The Epoch System 10: The Pong to End All Pongs

Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format “ZZM” existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise...

It’s 1977, and you’re in charge of the large Toshiba Corporation. Video games seem to be possibly a real market, and as an innovative electronics firm, you’ve got to get in on the ground floor. Sure, you’ve got Epoch to make you a copy of their System 10 as the TVG-610, but that’s so limited, you know pongs don’t have a future. But you don’t have...

People like to say that 1980’s games are highly regionalized. You could easily recognize a European-developed game like Rare’s Wizards and Warriors, and spot a Japanese-developed game like Bashi Bazook: Morphoid Masher from a mile away. Or, at least, maybe you could have if Jaleco had actually released Bio Senshi Dan outside of Japan. But that’s...

The Epoch Cassette Vision was a moderate success. But in 1983, that all ended, when Nintendo and Sega released new consoles, which had more advanced hardware that allowed for better graphics and games stored on ROM. Epoch went from dominating the cartridge-based game market in Japan to a distant third practically overnight. But it’s not like they...

When I asked the question, “what made the NES so interesting”, my answer was to describe the memory mappers used by the console. But what’s interesting is that the very first cartridge to feature a memory mapper was not from Nintendo themselves; they were late to the game of expansion hardware on cartridges, since their plan to expand the console...