during Christmas, they actually made all the employees — including us engineers — work on the assembly line to keep up with orders. No one knew how long the 2600 would last, they assumed one Christmas, maybe two at most, and then we would move on to the next product. The launch titles were okay — there was Combat and I did Air-Sea Battle.”
Although not official coin-op conversions, these two launch games — and many of the other initial 2600 releases — were based on arcade favourites, which set the trend for Atari's 2600 output for 1978, as developer David Crane confirms. “It was ironic that we were tasked with making home versions of $3,000 arcade games on the lowly $200 2600, but as game programmers at Atari, we were
The 26O0 was Atari's first cartridge-based system and follow-up to a line of dedicated Pong consoles. Design of the Atari 2600 began in the mid-1970s and was limited by component costs that led to severe RAM restrictions. The resulting quirky hardware required a variety of tricks, exploits, and workarounds to fully use, but Atari's young and enthusiastic programmers were up to the task. The 2600's unique and actíon-oriented games wowed players, and later, exclusive arcade ports and the advent of third-party games pushed the system far ahead of the competitíon. The console defined the second generation and remains one of the most iconic systems of all time.
Originally launched as the Atari Video Computer System (VCS), the console was rebranded as the 2600 in 1982.
Coleco: Telstar Arcade
The Telstar Arcade was a spin-off of Coleco's line of dedicated Pong Telstar systems. The console combined Pong, shooting, and racing into a single triangular case and could offer multiple game variations with its use of interchangeable cartridges. Each cartridge contained an advanced version of
the "Pong on a chip" integrated circuit and could run custom code that allowed for unique games using a pool of fixed assets. However, the Telstar Arcade offered little value over much cheaper Pong consoles and was outclassed by the new Channel F and Atari 2600. Coleco phased out the Telstar Arcade after just a year of sluggish sales.
Before making videogames, Coleco produced leather goods, toys, and plastic pools.
RCA: Studio II
The Studio II was the second console to use cartridges and the first and only system released by RCA. The console was based on a low-cost Consumner computer concept that RCA developed in the early 1970s, which was later updated into a game and educational system. However, its origins left the Studio II with an outdated design that was built around black-and-white graphics and keypad-based controls. The Studio II lacked the color graphics and fun action games of other new cartridge systems, and it even felt less advanced than some Pong consoles. After a year of incredibly low sales, RCA discontinued the Studio II and pulled out of the gaming market.
The RCA Studio II came with five built-in games: Addition, Bowling, Freeway, Doodle, and Patterns.
Apple: 2
Although eventually eclipsed by Commodore and Atari machines, the Apple II began its life byrevolutionising home gaming in the USA. Craig Grannell finds out about the plaforms origins and talks to former Apple II developers about what made the machine so great for gaming.
It's fair to say that if we ignore Apple's relatively recent onslaught on the games industry via iPhone OS devices and the App Store, few would consider the Cupertino-based company one that makes products for videogamers, let alone an industry leader in the field.
Even modern Apple Mac owners lack choice when it comes to games, often having to put up with expensive imperfect ports of old Windows titles, or the odd indie creation that trickles through — a situation that hasn't changed a great deal in over two decades. But things weren't always this way: for a brief, glorious time, Apple had one of the best home gaming systems around, courtesy of Apple II. It wasn't a hugely powerful piece of hardware, although it was impressive for the time, but the Apple II caught the imagination of programmers and fans of videogames — some of which subsequently became major players in the industry.
Apple's beginnings were in the hobbyist market. The mentality would be retained for the first revision of the Apple II, before a larger Apple's overly corporate-minded direction resulted in the ill-fated descision to ignore the people who first supported the company and focus entirely on business. But at the start, it was a tale of two Steves: Jobs and Wozniak. Even in his early 20s, Jobs was a shrewd businessman, tactician and visionary, and Wozniak was an engineering genius. An oft-told story of the pair involves Breakout: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell offered $100 for every chip that could be reduced from the circuit boards. Jobs agreed to split the bonus with Wozniak, who dropped Breakout's chip count by 50, but nonetheless ended up with just a few hundred bucks. Jobs allegedly pocketing the rest. (Wozniak has since said he "gladly would have designed Breakout game for Atari for free, just to do it', and admits that he was hurt when he found out about the "dishonesty", although he's over that now.
In 1976, mostly in Jobs' garage, history was made: the Apple I was created and offered to HP. It declined and Apple Computer was born. The Apple I was the first single-board computer, sold fully assembled - users had to supply a keyboard, case, monitor and power supply - and innovated by relying on things that we now take for granted: keyboard input and the use of a television for output, rather than the tried-and-tested toggle switches and LEDs that its contemporaries used. For the day, this was impressive stuff, but Wozniak wasn't satisfied.
