XVIII.
HOME ELECTRONIC GAME CATEGORIES
JERRY EIMBINDER
Electronic Engineering Times
Great Neck, New York
Today's home electronic games fall into twelve categories as shown in table one. The first category is dedicated TV games such as the Magnavox Odyssey series. There is an equivalent category in the coin-operated equipment business into which machines such as Atari's original Pong fall.
The second home electronic game cateogry lies between dedicated TV games and programmable TV games. It is called chip-alterable TV games and is illustrated by National Semiconductor's Adversary. To change the set of games available in an Adversary system, one master game chip can be substituted for another.
The original version of Adversary, introduced in fall, 1976 offered three games –– hockey, tennis and handball. Over 200,000 original Adversary games were sold in 1976 by National Semiconductor. Owners of these sets will be able to have their game chips replaced by newer devices as they become available.
Scheduled for June announcement is a new Adversary offering soccer, pinball, and "Wipeout" in addition to the original three games. Owners of existing Adversary sets will probably have to wait until National's own needs are satisfied before integrated circuits become available for upgrading of systems already sold.
The next category is programmable home TV games.
The first home TV game to use replaceable cartridges was Fairchild's Video Entertainment System, available in limited quantities in August 1976. Each cartridge contains a semiconductor memory programmed to reproduce specific games on a television screen.
The system provides two resident games –– hockey and tennis.
The heart of the system is the game console, which includes a Fairchild F8 microprocessor and four solid-state random-access memories. For many games, the score and elapsed time are continuously displayed at the bottom of the screen.
The Fairchild unit uses eight-position hand controls. The controller can be pushed forward, pulled back, pulled left or right, twisted left or right, and pulled up or pushed down.
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