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

The next generation of consoles will still have disc drives, with physical copies of games still available for purchase. The continued rise of digital distribution means that they will probably be the last as physical media is rendered more and more archaic.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that discs and their precursor cartridges had always been a staple of games consoles. The Magnavox Odyssey had ‘game cards’ that were purchasable separately, but only activated games already contained within the console. The subsequent wave of Magnavox releases, as well as Atari’s home versions of Pong and many others, would then only play the games that were built into the system. They therefore released new versions with new games on a regular basis, making systems quickly obsolete.

Fairchild, an American semiconductor company, entered the market in late 1976 with one major innovation – removable game cartridges. Games were sold separately and could be switched out of the system at will, ending the practice of forcing customers to buy a whole new system if they became bored with the games available to them.

The technology was quickly copied across the board, with Atari’s 2600 ascending to the top of the market with millions of sales. Fairchild quietly trundled along with moderate sales before exiting the market after the infamous crash of 1983.

Cartridges would be a staple of Nintendo consoles for the next 20 years, becoming iconic items that are still sought out by collectors today.