The first major break through in 1980 was the Magnavox Odyssey, which was the world's first home console. It was designed by Ralph Baer, who started working on it around 1966, with a prototype call the brown box. Which is now in a National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Around 100,000 odyssey games were sold the year it was released and 350,000 when a newer model made an appearance.
Odyssey were sued by Atari for patent infringement in the design of Atari s game Pong which closely resembled Odysseys tennis game. Odyssey had other games for example invasion, shooting gallery and more.
Also in 1980 Atari 2600 was released, Atari 2600 was a video game console which used ROM cartridges containing game code.
later, in 1982 Atari inc released a new console called Atari 5200 super-system, but commonly know as just Atari 5200. Which was -like Atari 2600- also a home video game console. The difference with both consoles was that Atari 5200 had an analog joystick and numeric keypad also with start pause and reset buttons.
In 1983 Atari had started to go down hill with many game and consoles unsold. Which resulted in Atari burying a mass of unsold video game cartridges and consoles in a land fill site in new mexico. In the large amount of unsold items among them were a few million copies of "E.T. the extra-terrestrial" which was one of the biggest game failures.
in 1989 in Japan, Nintendo released its first handheld console called the game boy. The game boys best selling games were tetris which has sold 30.26 million, and Pokemon red and blue which sold 23.64 million.
I believe these 10 years were very influential to the video game industry. It brought us the first Nintendo game boy, and the fall in Atari. It also was the start of home consoles, which may be responsible for the fall in arcade game players in the 1990s, most people will probably be sitting in their house playing tennis on their new home console, Magnavox Odyssey.
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