Atari PacMan game advert from the 80′s

In 1982, Atari Inc. released a port of Namco’s hit arcade game Pac-Man for its Atari 2600 video game console. Like the original arcade version, the player controls the titular character with a joystick. The object is to traverse a maze, consuming all the wafers within while avoiding four ghosts.

The game was programmed by Tod Frye, who was given a limited time frame by Atari to complete the project. The technical differences between the Atari 2600 console and the original’s arcade hardware—particularly the amount of available memory—presented several challenges to Frye. Given the popularity of the property, Atari produced 12 million units, anticipating a high number of sales.

While the port sold 7 million copies and is the best-selling Atari 2600 title, it was critically panned. Critics focused on the gameplay and audio-visual differences from the arcade version. Customers returned the game in large quantities. Initially, the port boosted the video game industry’s presence in retail, but has since been cited as a contributing factor to the North American video game crash of 1983. It was followed by Atari 2600 ports of Pac-Man‘s arcade sequels.

Info gleaned from Wikipedia

Atari Video Computer System Commercial1980s featuring Morecambe and Wise

The Atari 2600 is a video game console released in October 1977 by Atari, Inc. It is credited with popularizing the use of microprocessor-based hardware and cartridges containing game code, instead of having non-microprocessor dedicated hardware with all games built in. The first game console to use this format was the Fairchild Channel F; however, the Atari 2600 receives credit for making the plug-in concept popular among the game-playing public.

The console was originally sold as the Atari VCS, for Video Computer System. Following the release of the Atari 5200, in 1982, the VCS was renamed “Atari 2600″, after the unit’s Atari part number, CX2600. The 2600 was typically bundled with two joystick controllers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a cartridge game—initially Combat and later Pac-Man.

The Atari 2600 was wildly successful, and during much of the 1980s, “Atari” was a synonym for this model in mainstream media and, by extension, for video games in general.

In 2009, the 2600 was named the second greatest video game console of all time by IGN.

Info gleaned from Wikipedia

Apple computer advert from the late 80′s

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL; NYSE: AAPL; previously Apple Computer, Inc.) is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company’s best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes the Mac OS X operating system; the iTunes media browser; the iLife suite of multimedia and creativity software; the iWork suite of productivity software; Aperture, a professional photography package; Final Cut Studio, a suite of professional audio and film-industry software products; Logic Studio, a suite of music production tools; the Safari internet browser; and iOS, a mobile operating system. As of August 2010, the company operates 301 retail stores in ten countries, and an online store where hardware and software products are sold. As of May 2010, Apple is one of the largest companies in the world and the most valuable technology company in the world, having surpassed Microsoft.

Established on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California, and incorporated January 3, 1977, the company was previously named Apple Computer, Inc., for its first 30 years, but removed the word “Computer” on January 9, 2007, to reflect the company’s ongoing expansion into the consumer electronics market in addition to its traditional focus on personal computers. As of September 2010, Apple had 46,600 full time employees and 2,800 temporary full time employees worldwide and had worldwide annual sales of $65.23 billion.

For reasons as various as its philosophy of comprehensive aesthetic design to its distinctive advertising campaigns, Apple has established a unique reputation in the consumer electronics industry. This includes a customer base that is devoted to the company and its brand, particularly in the United States. Fortune magazine named Apple the most admired company in the United States in 2008, and in the world in 2008, 2009, and 2010. The company has also received widespread criticism for its contractors’ labor, environmental, and business practices.

Info gleaned from Wikipedia

Amstrad Computer advert from the1980s

Amstrad is a British electronics company founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar. The name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading. It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1980.

During the late 1980s, Amstrad had a substantial share of the PC market in the UK. As of 2006, Amstrad’s main business is manufacturing Sky Digital interactive boxes. Amstrad was once a FTSE 100 Index constituent but is now wholly owned by BSkyB.

The company is based in Brentwood, Essex.