In Jack Connicks's 1986 feature for Call-A.P.P.L.E. magazine'... And Then There Was Apple', Wozniak revealed that he wanted a faster, more colorful and nosier machine - and the Atari videogame he'd worked on was the driving force behind many of the technical descisions made. "A lot of features of the Apple II went in because i had designed Breakout for Atari. I had designed it in hardware. I wanted to write it in software now," he said. Colour was added first, so games can be programmed: "I sat down one night and tried to put [Breakout] into BASIC. Fortunately I had written BASIC myself, so i had just burned some new ROMs with line-drawing commands, colour-changing commands, and various BASIC commands that would plot in colour." Having got a ball to bounce around, Wozniak realized that sound was required and so a speaker was added to the Apple II - something he said wasn't planned, but was "just accidental". Paddles were the next addition, implemented via a simple paddle circuit. "So a lot of these features that really made the Apple II stand out in its day came from a game, and the fun features that were built in were only to do one pet project, which was to program a BASIC version of Breakout and show it off,' explained Wozniak.
Continuing to effectively design for himself, Wozniak fashioned a computer with a number of firsts - the first machine of its kind to be sold completely assembled; the first boasting a plastic case; the first with colour graphics, hi-res, sound and paddles; the first with BASIC game commands and the BASIC in ROM - and the only Apple i have had beaten
Fairchild: Channel F
The Fairchild Channel F is little known to modern gamers, as is its inventor Jerry Lawson. Here, Marty Goldberg gives you the inside scoop on the console that changed the consumer videogame industry for good.
There’s no other way to describe the Channel F other than a game-changer in the consumer videogame console industry. While it didn’t cause dedicated console manufacturers to fly out of the market, it did signify a major coming change in the approach to consoles. It seems almost appropriate now that the company to give most of the world its introduction to microprocessor-driven home consoles was a semiconductor manufacturer. Much like the position Apple was in almost three decades later, this manufacturer had the capabilities to run all aspects of the console’s creative process — design, fabrication and manufacturing. That company was Fairchild, and its division, Fairchild Semiconductor.
While the Channel F was in development at the same time as the Atari Video Computer System, Fairchild was the first to the market, launching in November 1976. Ultimately, what nullified any headstart over Atari was the hard lesson future competitors learned as well: If you don’t have hot titles and people who know how to design the games people want to play, your console is not going to sell. But instead of jumping ahead, let's go back to the very beginning of the Channel F.
We mean literally the very beginning — the origins of the Channel F’s chief creator. The Channel F’s story starts with African-American engineer Jerry Lawson, an acquaintance of Atari notable Al Alcorn. Jerry was born during December 1940, and grew up in Queens, New York City. Getting into electronics young, Jerry was an amateur radio operator from the age of 13 and a typical ‘science kid‘. Building an amateur radio station in his room, he was a true testament to the changing stature of African-Americans in American society, a traditionally hostile environment for the ethnicity. In fact, Jerry's own grandfather had been a physicist who couldn't get hired by anyone except the post office.
Jerry's creative and entrepreneurial juices also started young when he started building and selling walkie-talkies. By his late teens he was doing television repairs, buying repair parts with a small allowance from his mother. The
The Channel F was the first true video game console, as it was the first to use removable, programmable media in conjunction with a microprocessor. Built by Fairchild Semiconductor, the console was seen as a platform to directly sell its 8-bit microprocessor in the emerging games industry. On release, the Channel F was a step up from dedicated Pong consoles but never quite caught on due to Fairchild's poor understanding of the gaming and retail markets. The Channel F lacked the innovative action games of its later rival, the Atari 2600, and when console sales stagnated, Fairchild pulled out after only two years on the market.
The Channel F had two built-in games: Hockey and Tennis.
Coleco: Telstar
The Odyssey and Coleco Telstar Series
By 1975, Magnavox had discontinued the original Odyssey and began producing a series of streamlined Odyssey systems. Some of these dedicated Pong consoles (like the Odyssey 2000 above) used the General Instruments AY-3-8500, a "Pong on a chip" that incorporated all of the logic and circuits for Pong into one integrated circuit. The first to use this chip was Coleco, a toymaker whose line of Telstar systems would become one of the best-selling series of Pong consoles.
Montiverdi: TV Sports
The simplicity of the "Pong on a chip" integrated circuit opened the floodgates for electronics manufacturers to produce their own Pong consoles. Pong was so
popular and so easy to produce that, by 1977, the market was flooded with nearly identical systems. When consumer fatigue set in and the systems stopped selling, companies dumpedd their Pong consoles and left the industry. The result was the first market crash and the end of the Pong era. Luckily, a new generation of gaming consoles had begun to emerge that would quickly revitalize the industry.
The Montiverdi TV Sports was just one of the many uninspired Pong consoles that offered multiple Pong game modes as well as light-gun shooting.
Nintendo: TV-Games
Pong wasn't just a phenomenon in the United States; it also took off in Japan and Europe, where local companies produced their own Pong consoles. In Japan, one of the most popular Pong systems came from Nintendo, a longtime toymaker that had begun branching out into videogames. Its Color TV-Games line included two Pong consoles, a Breakout clone, a racing game, and a computer that played the strategy game Othello.
The Color TV-Game 15offered 15 variations of Pong and retailed for 15,000 Yen in 1977.
This was the historical story of each videogame console in readable text.
