Fairchild Channel-F Video Entertainment System: The First Modern Game Console

In the 1970s, a company called Fairchild Semiconductor had been watching an emerging market of electronic entertainment. Video arcades had already become wildly popular, and Pong-style games systems that could only play built-in games were amazing sellers and excellent revenue generators for companies like Magnavox, Atari, and Coleco. Fairchild, a Silicon Valley pioneer, was about to break ground in a new territory, one that no other game company had yet entered.

No stranger to innovation, Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957 as a subsidiary of the Fairchild Camera and Instrumentation Company, and led the way in developing semiconductors from a new space-age material called silicon. In 1964 Fairchild introduced the first linear integrated circuit.

In the mid 70s, the company drew up plans to enter the microprocessor market. Research and design began on the F8 chip, a 1.78 MHz 8-bit microprocessor. The first public outing of this design came as Fairchild was poised to make video game history.

Technology Race

In 1976 Fairchild rushed to the market its Channel-F Video Entertainment System amidst internal worries that rival RCA would beat them to the market, and just in time for the Christmas season. Video game sales were very much seasonal at this point in history.

RCA, the TV manufacturer, was also working on getting a console of their own to the market, one with a cartridge design. They called it the Studio II. The concept of the ROM cartridge meant that manufacturer could first sell a game system, and then profit off of selling game programs to be used on the system. Previously this had not been accomplished.

In August of '76, Fairchild beat RCA's Studio II console to the market. RCA lagged behind and didn't even make the Christmas season, launching in early January 1977 instead. Fairchild won over RCA in every other way imaginable as well. The underpowered Studio II produced embarrassing graphics, the console output in black and white only even though the games were programmed in color. RCA killed support for its console by the end of the first year with only eleven games released.