The early days of home video games were, to put it lightly, a mess. Dozens of companies scrambled to cash in on the Home Pong craze by releasing largely identical standalone consoles powered by fully identical chipsets all sourced from the same manufacturers. Pong was fun, sure, and the fact that it turned televisions into something you could interact with rather than
simply watch in passive silence felt pretty revolutionary in the ’70s, but the average nuclear American family only needed so many Pongplaying devices to entertain their 1.42 kids on their single 12” blackand- white console television.
There wasn’t much room for the business to grow until proper “programmable” consoles with interchangeable software media supplanted the Pongalikes.
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