Let me finish this brief review and preview of cable games to come with this observation. I believe the techniques and incentives are now at hand to make a meaningful technical and marketing assault on one-way cable games possible. Whether the cable industry can be motivated to move in this direction remains to be seen. It is entirely possible that nothing will happen until that long awaited multifunction terminal appears which, in conjunction with a two-way cable, will let us do our shopping, meter reading, and all the other etceteras we've been reading about for years. When that happens, games will certainly be a part of such systems. But that part of the TV Game story comes under the heading of information to which many of us have been overexposed in the past, and I will stay away from that area, as promised.
A few minutes ago I talked about video tape recordings in conjunction with cable TV broadcast game programs. This leads me to the last TV Game related topic, and that is the future relationship between TV Games and Video Tape or Disc Playback Equipment.
Remember, the Sony cassette with the prerecorded Hockey Game I described in connection with Category 2. and 3. Cable Games? Obviously, if you eliminate the cable by putting the video tape deck into your living room and connecting your TV Game Box to the tape deck; you now have a videotape-assisted hockey game you can play at home, in which both you and your opponent have a whole team playing for you on-screen.
Stretching our imagination a little further, we can visualize road-racing games in which our TV set becomes a convincing view through the windshield. While the pictorial imagary comes from the tape, we will do electronic processing of this video information to suit it to your steering wheel commands. Meanwhile digital data will be extracted from your video recording during Vertical Interval. It will allow your microprocessor to react to such things as sideswiping or collisions or running off the road, perhaps by using the digital data to identify various pictorial objects in terms of their location on screen.
At any rate, there is little doubt that once video tape or disc home entertainment systems have become a widely-accepted consumer product, a game playing capability will be one of the things you will find in every machine.
As digital memory gets cheaper, another thing that will happen will be the use of your color TV set as a canvas on which you can doodle, or paint seriously, if you will; again, your video recording equipment will serve as temporary or permanent storage, while you are in the process of painting, or after you have finished. Perhaps at sometime in the future when you ask a friend to come up and look at your etchings, you really mean to trot out your latest collection of video art for him—or her.
- Fairchild's cartridge game records score and time remaining at bottom of screen.
