Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge

(1/2) > >>

Deozaan:
Here's an interesting article about the world before interchangeable game cartridges existed, and how the game cartridge came to be.

Consider the humble video game cartridge. It's a small, durable plastic box that imparts the most immediate, user-friendly software experience ever created. Just plug it in, and you're playing a game in seconds.

If you’ve ever used one, you have two men to thank: Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel, who invented the game cartridge 40 years ago while working at an obscure company and rebounding from a business failure. Once the pair's programmable system had been streamlined and turned into a commercial product—the Channel F console—by a team at pioneering electronics company Fairchild, it changed the fundamental business model of home video games forever. By injecting flexibility into a new technology, it paved the way for massive industry growth and the birth of a new creative medium.

--- End quote ---




http://www.fastcompany.com/3040889/the-untold-story-of-the-invention-of-the-game-cartridge

bit:
I want one!!!
No, wait; that's really outdated stuffs--
Hmm, but-- :-[ now I -really- want one!!!  :-*

Deozaan:
Here's a related story about resurrecting an old Atari cartridge from the landfill:

The Story
Earlier this year the fabled Atari Landfill was discovered as part of a documentary called "Atari: Game Over".

The documentary covers what caused the gaming market to crash, and also the search for the "lost landfill" where Atari allegedly dumped millions of unsold games.  Unlike the bigfoot shows they actually did find what they were looking for – a big heap of games – and many of them were recently put up for auction on eBay.

Atari was a big part of my childhood and modding the consoles is what got me started in the maker community, so I felt obliged to own one of these trashy relics. Didn't have to be ET, anything from that site was good enough for me. I went with Asteroids and Star Raiders (with keypad!) I actually quite like 2600 Asteroids.

Back in the day the games were dumped, steamrolled and then covered with cement to stop looters. From the auction photos I could tell the cartridges were fairly intact inside their boxes, so I reasoned the PCBs were likely still intact.

My goal was to obtain one of these cartridges and try to bring it back to life. To actually PLAY a landfill cartridge that had been buried for 31 years!-http://www.benheck.com/atari-landfill-cartridge-resurrection/
--- End quote ---

Read the rest on BenHeck.com.

bit:
Wow, Atari wasn't the only thing bulldozed.
After WWII the US Military laid thousands of katanas out on pavement and ran over them with bulldozers, and people are still trying to resurrect the tradition in the same way as with the Atari.

I used to hate tv commercials (still mostly do).
Then one day in the age of DVDs, I dragged out an old tv movie-grab on a VCR cassette that was complete with original commercials, and the nostalgia effect was so powerful watching outdated commercials from another era that I ended up enjoying the commercials as much as the movie.

BTW, I looked it up, and in Japanese, 'atari' means 'to hit the target' or 'to receive something fortuitously'.

That Atari console in the ^pic is actually quite stylish.

Deozaan:
That Atari console in the ^pic is actually quite stylish.-bit (January 23, 2015, 09:02 PM)
--- End quote ---

That's not an Atari. That's a Channel F console. The first console that used cartridges.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page