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. More »
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]
