Blog Archives
Mat Langford’s Gaming World – A Brief History of Main-Stream Gaming Consoles
To tie in with May’s Origin theme, I’ve decided to write up a little something on the history of the main-stream video game console.
Even though I wasn’t around for some of the earlier iterations, I have played all of them, and all of them – while they ranged from terrible to incredible – have left a distinct mark on the culture of gaming.
Magnavox Odyssey
Many people think of Atari’s Pong as the starting block for video gaming when in fact, there was a little known system that predated it. In 1972, Magnavox released a console called the Magnavox Odyssey, marketed as the first true commercial home video game console. It had a peripheral light gun for a shooting gallery game, very similar to that of the Nintendo Entertainment System (Duck Hunt anyone?).
