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screen. Although the company was not interested in pursuing his idea, Baer did
not give up. In 1966, now working for a different company, he and colleague Bill
Harrison developed a game called Chase. This used a “console” - a special-pur-
pose box of electronic circuitry - to allow the user to control images displayed
on a TV screen. This was the first video game to use a standard television for
its display. The technology was licensed to a company called Magnavox, which
released the world's first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in
1972. Through a system of plug-in devices called cartridges , the same console
was able to play a small number of different games, including table tennis
and various shooter games. After a TV advertising campaign that starred Frank
Sinatra, Magnavox sold more than one hundred thousand consoles in 1972.
During its entire life span, more than two million Odyssey systems were sold.
In these early consoles, the games were hard wired into the electronic cir-
cuitry, as in the early arcade machines, and it was difficult to add new games.
Bushnell was frustrated by this limitation and wanted to produce a flexible video
game console that could play all of Atari's current games. However, to bring such
a console to market, Bushnell needed more funding so he sold Atari to Warner
Communications in 1976. However, after a series of disagreements with Warner
managers, Bushnell left the company in 1978. By the second half of the 1970s,
the software for video games was being developed for consoles that contained
microprocessors. Game cartridges were now programs burned into ROM (read-
only memory) chips that could be plugged into a slot on the game console. In
1977, the Atari 2600 was released offering nine different games and soon became
one of the most popular consoles of the time. However, it was not until Atari
made a console version of Space Invaders that the company had the first “killer
app” for video game consoles. Atari released its last console, the Atari Jaguar, in
1993. It was not a commercial success, and sales of the console ended in 1996.
In 1985, the Japanese company Nintendo reenergized the video game console
market with the release of its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The hard-
ware came bundled with two controllers and the game Super Mario Bros. This
game was designed by the Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto ( B.9.8 ). He
based Mario on a character, originally called Jumpman, that he had used in his
earlier arcade game success Donkey Kong. After the failure of Nintendo's Radar
Scope arcade game in the United States in 1980, the runaway success of Donkey
Kong had saved the company from financial collapse. For the game Super Mario
Bros. on the new NES console, Miyamoto gave Mario a big mustache and Italian
nationality, and based him in New York City because of its “labyrinthine subter-
ranean network of sewage pipes.” 4 In the game, Mario has to explore eight differ-
ent worlds and defeat many enemies to rescue Princess Peach. Jumping to access
places is a key ability in Mario games. The game also used the idea of “power-
ups.” Mario can acquire three different power-ups: the Super Mushroom, which
causes him to grow larger; the Fire Flower, which allows him to throw fireballs;
and the Starman, which gives him temporary invincibility.
Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. game was the first successful “side-scrolling”
game. Side scrolling is a computer graphics technique in which the action is viewed
from the side and the on-screen character moves from left to right through the
scene, but can also go backward as well as forward. This technique is typically
used for what are called “platform” games - action games featuring characters
B.9.7. Toru Iwatani was born in
Tokyo and joined the computer
software company Namco in 1977.
He led the team that designed and
built the arcade version of what was
called Pac-Man in the United States,
and the game was first released in
Japan in 1980. The game quickly
became an international success and
was one of the first video games to
appeal to players of both sexes.
 
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