History

In 1980, Amstrad went public trading on the London Stock Exchange, and doubled in size each year during the early ’80s. Amstrad began marketing their own home computers in an attempt to capture the market from Commodore and Sinclair, with the Amstrad CPC range in 1984. The CPC 464 was launched in the UK, France, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Spain and Italy. It was followed by the CPC 664 and CPC 6128 models. Later “Plus” variants of the 464 and 6128, launched in 1990, increased their functionality slightly.

In 1985, the popular Amstrad PCW range was introduced, which were principally word processors, complete with printer, running the LocoScript word processing program. They were also capable of running the CP/M operating system. The Amsoft division of Amstrad was set up to provide in-house software and consumables.

On 7 April 1986 Amstrad announced it had bought from Sinclair Research “…the worldwide rights to sell and manufacture all existing and future Sinclair computers and computer products, together with the Sinclair brand name and those intellectual property rights where they relate to computers and computer related products.” which included the ZX Spectrum, for £5 million. This included Sinclair’s unsold stock of Sinclair QLs and Spectrums. Amstrad made more than £5 million on selling these surplus machines alone. Amstrad launched two new variants of the Spectrum: the ZX Spectrum +2, based on the ZX Spectrum 128, with a built-in tape drive (like the CPC 464) and, the following year, the ZX Spectrum +3, with a built-in floppy disk drive (similar to the CPC 664 and 6128), taking the 3″ disks that many Amstrad machines used.

The company produced a range of affordable MS-DOS-based, but with the GEM graphics interface, and later Windows-based personal computers, the first of which was the PC1512, priced at £399 in 1986. It was a success, capturing more than 25% of the European computer market. In 1988 Amstrad attempted to make the first affordable portable personal computer with the PPC512 and 640 models, introduced a year before the Macintosh Portable. They ran MS-DOS on an 8 MHz processor, and the built-in screen could emulate the Monochrome Display Adapter or Color Graphics Adapter. Amstrad’s final (and ill-fated) attempts to exploit the Sinclair brand were based on the company’s own PCs; a compact desktop PC derived from the PPC 512, branded as the Sinclair PC200, and the PC1512 rebadged as the Sinclair PC500.

Amstrad’s second generation of PCs, the PC2000 series, were launched in 1989. However, due to a problem with the Seagate ST277R hard disk shipped with the PC2386 model, these had to be recalled and fitted with Western Digital controllers. Amstrad later successfully sued Seagate, but following bad press over the hard disk problems, Amstrad lost its lead in the European PC market.

Info gleaned from Wikipedia

Acron Electron 1980s

The Acorn Electron is a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd. It has 32 kilobytes of RAM, and its ROM includes BBC BASIC along with its operating system.

The Electron was able to save and load programs onto audio cassette via a supplied converter cable that connected it to any standard tape recorder that had the correct sockets. It was capable of basic graphics, and could display onto either a television set, a colour (RGB) monitor or a “green screen” monitor.

At its peak, the Electron was the third best selling micro in the United Kingdom, and total lifetime game sales for the Electron exceeded those of the BBC Micro. There are at least 500 known games for the Electron and the true total is probably in the thousands.

The hardware of the BBC Micro was emulated by a single customized ULA chip designed by Acorn. It had feature limitations such as being unable to output more than one channel of sound where the BBC was capable of three-way polyphony (plus one noise channel) and the inability to provide teletext mode.

The ULA controlled memory access and was able to provide 32K × 8 bits of addressable RAM using 4 × 64K × 1-bit RAM chips (4164). Due to needing two accesses to each chip instead of one, and the complications of the video hardware also needing access, reading or writing RAM was much slower than on the BBC Micro. This meant that although ROM applications ran at the same speed, there was a substantial speed decrease on applications running from RAM.

Info gleaned from Wikipedia

Commodore 64 advert from 1980 featuring the Elephant Boxing.

