10 Little-Known Decisions That Changed The Course Of Gaming History

9. Fairchild Choose The Cartridge

Most early gaming 'consoles' had one particularly major limitation - they could only play the games that were built into them. This meant that in order to innovate and create new games, developers had to constantly launch new versions of their systems - Atari releasing six in the two year period between 1975 and 1977 alone. Fairchild, predominantly a semiconductor company, entered the market in 1976 with the Channel F. Though somewhat basic, even for the time, it instead played games that were stored on cartridges, which were sold separately to the console. Fairchild's creation quickly faded into obscurity, but Atari liked their idea. They copied the formula for their 1977 release, the VCS, which later became known as the Atari 2600 and became the first console to achieve any form of longevity in a market dominated by products with short life cycles. Cartridges continued as the dominant medium for almost twenty years, favoured by both Nintendo and Sega before Sony opted to use compact discs on the original PlayStation.