when did home video games systems first become very popular
History of video games The Magnavox Odyssey never caught on with the public, due largely to the limited functionality of its primitive technology. By the middle of the 1970s, however, the ball-and-paddle craze in the arcade had ignited public interest in video games and continuing advances in integrated circuits had resulted in large-scale integration (LSI) microchips cheap enough to be incorporated into a consumer product. In 1975, Magnavox reduced the part count of the Odyssey using a three-chip set created by Texas Instruments and released two new systems that only played ball-and-paddle games, the Odyssey 100 and Odyssey 200. Atari, meanwhile, entered the consumer market that same year with the single-chip Home Pong system designed by Harold Lee. The next year, General Instrument released a "Pong-on-a-chip" LSI and made it available at a low price to any interested company. Toy company Coleco Industries used this chip to create the million-selling Telstar console model series (1976–77), while dozens of other companies released models as well. Overall, sales of dedicated ball-and-paddle systems in the U.S. grew from 350,000 in 1975 to a peak of 5–6 million in 1977. A similar boom hit the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, with much of the market supplied by clone manufacturers in Hong Kong.