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982. Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US $595. Preceded by the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore MAX Machine, the C64 features 64 kilobytes (65,536 bytes) of memory with sound and graphics performance that were superior to IBM-compatible computers of that time. It is commonly known as the C64 or C=64 (after the graphic logo on the case) and occasionally as the CBM 64 (for Commodore Business Machines), or VIC-64^. It has also been affectionately nicknamed the “breadbox” and “bullnose” due to the shape and colour of the first version of its casing^.

During the C64′s lifetime, sales totalled 17 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time.   For a substantial period of time (1983–1986), the C64 dominated the market with between 30% and 40% share and 2 million units sold per year, outselling the IBM PC clones, Apple Inc. computers, and Atari 8-bit family computers. Sam Tramiel, a former Atari president and the son of Commodore’s founder, said in a 1989 interview “When I was at Commodore we were building 400,000 C64s a month for a couple of years.”

Part of its success was because it was sold in retail stores instead of electronics stores, and also because these machines can be directly plugged into an existing home television without any modifications. Commodore produced many of its parts in-house to control supplies and cost. It is sometimes compared to the Ford Model-T auto-mobile for bringing a new technology to middle-class households via creative mass-production.

Approximately 10,000 commercial software titles were made for the Commodore 64 including development tools, office applications, and games. Various C64 emulators allow anyone with a modern computer, or a compatible game console, to run these programs today. The machine is also credited with popularizing the computer demo scene. The C64 is still used today by some computer hobbyists.

Since 28 March 2008, Commodore 64 games have been available to buy through Nintendo’s Virtual Console service in Europe; the first games available were Uridium and International Karate. Later, on February 23, 2009, the Commodore 64 section was launched in North America with the first three titles, International Karate, The Last Ninja and Pitstop II. A C64 emulator application with classic games also appears on Apple Inc.’s App Store.

Advert from 1984 for Select computer game compendium for the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum.

1990 ATARI Lynx commercial

The Atari Lynx is an 16-bit handheld game console that was released by Atari Corporation in 1989.  The Lynx holds the distinction of being the world’s first handheld electronic game with a colour LCD display. The system is also notable for its forward-looking features, advanced graphics, and ambidextrous layout. The Lynx was released in 1989, the same year as Nintendo’s (monochromatic) Game Boy.  However, the Lynx failed to achieve the sales numbers required to attract quality third party developers, and was eventually abandoned.

Today, as with many older consoles, there is still a small group of devoted fans, creating and selling games for the system.

Features

The Atari Lynx has several innovative features including it being the first color handheld, with a backlit display, a switchable right-handed/left-handed (upside down) configuration, and the ability to network with up to 17 other units via its “ComLynx” system (though most games would network eight or fewer players). ComLynx was originally developed to run over infrared links (and was codenamed RedEye). This was changed to a cable-based networking system before the final release.

The Lynx was also the first gaming console with hardware support for zooming/distortion of sprites, allowing fast pseudo-3D games with unrivaled quality at the time and a capacity for drawing filled polygons with limited CPU intervention. Blue Lightning, an After Burner clone, was especially notable and featured in TV advertising for the console.

The games were originally meant to be loaded from tape, but were later changed to load from ROM. The game data still needed to be copied from ROM to RAM before it could be used, so less memory was available and the games loaded relatively slowly.

History

The Lynx was the second handheld game with the Atari name to actually be produced, the first was Atari Inc.’s handheld electronic game Touch Me. Atari Inc. had previously worked on several other handheld projects including the Breakout, Space Invaders, and the Atari Cosmos portable/tabletop console. However, those projects were shut down during development – some just short of their intended commercial release.

The Lynx system was originally developed by Epyx as the Handy Game. Planning and design of the console began in 1986 and completed in 1987. Epyx first showed the Handy system at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 1989. Facing financial difficulties, Epyx sought out partners. Atari Corp. and Epyx eventually agreed that Atari Corp. would handle production and marketing, while Epyx would handle software development.

