In Real Life

If You Were A Video Game Console, Would You Be As Cool As Ellen?

“If you were a video game console, what would you be?” is not the sort of question one would expect to find on the Facebook page of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, yet here we are.


April 12, 2011
Retro

Remembering The First Console To Use Cartridges

Today’s video game news was tinged with sadness, as the world learned of the death of Jerry Lawson, the man who led the team behind the creation of the video game cartridge.


June 22, 2009
In Real Life

The Father Of Cartridge-Based Consoles

Overshadowed in popular culture by the Atari VCS, the Fairchild Channel F is little more today than the answer to a trivia stumper: the first game console to use cartridges. And this man built it.


June 22, 2008
Uncategorized

The Consoles of Our Ancestors

Back when I was your age, we played games that sucked and were no fun and we liked it, because it built character, and building character was fun (it was an early form of achievement farming). In fact, we used a slide projector to create finger-shadow combatants for Mortal Kombat, and it was a hoot when granddad had to roll the dice correctly in the correct order to get a fatality.

So that’s a big brown blip on the bullshit radar, isn’t it. Yeah, thought so. Instead for you, GamesRadar has a comprehensive timeline of all of the video game consoles of the 1970s and I was surprised to learn just how many there were besides the 2600 and the Pong console. Oh, some family friends had the Fairchild (above), that made visiting their home like going to a foreign country where the toilets flushed backward. Except for the Odyssey (actually, we only saw the Odyssey II) I don’t think anything other than the Atari retailed in my hometown. Then again, we didn’t get a McDonald’s until 1980. We had to have our birthday parties at a typewriter repair shop. And we liked it!

Consoles of the 70s [GamesRadar]