Console Portraits: a 40-year-old pictorial of gaming

[Lady Jaye]

Found this today on Wired.com. Didn't remember that Mr. Baer's Brown Box turns 40 this month. Enjoy the pics, even though you've probably seen these pics before.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/multimedia/2007/05/gallery_game_history

In general, it's a very good pictorial, despite a couple of mistakes. Nintendo didn't rename Jumpman Mario for SMB. And last I checked, the PS2 wasn't released in 2007...

[Flack]

The Mario thing was the first thing I caught; he was Mario in Mario Bros. years before Super Mario Bros.

[MrRoboto19XX]

Splitting hairs as I may be, it's a decent article, but the fact that they have a Japanese Dreamcast with a European controller bothers me.

[Lady Jaye]

Wasn't he renamed Mario for DK Jr (which came out before Mario Bros.)?

[Arcade Antics]

Wasn't he renamed Mario for DK Jr (which came out before Mario Bros.)?
Correct, he's named Mario right on the instruction sheet on the CPO. :) (DK Junior - 1982, Mario Bros. - 1983)

[Nebagram]

Nice article, though a little bitty in pieces. I suppose that can be forgiven- trying to sum up the whole history of videogames in 47 pictures is a task I wouldn't wish on anyone...

[rolenta]

The Brown Box wasn't 'wired to a black-and-white TV'. It was capable of generating color graphics. Magnavox released the Odyssey in B&W only to save money.

[Push Upstairs]

So what was the video game system that Frank Sinatra helped sell?


That Atari Force sure had some sexy outfits. DEAD SEXY!

[Lady Jaye]

A quick google gives the answer: the original Odyssey (TV ad in the fall of 1972). Now, it'd be cool if anyone had a copy of that ad somewhere... but I doubt it (or at least not digitized). I have tons of videogame TV ads spanning the years, and I never saw that one (and this despite a more intensive search that I did last fall for Montreal's Arcadia Festival).

http://www.pong-story.com/odyssey.htm

[vintagegamecrazy]

Kinda fun to think back and look at a few pics. Kudos to Ralph Baer once again!

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

Splitting hairs as I may be, it's a decent article, but the fact that they have a Japanese Dreamcast with a European controller bothers me.
All the console pics in the article are weird. They have a US SNES with a European controller. They have an obscure PAL Asian Mega Drive. A European CBS Colecovision. It's cool, but I wonder why they did it that way? The article itself is obviously U.S.-centric.

And what's up with their Wii picture? All the other pictures are high quality advertising photos, but for the Wii they just used some random pic from someone's Flickr album? Maybe it's the article's author or something.

Anyway, fun. But the ads that would randomly come up ruined it. I usually refuse to continue using sites that do that sort of thing, but I stuck it out this time just because I was cerious to see what they chose to show.


...word is bondage...