Atari Corp. changed the internal speaker and removed the thumb-stick on the control pad before releasing it as the Lynx, initially retailing in the US at US$189.95. Atari Corp. then showed the Lynx to the press at the Summer 1989 CES as the “Portable Color Entertainment System”, which was changed to Lynx when actual consoles were distributed to resellers.

However, Nintendo’s new Game Boy was also introduced at the 1989 CES. At $90, it was much less expensive than the Lynx, without the color or custom chips. Nintendo had no problems supplying retailers with the Game Boy for the Christmas season while Atari Corp. only managed limited distribution of their Lynx by year’s end.

During 1990, the Lynx had moderate sales but Nintendo’s Game Boy continued to gain market share. In 1991, Atari Corp. relaunched the Lynx with a new marketing campaign, new packaging, slightly improved hardware, and a new sleek look. The new system (referred to within Atari Corp. as the “Lynx II”) featured rubber hand grips and a clearer backlit color screen with a power save option (which turned off the LCD panel’s backlighting). It also replaced the monaural headphone jack of the original Lynx with one wired for stereo. The new packaging made the Lynx available without any accessories, dropping the price to $99. Although sales improved, Nintendo still dominated the handheld market.

As with the actual console units, the game cartridges themselves evolved over the first year of the console’s release. The first generation of cartridges were flat, and were designed to be stackable for ease of storage. However, this design proved to be very difficult to remove from the console and was replaced by a second design. This style, called “tabbed” or “ridged”, used the same basic design as the original cartridges with the addition of two small tabs on the cartridge’s underside to aid in removal. The original flat style cartridges could be stacked on top of the newer cartridges, but the newer cartridges could not be easily stacked on each other, nor were they stored easily. Thus a third style, the “curved lip” style was produced, and all official and third-party cartridges during the console’s lifespan were released (or re-released) using this style.

In May 1991, Sega launched its Game Gear portable gaming handheld. Also a color handheld, in comparison to the Lynx it had a higher cost, smaller bulk, and better battery life. However, the Game Gear was backed up by significantly more popular titles and consequently the market became dominated by Nintendo followed by Sega in a distant second and the Lynx in third.

In 1994, Atari Corp. shifted its focus away from the Lynx. As Nintendo’s Super Nintendo and Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis filled retailers’ shelves, Atari Corp. refocused its efforts on its Jaguar console. A handful of games were released during this time, including Battlezone 2000. In 1996, Atari shut down its internal game development.

Telegames released a number of games in the second half of the 1990s, including a port of Raiden and a platformer called Fat Bobby in 1997, as well as an action sports game called Hyperdrome in 1999. At the end of the 1990s, Hasbro, the owners of the Atari properties at the time, released the rights to develop for the system to the public domain. Since then a number of independent developers released games into the new decade, like Championship Rally, CyberVirus, and Alpine Games.  Some of the late 90s/early 2000s games were under development by other companies at one time, but rights to the game programs and all of the existing code was bought and finished by other developers.

In 2008 Atari was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for pioneering the development of handheld games with its Lynx game unit^.

On October 24, 2009, North American company Super Fighter Team released Zaku, an all new, all original horizontal shooter for the Lynx developed by PenguiNet. Of significant note is that it was the first new game for the system whose game card has an authentic “curved lip” plastic shell. The game also shipped with a full color cardstock box, and 31 page instruction manual printed in both English and French.

Info gleaned from Wikipedia

SEGA megadrive advert from 1991.

The Mega Drive is a fourth-generation video game console released by Sega in Japan in 1988 and Europe in 1990. The console was released in North America in 1989 under the name Genesis, as Sega was unable to secure legal rights to the Mega Drive name in that region. The Mega Drive, heavily marketed as “16-bit” due to its hardware, was Sega’s fifth home console and the successor to the Sega Master System, with which it is electronically compatible.

