Ask anyone who's been gaming since before broadband was a thing what the first video game console was, and you'll get a dozen different answers. There's a proper answer buried further back than most people bother looking though, and it's a good one: a box that could only ever play one game. Well, a handful of flavours of the same game. No cartridge slot, no disc drive, no updates or patches. Just one chip and a few DIP switches on the front and that's the entire library, forever.
That's not to be considered a flaw by the standards of the time, that's history in the making. For a few mad years in the genesis of video gaming, that was the whole industry. Before Atari's 2600 made "your console plays more than one game" the standard, plenty of lounge rooms met video games through boxes that really only ever played one type of game: a version of tennis, ping pong, or "hit the square with the other square." I love reflecting back on where it all began, because everything you've ever played, right down to whatever's installed on your Steam library right now, has this stuff somewhere in its family tree.
The side project that started it
It traces back to a lunch break, of all things. In 1966, an engineer named Ralph Baer was overseeing hundreds of people building military electronics for a New Hampshire defence contractor. On the side, purely as a hobby, he started sketching out a way to play games on an ordinary television.
By 1968 that sketch had become a working prototype, nicknamed the "Brown Box." It could play a two-player tennis game. It could also play a light-gun shooting game. Baer's employer patented the design and licensed it to Magnavox. Magnavox put it out in September 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console ever sold. That's four years before most people had even heard the phrase "video game."
The Odyssey couldn't do colour. It couldn't keep score on-screen either. It just drew a couple of white squares and a line on a black background and left the rest to your imagination. Magnavox's fix for that was properly analogue: the box shipped with a set of translucent plastic overlays that stuck onto the screen, adding colour and a "court" the hardware itself couldn't produce. It also came with dice, play money and poker chips too, since a chunk of its 28 built-in games needed props the console couldn't provide on its own. It sold around 350,000 units between 1972 and 1975.
The demo that (maybe) started Pong
In May 1972, a Magnavox dealer demo of the Odyssey's tennis game was attended by a young engineer named Nolan Bushnell, and a few months later his company Atari released Pong in arcades. Bushnell always swore he wasn't impressed by what he'd seen at that demo, and he later put it bluntly saying: "I absolutely did see the Odyssey game and I didn't think it was very clever." - Funnily enough, Baer kept a signed guest book from that exact demo as proof Bushnell had been there.
Magnavox sued Atari for patent infringement over it, and in 1976, with Pong already a hit, Atari settled out of court for $1.5 million and licensed Baer's patents so that they could keep selling the game.
Every home needed one
Pong's home version took two more years to turn up. Al Alcorn had built the original arcade Pong. In 1974 he worked with Bob Brown and Harold Lee to shrink an entire arcade cabinet's worth of electronics onto a single chip. By most accounts it was the most complex chip that had been fitted into a mass-market home product, arcade or otherwise. Unfortunately for them, toy retailers weren't interested in the result. They figured "Home Pong" cost too much money and doubted regular shoppers would bother with it.
But retail giant Sears did bother. Its sporting-goods buyer, Tom Quinn, asked Atari how many units it could make in time for Christmas. Bushnell said 75,000 and Quinn offered to fund double that. Home Pong sold out under Sears' Tele-Games brand that Christmas of 1975. By the new year, plugging a box into the telly to belt a ball around had gone from a hobby project to a mainstream Christmas gift.
Fun fact about Al Alcorn... Two years after Home Pong, he took on a teenager for his first job at Atari: Steve Jobs. Alcorn put him onto a new arcade game, Breakout and Jobs brought in a mate to actually build it, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak's habit of squeezing a design onto as few chips as possible carried straight over into how he laid out the Apple II's motherboard a few years later. Alcorn himself later joined Apple as a staff engineer in 1986. Small industry, apparently.
Everyone else wanted a piece of it too
Once Home Pong sold, a chipmaker called General Instrument made the whole idea trivial to copy. Its AY-3-8500 chip, nicknamed "Pong-on-a-chip," had tennis, soccer, squash, a practice mode and two shooting games built into one part that any manufacturer could buy off the shelf and drop into their own case. Around five million of them sold.
Hundreds of nearly identical "TV games" consoles turned up between 1976 and 1978 as a result, most running the exact same six games under a different name and a different shade of fake wood grain. Coleco's Telstar line alone spawned fourteen models and sold over a million units. RadioShack had one. APF had one, built in Japan. By 1977, if a department store didn't have some version of the tennis game near the till, it was the odd one out. I myself had 2 different TV Games kept in bottom drawers around the house growing up, though that was the mid-80's they still got a good amount of play.
Nintendo's quiet start
Nintendo had distributed the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan from 1974. That's what pushed it toward building a console of its own instead of just importing someone else's. The result was the Color TV-Game 6 in 1977, six variations on the same Pong-style "Light Tennis" game. A second model, the Color TV-Game 15, followed in 1978. Between the two, Nintendo sold well over a million units, its first real run as a games company rather than a playing-card one.
The console was designed under Gunpei Yokoi, who'd go on to invent the Game & Watch handhelds and design the original Game Boy. Working under him on this project, fresh out of an industrial design course at art school, was a young hire named Shigeru Miyamoto. But Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong were still years away. His first job was wiring up variations of tennis.
Why it all ended so fast
The Fairchild Channel F turned up in 1976 with a cartridge slot, meaning you could buy a new game without buying a whole new console. Atari's own VCS (renamed the 2600 a few years later) followed in 1977 and made that the new standard almost overnight. Within a couple of Christmases, the one-game boxes that had filled every shelf were clearance stock.
Five or so years, start to finish. One prototype from a lunch break turned into hundreds of near-identical consoles under Christmas trees across three continents. Whatever you're playing on Steam right now has some of this in its lineage somewhere, even if it's a dozen generations removed from a box that only ever played tennis.
Photo credits: Ralph Baer photo by Rolenta (CC BY-SA 4.0); Sears Tele-Games Pong photo by Abraham San Pedro Salazar (CC BY-SA 4.0); Coleco Telstar photo by Maddmaxstar (public domain); Nintendo Color TV-Game 6 photo by Chapuisat (CC BY 2.0); featured Magnavox Odyssey photo by Jeff Keyzer (CC BY-SA 2.0). All sourced via Wikimedia Commons.