5 HUGELY Important Video Game Consoles (You Haven't Heard Of)

With the releases of the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, the end of 2020 will see the beginning of the ninth generation of games consoles. This will be the fourth generation where Sony and Microsoft, together with Nintendo, will dominate the market, having gone unchallenged by other companies since the discontinuation of Sega’s Dreamcast in 2001.

Sega’s downfall was the most notable since that of Atari five years prior in 1996, when their final roll of the dice, the Atari Jaguar, bombed against the Playstation and Nintendo 64.

It’s almost unthinkable to imagine new companies attempting to make any headway in today’s oligopolistic landscape, but until just a few years before the Jaguar’s failure, the console industry was something of a free-for-all.

With both established and unknown companies all trying to capture a piece of the rapidly growing new market across its first few generations, Sega and Nintendo emerged truly dominant with the Mega Drive and SNES. Notable casualties included Mattel (the Intellivision), Apple (Bandai Pippin), Sir Alan Sugar’s Amstrad (GX4000), Philips (the CD-i) and even EA (the 3DO), who switched their focus to games instead.

In amongst all of these are a host of forgotten systems that brought innovations or ground-breaking technology to the table, changing the industry as it was replicated and improved upon by others. Here are five such consoles that paved the way for the games we enjoy today, but are mostly unknown outside of museum exhibits.

There is considerable debate about what the first ever video game was. Programmers began sharing creations that could be rudimentarily defined as ‘games’ as early as 1950. A precursor to Pong first emerged in 1958, before Spacewar, a game created at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) in 1962, was replicated and commercially released by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1971.

Bushnell is often cited as ‘the father of the industry’. He and Dabney founded Atari in 1972 and the history is much clearer from there, as their development of Pong for arcades in the same year kickstarted an industry that has gone from strength to strength in the 48 years since. Atari's most famous creation was suspiciously similar to ‘Table Tennis’, one of the titles included within Ralph Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey, which Bushnell attended a demonstration of in California in early 1972.

Though it achieved reasonable sales figures in its three years on the market (350,000 units) and wouldn’t be challenged as a home console until Atari began releasing home versions of Pong in 1975, the Odyssey quickly fell into obscurity, largely forgotten by all but video game historians. No new games were developed after 1973 and no move was made to sell the system outside of Magnavox stores or make it available for non-Magnavox televisions.

Though flawed, the Odyssey was first and will always viewed as ground-breaking as a result.