The Mega Drive was the first of its generation to achieve notable market share in Europe and North America. It was a direct competitor of the TurboGrafx-16 (which was released one year earlier in Japan under the name PC Engine, but at about the same time as the Genesis in North America) and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (which was released two years later). The Mega Drive began production in Japan in 1988 and ended with the last new licensed game being released in 2002 in Brazil.

The Mega Drive was Sega’s most successful console, with over 29 million units sold worldwide. The console and many of its games are still popular today: Some games have been re-released in compilations for newer consoles and/or offered for download on various online services, such as Xbox Live Arcade and Virtual Console. The console is also still popular for fan translations and indie game development.

History

Although the Sega Master System was a success in Europe, and later also Brazil, it failed to ignite much interest in the North American or Japanese markets, which, by the mid-to-late 1980s, were both dominated by Nintendo’s large market shares. Meanwhile in the arcades, the Sega System 16 had become a success. Hayao Nakayama, Sega’s CEO at the time, decided to make its new home system utilize a similar 16-bit architecture^. The final design was eventually also used in the Mega-Tech, Mega-Play and System-C arcade machines. Any game made for the Mega Drive hardware could easily be ported to these systems.

The first name Sega considered for its console was the MK-1601, but it ultimately decided to call it the “Mega Drive”. The name was said to represent superiority and speed, with the powerful Motorola 68000 processor in mind. Sega used the name Mega Drive for the Japanese, European, Asian, Australian and Brazilian versions of the console. The North American version went by the name “Genesis” due to a trademark dispute.

Info gleaned from Wikipedia

1979 UK and Ireland commercial for the Philips Videopac Computer Games System.

The Magnavox Odyssey², known in Europe as the Philips Videopac G7000, in Brazil as the Philips Odyssey, in the United States as the Magnavox Odyssey² and the Philips Odyssey², and also by many other names, is a video game console released in 1978.

In the early 1970s, Magnavox was an innovator in the home video game industry. They succeeded in bringing the first home video game system to market, the Odyssey, which was quickly followed by a number of later models, each with a few technological improvements. In 1978, Magnavox, now a subsidiary of North American Philips, released the Odyssey², their new second-generation video game console.

Design
The original Odyssey had a number of removable circuit cards that switched between the built-in games, of which there were ten in Europe and Asia, and twelve in America. The Odyssey² followed in the steps of the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 by being designed to play programmable ROM cartridges. With this improvement, each game could be a completely unique experience, with its own background graphics, foreground graphics, gameplay, scoring, and music. The potential was enormous, as an unlimited number of games could be individually purchased; a game player could purchase a library of video games tailored to his or her own interest. Unlike any other system at that time, the Odyssey² included a full alphanumeric membrane keyboard, which was to be used for educational games, selecting options, or programming (Magnavox also released a game cartridge called Computer Intro! with the intent of teaching simple computer programming).

The Odyssey² used the standard joystick design of the 1970s and early 1980s: the original console had a moderately-sized silver controller, held in one hand, with a square housing for its eight-direction stick that was manipulated with the other hand. Later releases had a similar black controller, with an 8-pointed star-shaped housing for its eight-direction joystick. In the upper corner of the joystick was a single ‘Action’ button, silver on the original controllers and red on the black controllers. The games, graphics and packaging were designed by Ron Bradford and Steve Lehner.

One other difference in these controllers is that the earliest releases of the silver joystick were removable. They could be plugged and unplugged from the back of the unit, while all later silver and all black controllers were hardwired into the rear of the unit itself.

One of the strongest points of the system was its excellent speech synthesis unit, which was released as an add-on for speech, music, and sound effects enhancement. The area that the Odyssey² may be best remembered for was its pioneering fusion of board and video games: The Master Strategy Series. The first game released was Quest for the Rings!, with gameplay somewhat similar to Dungeons & Dragons, and a storyline reminiscent of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Info taken from Wikipedia