THE HISTORY OF VIDEOGAMES PART 5 - May 1999
| Up until Christmas 1977, videogaming, while big news, had
been pretty much an exclusively outdoor pursuit. If you wanted to play anything more
exciting than Pong (and even in 1977, anything was more exciting than Pong), you had to at
least make the physical effort of getting up off your fat lazy arse and going down to the
arcade. But that changed for ever when Atari released their first home game console, the
Atari Video Computer System 2600 (or VCS for short). The VCS was a primitive tool - it had hardly any memory (only one sixteen-thousandth as much as a modern computer), big chunky graphics and about four different sound effects (and that was including the loud hum when you put it too near the TV), but the important thing was that rather than just having loads of built-in variations of tennis like home Pong machines, the VCS was the first machine that could play hundreds of different plug-in games, including simplified but recognisable versions of all the most popular arcade classics of the day. The games were mostly terrible and tremendously expensive (amazingly, VCS cartridges cost the equivalent of about £80 at today's prices), but people just couldn't get enough of them. Millions of VCSs were sold, the home gaming market exploded into life, and nothing would ever be the same again... |
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