History- When Ralph Baer was shopping around his original Brown Box prototype in the early 70's, RCA, a TV manufacturer, came very close to buying the rights to it. However, they ultimately declined, and the Brown Box was instead bought by Maganvox and became the Odyssey. The Odyssey line made Magnavox a major player in the home video game market. RCA had let a golden opportunity go by rejecting Baer's console, and they attempted to make up for their mistake by developing a game console of their own.

RCA's new game system would not be a dedicated, PONG style console, like nearly everything else on the market. Instead, they would use a new technology, programmable game cartridges. The only other game console to use this method of gameplay was Fairchild's Video Entertainment System. RCA's console, called the Studio II, was released in late 1976. The Studio II came out only a few months after Fairchild's VES, making it only the second cartridge based system ever released.

Unfortunately, cartridges were the only advanced part of the Studio II. The system only displayed games in black-and-white, not in color, which had quickly become the industry standard. The Studio II also ditched detached joystick controllers in favor of a pair of stationary numeric keypads mounted on the console itself. Game sounds came from a small internal speaker, which was only capable of a few rudimentary beeps. The graphical capabilities were quite primitive compared to contemporary systems.

These unfortunate design flaws meant that the Studio II was technologically far behind their competition from the first day it was launched. RCA's console lagged far behind the superior VES in sales, and was finished off for good by Atari's blockbuster VCS. RCA learned their lesson and left the video game hardware business for good

Games- 5 games were preprogrammed onto the Studio II. An additional 11 were available separately. Of these additional games, the only one of note is Bingo, which came with a number of Bingo cards and marker chips.

Collector's Guide- Because of the poor quality of the Studio II, the system is generally only desirable for completists who want every console from the era. Despite it's unpopularity, it's low production run makes it difficult to find. The games themselves usually come bundled with the system, as they are not very desirable on their own. The most collectible of all Studio II games is Bingo, which comes with a number of accessories and can be as expensive as the console itself.

An important thing to note about the Studio II is it uses a proprietary switchbox which both the power supply and RF adapter are connected to. No other generic RF adapters can be used with the Studio II. When buying a Studio II, make sure that it comes with the switchbox, as they are very difficult to find on their own.

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