The Console Wars have been a part of gaming since almost the very beginning. For decades, generations of gamers have chosen sides in many great struggles, bravely carrying their favorite company's standard into battle against all enemies.

Things were much simpler back in the old days. The average gamer's age was much younger than it is today. This meant that they (or most likely their parents) usually could not afford more than one gaming system. People were forced to pick between the two or three major competitors and then stick with them through thick and thin.

The console manufacturers did everything they could to sway young gamers to their side. They were tempted with exclusive titles that couldn't be found anywhere else like Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mega Man, and Final Fantasy. Fancy peripherals like the Power Glove and Super Scope promised to revolutionalize gaming. Colorful ads for the hottest new games were placed all over comic books and during Saturday morning cartoons. (Remember "Sega does what Nintendon't"?)

Many older gamers are decorated veterans of the Console Wars. They remember the mythical multigenerational contest between Nintendo and Sega, the rise of Sony's Playstation empire, the brave last stand of the Dreamcast, the failure of the Saturn and the GameCube, and the legendary battle between the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar during the 1993 holiday season.

There are a few gamers who remember an even earlier age, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and primitive consoles fought each other with pixelated clubs for control of a primordial market. In the beginning, most home gaming systems were nothing more than fancy Pong machines. By the mid-1970's advanced consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey, Fairchild Channel F, and Bally Professional Arcade gained the ability to play a variety of more advanced games. These systems were marginally profitable, but none of them could gain dominance over the emerging home gaming market.

The Atari VCS:

In 1977, Atari decided to enter the world of home gaming systems. The company, under its legendary founder Nolan Bushnell, had previously released Pong, which was in part responsible for the rise of the electronic gaming industry. At the time, game consoles were starting to utilize the exciting new technology of interchangeable game cartridges to allow hundreds of different titles to be played on one machine. The Atari engineering team used that futuristic cartridge technology to create an advanced new machine that would be known as the Video Computer System.

The Atari VCS started slowly, selling only around 250,000 units the first year. The company quickly turned things around by signing exclusive deals with the makers of popular arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man which allowed the games to be ported to the VCS. Exclusive games and lackluster competition helped Atari rocket to the top of the gaming world. At the peak of their success, Atari sold nearly 8 million VCS consoles in one year.

The Mattel Intellivision:

The Mattel company, known for creating Barbie and other traditional toys, entered the electronic gaming industry in 1980 with their Intellivision console. When Mattel launched the Intellivision, Atari ruled the gaming landscape with every other company fighting for second place.

The Intellivision had better graphics and was more powerful than the VCS They also had advanced peripherals like a voice synthesis module and the support of top third party game developers. Despite these advantages, there was little chance that Mattel would be able dislodge Atari from its position at the top. However, Mattel had a secret weapon that they hoped would help them do what no other company could and topple the VCS.

Mattel unleashed famous actor George Plimpton on Atari, featuring him in a series of print and TV ads which attacked the VCS for its inferior graphics. As anyone who grew up in the 80's knows, George Plimpton was the authoritative word when it came to video games, and when he came out on the side of the Intellivision, it was all people needed to jump ship from Atari to Mattel.

These attack ads were unprecedented at the time, no company had ever gone after another the way that Mattel had against Atari. The ads helped put the Intellivision on the radar, and for the first time, there was actually two serious competitors for the gamer's dollar. In 1982, the Intellivision sold 2 million units and was starting to chip away at Atari's market share. Unfortunately, a series of blunders by Mattel, including the continued delay of an advanced keyboard/cassette storage add-on which had been promised shortly after the system launched, kept the Intellivision from reaching the top of the industry.

Both Atari and Mattel soon released new consoles, the 5200 and Intellivision 2, and were ready to take their rivalry into a second generation of hardware. However, the home video game industry suddenly collapsed in 1983. The market had become flooded with nearly a dozen competing game consoles and hundreds of poorly made games. There were too many companies competing for a shrinking market, which resulted in mass bankruptcies of both game developers and console makers. Instead of fighting each other, Atari and Mattel were simply fighting to survive.

Mattel's Electronics division collapsed completely and they never released another game system. Atari survived the crash and released the 7200 console to compete against the NES. Nintendo's brand new gaming machine crushed the 7200, ending Atari's run as console king. The center of the gaming world moved to Japan as the old American console makers of the 70's and early 80's refused to get back into the business.

The gaming industry might have ended up very different if Atari and Mattel would have been able to continue their fight. The Intellivision 2's superior hardware might have helped it gain ground against Atari's underwhelming 5200 console. Had Mattel taken over as industry leader, perhaps Atari would have accepted Nintendo's offer to allow it to distribute the Famicom in the US under the Atari brand name. (Atari broke the deal at the last minute after seeing an unlicensed copy of Donkey Kong being showcased on Coleco's Adam computer and assuming that Nintendo had made a different deal with Coleco behind their back.) The Atari/Nintendo partnership could have very well dominated the re-energized American gaming market even more completely than Nintendo did by themselves. We were that close to playing classic 2600 and Jaguar games on the new Atari Wii's Virtual Console. And this all could have been made possible by the power of George Plimpton.