IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015 - 60

Atari Video Computer System: Bring Entertainment Stories Home
By Joe Decuir
In 1975, I had a chance to contribute to the foundation of the
consumer video game industry. The microprocessor revolution
allowed the industry to move entertainment from the public
media into people's living rooms. This article will explain the
roots of the industry and how a collection of engineers built
the first successful home game console. Furthermore, to build
an industry, the hardware designers need to make room for
unexpected creativity.
EntErtaInmEnt In 1970
When I was studying engineering at the University of
California at Berkeley, we had music, TV shows, movies, and
live events. We would hear a new song on the radio, buy vinyl
records, and maybe buy concert tickets. We could watch TV
shows from the networks, interspersed with advertising, or
we could buy tickets to see movies. A few of us would buy
tickets to live plays with real actors. The entertainment stories
were defined by others. The only reusable media we had were
those vinyl records or reel-to-reel audio recording tapes to
play again at home. Music compact discs, video tapes, digital
versatile discs, and Blu-ray media were decades in the future.
In the following decades, the microprocessor revolution
changed all of this. The consumer electronics (CE) manufacturers created the video game industry, first in arcades and then
at home. For video games, the entertainment story is defined
by the users themselves, in person-to-person play, in play
against the machine, and in play as part of a team of people
(now online).
EarlY VIDEo gamEs
Video games first appeared at universities, where a large
computer would support some simple user interface to play
games like Spacewar [1]. The story: a user would maneuver
his/her spaceship avatar in a contest with another player and
a gravitational "sun."
The first moves to bring these ideas home were developed
by Ralph Baer with his Brown Box [2] (see Figure 1). Baer was

FIGURE 1. Ralph Baer in his lab. (Photo courtesy of Bob Frankston.)

60 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

july 2015

awarded an Edison Medal by the IEEE for this work [3]. His
machines were discrete logic and diodes, but they accomplished the simple task of generating a game on a home TV set.
Unfortunately, Ralph did not work in the CE industry. This was
back-room work, while his day job was defense work. However,
his company licensed his ideas to Magnavox, a CE company. The
result was the Odyssey game console, sold in 1972 [4].
In the meantime, Nolan Bushnell (the Atari founder) was
trying to bring the Spacewar idea to arcades. Atari's first arcade
product was Computer Space [5]. Then, he witnessed a demonstration of the Brown Box. His simple insight was to bring that
accessible and compelling game to the arcades. Al Alcorn did
the design, and the result was Pong-a wild success [6].
Atari became the leader in arcade video games. As users
became more sophisticated, and as electronics advanced,
Atari began building more complicated arcade games, a good
example of which was Tank [7]. Atari also built a home implementation of Pong [6] and introduced it at Christmastime in
1975. Harold Lee was the primary chip designer. It was also a
great success.
tHE nEW marKEt ProBlEm to solVE
Atari was building video game market success in three areas:
▼ arcade Pong
▼ arcade complex games (e.g., Tank)
▼ home Pong.
Clearly, Atari's competitors would see and try to fill the same
markets and leapfrog it. The clear market need was a way to
bring the more complicated games home.
From an engineering standpoint, there were two implementation choices:
▼ design a new custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for each game
▼ design a programmable system using a new microprocessor and an ASIC to drive the screen and the audio.
Atari studied both architectures. Atari and some competitors built products from custom ASICs, including Atari Video
Pinball [8], and built other products with custom ASICs in a
physical cartridge, e.g., Coleco Telstar Arcade [9].
At Atari, Steve Mayer and Ron Milner were studying a
third option: a processor, an ASIC and replaceable game code
on a ROM cartridge. This option looked like it might need
a frame buffer, and it might be too expensive in 1975. The
two 8-bit microprocessors that dominated the market were
the Intel 8080 [10] and the Motorola 6800 [11]. The quoted
large-volume processor pricing would be in the tens of dollars
(1975). The cost of memory was also looking prohibitive at the
time; a low-resolution bit map, 80 × 48 pixels with two colors,
would cost several dollars (e.g., Fairchild F8) [12].
All of this changed in September of 1975. MOS
Technology announced the MCS6502 [13] at the IEEE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015