History of Video Game Consoles

The development of home and handheld video game systems, shaped by successive hardware generations, changing business models, and new ways to play.

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Magnavox Odyssey: A 1972 home video game console that displayed simple games on a television using removable circuit cards. Its release marked the first commercial home console era.
Video game console generations: A periodization of console history into successive waves of competing hardware with broadly comparable capabilities. Generations organize the chronology around shifts in hardware and competition.
Ralph H. Baer: An engineer whose television game prototypes led to the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home video game console. His prototypes turned television play into a commercial console product.
Video game industry: The global business of developing, publishing, distributing, and selling video games and related hardware. Console cycles became a central structure of the industry's business.
Atari 2600: A 1977 home console that popularized interchangeable game cartridges and helped establish a mass market. Its success made cartridge-based consoles a defining model.
Game cartridge: A removable game-storage medium containing a circuit board and memory or other electronic components. Cartridges defined how many early consoles distributed and ran games.
Brown Box: Ralph Baer's late-1960s prototype for a home video game system, later developed into the Magnavox Odyssey. It was the direct experimental precursor to the first commercial console.
Third-party developer: A game developer that creates software for a platform owned or controlled by another company. Console makers' licensing systems made independent publishers central to the market.
Nintendo Entertainment System: Nintendo's 8-bit home console, released in Japan in 1983 and North America in 1985. Its commercial recovery of the North American market shaped the next generation.
Optical disc: A storage medium read by a laser, including CDs and DVDs used for console games. Disc adoption expanded game capacity and changed manufacturing economics.