Color TV-Game

Lore & Background

The Color TV-Game series was developed as Nintendo moved away from toys and playing cards into the video game market, spurred by the success of Space Invaders and the 1973 oil crisis. Nintendo had no prior electronics manufacturing experience and partnered with Mitsubishi Electronics, which had previously produced Nintendo's EVR Race. For the first two models, Nintendo licensed technology from Magnavox to produce Pong clones. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi ordered the consoles to be built quickly with cheap parts to keep consumer prices low. The first model, Color TV-Game 6, launched on June 1, 1977, at a price significantly lower than competitors. It offered six variations of Pong. One week later, Color TV-Game 15 launched at roughly 50% higher price, featuring detachable controllers and the same fifteen games (only six accessible on the TV-Game 6 without modification). Racing 112, released June 8, 1978, was a top-down racer with a detachable wheel and two paddle controllers. Block Kuzushi, released April 23, 1979, included six Breakout variations; its casing was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. The final model, Computer TV-Game, released December 12, 1980, contained an arcade-perfect version of Computer Othello and was produced in limited quantities due to declining interest in dedicated consoles.

Reader's Guide

The Color TV-Game series was a commercial hit, selling one million units each of the Color TV-Game 6 and 15, and half a million each of Racing 112 and Block Kuzushi. Its low price point was a key factor in its success, establishing Nintendo's philosophy that consoles must be sold at a profit. The series gave Nintendo confidence to continue in the video game hardware market, leading to the Family Computer (Famicom) in 1983 and its international counterpart, the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Block Kuzushi model marked the debut of Shigeru Miyamoto, who later created Mario. Nintendo has referenced the series in later games: Alleyway for the Game Boy is considered a throwback to Block Kuzushi, and WarioWare titles include a microgame based on Racing 112. The colorful casing, resembling toys, also contributed to the systems' appeal. The series was discontinued in 1983 in favor of the cartridge-based Famicom.

Did You Know?

• The Color TV-Game series is the highest-selling first-generation video game console line, with three million units sold across the first four models.
• Shigeru Miyamoto designed the casing for the Color TV-Game Block Kuzushi, one of his first video game projects.
• A promotional version of Color TV-Game 6 was produced for House Foods' instant noodles, featuring the House Shanmen logo and made in very limited quantities.
• The Computer TV-Game contains an arcade-perfect rendition of Computer Othello, an uncommon feature for home consoles in the early 1980s.

The Microprocessor Revolution

The second generation of home consoles was fundamentally reshaped by a single technological leap: the microprocessor. Before this shift, arcade machines and first-generation consoles like the original Magnavox Odyssey relied on discrete electronic components and fixed-logic integrated circuits. Even when manufacturers produced application-specific chips to consolidate those circuits, each unit still contained only one unchangeable program. Atari's engineers recognized that spending between one hundred and two hundred fifty thousand dollars on a hardware unit designed for a single game—only to see it become obsolete within three months—was simply not viable. Intel's 4004 microprocessor, introduced in 1971, changed the calculus entirely by allowing software programs to be written around a general-purpose chip. By the time prices made these processors affordable for consumer hardware, engineers at Atari's Cyan Engineering subsidiary and at Alpex Computer Corporation saw the opportunity to build programmable home consoles. Alpex partnered with Fairchild Camera and Instrument to produce the Channel F in 1976, and the Magnavox Odyssey² followed in 1978, both riding this new wave of programmable silicon.

Cartridge Technology and the Portable Game

The transition from fixed-logic hardware to programmable consoles brought a parallel revolution in how players accessed games. The first-generation Magnavox Odyssey had experimented with cartridge-like circuit cards, but those offered limited functionality and still required physical TV screen overlays and other accessories to make a game fully playable. The Fairchild Channel F, released in 1976, established the modern ROM cartridge format: a read-only memory chip mounted on a circuit board inside a hard casing designed to survive repeated physical insertion into the console and to resist static electricity buildup. This design became the industry standard, and most subsequent systems—including the Atari 2600 in 1977 and the Magnavox Odyssey² in 1978—adopted similar cartridge technology. The popularity of swappable game cartridges grew rapidly after the Atari 2600's launch, and from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, cartridges remained the dominant delivery method for home video games until optical discs eventually replaced them. A few early systems, such as the RCA Studio II, still bundled built-in games alongside cartridge slots, but the era's defining shift was toward fully self-contained, replaceable software packages.

Arcade-to-Home Pipeline and the Birth of Third-Party Development

The second generation existed in a symbiotic relationship with the golden age of arcade video games, and much of its content was shaped by that connection. As home consoles became more capable of replicating arcade experiences, publishers increasingly turned to porting proven arcade titles. Space Invaders, widely regarded as the first killer-app arcade game to make the jump to a home platform, arrived on the Atari 2600 in 1980, though earlier Atari-published arcade titles had been ported to the 2600 before that milestone. When the ColecoVision launched in August 1982, it shipped bundled with Nintendo's Donkey Kong, underscoring how arcade franchises anchored home console sales. On the development side, the generation also witnessed the birth of the third-party software industry. In 1979, four former Atari programmers—frustrated by management conflicts following Warner Communications' acquisition of Atari—founded Activision, the first independent developer of video games. The company remained small through the 1980s but eventually grew into a major 21st-century gaming force, and its success inspired large corporations to launch or acquire their own software subsidiaries.

The 1983 Crash and the Close of an Era

The very success that defined the second generation ultimately sowed the seeds of its collapse. By 1982, toy store shelves were buckling under an overabundance of consoles, over-hyped game releases, and a flood of low-quality titles from newly arrived third-party developers. The market had grown to include more than fifteen different consoles, and the combination of over-saturation with poor understanding of consumer demand proved fatal. Beginning in December 1982 and stretching through all of 1984, the video game crash devastated the North American market. Developers collapsed, new console game development ground to a near halt, and by mid-1985 the number of console games announced for U.S. release had effectively dropped to zero. The industry did not fully recover until the arrival of the third generation. The second generation itself officially ended in 1992, when the Atari 2600—still one of the era's most iconic platforms—was finally discontinued, closing the book on a period that had transformed video games from fixed-logic curiosities into a sprawling, programmable entertainment industry.