IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2021 - 59

Column: Industry Trends

History of Video Game
Distribution
Michael Mattioli
Goldman Sachs & Co.

Abstract-Video games were originally distributed through fixed-function appliances or
gaming consoles. As technology improved, various forms of physical media were used to
distribute games, such as cartridges and discs. While this provided versatility, it also
carried physical design considerations and complexities surrounding backwardcompatibility. Today, digital distribution is growing rapidly and beginning to overtake
physical media. Cloud gaming is disrupting distribution even further by eliminating local
storage, compute, and rendering and shifting all of those tasks to cloud compute
resources.

& SOME

OF THE earliest video game consoles,
such as the Magnavox Odyssey shown in
Figure 1, functioned as dedicated systems or
appliances, which could only support a single or
fixed number of games.
Games were designed and implemented using
a variety of integrated circuits (ICs), which were
arranged on a custom printed circuit board
(PCB). For example, Atari's Pong, designed by Al
Alcorn, was implemented entirely in hardware
using ICs, which were originally designed for use
in televisions-not a single line of program code
was used2. Conscious of the cost of the overall
system, game designers were limited by what

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2020.3032778
Date of publication 21 October 2020; date of current version
2 February 2021.

March/April 2021

could be done with ICs which were readily available at the time.
As semiconductor manufacturing processes
improved and consoles used more general-purpose
hardware such as random-access memory (RAM),
central processing units (CPUs), and graphical
processing units (GPUs), consoles moved to readonly memory (ROM) cartridges. Consumers were
now able to purchase new games that could be
played on the same (existing) console by simply
removing and inserting the cartridge containing the
game they wished to play. The Fairchild Channel F
was one of the first consoles to feature a ROM cartridge; an example of such can be seen in Figure 2.
ROM cartridges were typically proprietary in
design and implementation; in other words, they
were designed to be used solely with one specific console. However, there are instances of
consoles maintaining backward-compatibility

Published by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society

2162-2248 ß 2020 IEEE

59



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