The question is: "How do you effectively demonstrate and sell a product that is just plain hard to play at first?" I'll let you answer that question for yourself, but I'll say this much: The prevailing attitudes among the buyers are beginning to change and it's beginning to dawn on people that games with lasting play interest may require a learning process, just as it takes time to become proficient in real-life Ping-Pong, or card games, for example.
What this probably says, is that different design approaches to home TV Games vs coin operated games are in order and I believe you will see that trend reflected in the upcoming crop of 1977 Home TV Games.
Let me go back, for a few more minutes, to cap off the story on the beginnings of Home TV Games. It is probably common knowledge by now that Sanders decided to license the patents which I referred to earlier to one of a number of interested TV receiver manufacturers. Eventually Magnavox expressed a serious interest in building a number of hand tooled units based on our latest Home TV Game designs and market acceptance-testing them at several of their Home Entertainment Center locations in the U. S. An agreement for these tests was worked out in 1971. Actual test results were very encouraging and led to a license agreement between Magnavox and Sanders for their exclusive use of our patents and for rights to sublicense these patents.
The rest is familiar history. Magnavox publicly demonstrated their first Odyssey Home TV Game product in May of 1972 and managed to have substantial production capability on-line by the summer of 1972 to support the first wave of TV Game sales for the Fall and Christmas season of that year. And a pretty good start it turned out to be. In spite of the fact that Magnavox, through their initial advertising, managed to get the idea implanted in people's mind that Odyssey could only be played on Magnavox TV sets, nearly one hundred thousand games and game accessories were sold that short Fall and Winter season; and it has been upward and onward ever since, with ATARI joining the fray in 1975 and a still larger number of substantial suppliers appearing on the scene in 1976.
Some idea of the quantities of Home TV Games sold this past season can be inferred from General Instrument's announcement last month of the shipment of their five-millionth AY-8500 LSI game chip. It can safely be assumed, that the majority of these chips went into merchandise delivered to the shelves of U. S. and some foreign stores and from there to the homes of the TV Ping-Pong, Hockey and Handball players of America, Canada, and a few other places.
So here we are in January of 1977, with a big Home TV Game season behind us and sales at price levels that are just about in line with what I was directing my efforts to almost ten years ago–when I kept making noises about multifunction games for $29.95–which is, of course, just about where we are in terms of today's dollars. Now the question is: Where are we going next?
Gametronics attendee tries Ramtek's Horoscope.
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