Before Sega and Nintendo, the video game industry saw an epic battle for technical supremacy and consumer sales between Atari with their pioneering 2600 system and the ground breaking Intellivision, developed by the toy company Mattel, better known for Barbie and Hot Wheels.
This is a fascinating account of the development of a video games console, designed from the ground up to be expandable as a modular hub for a home computer system featuring a keyboard, online connectivity and even a voice synthesiser. Most of the planned expansions never came to pass, but even the base system is a technical marvel. Featuring revolutionary graphics, sound, and adaptable controllers with 16 directional controls, a numbered keypad and nifty slot in overlays for each game, the system really did deserve its portmanteau name derived from ‘Intelligent Television’.
This book goes into considerable technical detail about the base operating system, how it was programmed and the advantages that it had over Atari’s more primitive offering. The business and economics of the video game industry of the late 70s and early 80s are also explored in depth, with the circumstances leading up to the first video games crash being clearly explained.
This book can stand along side ‘The Soul of a New Machine’ by Tracy Kidder, the other classic work from this era about the development of a computer system from the ground up. It’s freely available from the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/mit_press_book_9780262380553
No comments:
Post a Comment