making a thread instead of a pinterest board b/c why not
currently contemplating the first-generation of home consoles. lots of really interesting industrial design.
archive.org has a collection of instruction manuals from over 100 different pong-era systems. the market was very glutted.
The majority of these systems used game-on-a-chip designs sourced from half a dozen or so tech companies. The earlier designs were just pong-clones, though they quickly diversified. pong-story.com has an article that goes into more detail about this stuff
http://www.pong-story.com/gi.htm
Here’s the Ping-O-Tronic (pong-story.com, wikipedia). Apparently it does not use a pong-on-a-chip, but apparently uses a bespoke analog design (!). It was made by an Italian furniture company called Zanussi, which makes about as much sense as a Connecticut leather company or a Japanese toy company making electronic games.
Beautiful.
Its follow-up, the Play-O-Tronic, uses a generic pong chip and doesn’t look quite as striking:
I love how Nintendo’s breakout clone looks.
The Coleco Telstar Arcade is a beautiful, ridiculous thing. That triangle thing on the top is actually a cartridge that contains a game-on-a-chip. Absolutely wild.
