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Atari's Lost Game System- The Game Brain
During the two years after Atari had introduced PONG to the world, the company released a steady stream of dedicated consoles that played a variety of table tennis type games. Atari consoles from that era included SuperPONG, UltraPONG, and PONG Pro-Am. Not exactly the most diverse group of systems, but it was the same thing as every other video game company was doing at the time.
With the release of the Fairchild Channel F and other cartridge based consoles, the era of dedicated PONG consoles was coming to an end. Unfortunately, Atari had thousands of leftover PONG chips, the CPUs that were the heart of their consoles.
The company devised a plan to get rid of their surplus microprocessors by making a mega-PONG system that combined all of their previous dedicated consoles into one monster machine. Unfortunately, Atari decided against releasing this console, instead focusing on development of an even more advanced system, the VCS. Keep reading for the story of Atari's lost treasure, the Game Brain.
The Game Brain, Atari Model C-700, was supposed to be able to play every single PONG game that Atari had ever released. But it wasn't just a simple matter of designing a super PONG chip that played every single game. Atari also had a warehouse full of nearly obsolete chips designed for older PONG models that it needed to get rid of. Designing a console that would house up to 10 separate chips would be difficult and the end product would be overly cluttered and expensive. Instead, Atari came up with a clever solution to their problem.
The PONG chips would not be housed in the console at all. Instead, they would be built into game cartridges that plugged into the system. The insides of the Game Brain console would be nearly empty, only housing a few circuits in the game paddles that controlled their input. The cartridges would function as mini PONG systems, complete with their own little on/off switches.
The Game Brain's backwards compatibility even extended to controllers. Gamers could take the controllers off of their older PONG systems (only the ones that had removable controllers in the first place) and plug them into jacks on the back of the Game Brain. The new console even came with small reference cards to remind players of the control scheme for the particular game they were playing.
In the end, Atari planned to release a total of 10 Game Brain cartridges, including all the old PONG titles along with more obscure releases like Video Music. The Game Brain collection would have condensed Atari's first 2 years of home video games into one neat package. Unfortunately, Atari was starting to run low on money and they decided to sink their dwindling cash supply into the development of the VCS (which would turn out to be a very good plan).
It is unfortunate that the Game Brain was never released. It would have been a fitting end to the legendary first generation of video game consoles. Eventually, a variation of the Game Brain project did find the light of day as the entire library of original PONG games was released in 1977 as an Atari VCS cart called Video Olympics.
Only 3 prototype Game Brain consoles and 5 prototype cartridges are known to exist.
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