Bally Astrocade - A game console few remember

Currently most gamers are concerned about which is the fastest or most powerful game console on the market, this is very long simple to deduce because there is very little competition, only 3 companies that carry the main banner of the world of video games, specifically desktop consoles.

In the past many companies wanted to enter this market, they had to impress the users to buy their product, this is why there were a lot of game consoles in the past, several of them were successful, but many were forgotten.

Although there are consoles that were not successful have a merit, many of them served as a basis for the creation of others, for that reason it is always important to remember them because without them perhaps the video games would not be as we know them today, this way I will introduce you to a console that was completely forgotten, it is the Bally Astrocade.

It is certainly a very old game console, launched in 1977 through the company Bally Manufacturing. It belonged to the second generation of game consoles, this means that it had a very high competition because in those years Atari reigned the homes with its brand new Atari 2600.

The curious thing about Bally Astrocade is that it wasn't the typical console that was obtained through a store, to be able to buy one you needed to make a request via mail, that is to say it was under order, however, later years you could already obtain it in some stores.

To impress the public, the Bally Astrocade was made with the intention of being a video game console with a powerful processor for the time and a sound quality that did not compare with any of the competition. Despite achieving this, he had two problems which caused his own death.

The first and most problematic was their marketing, they didn't know how to do the advertising work. Seeing their commercial did not encourage you to have a Bally Astrocade, rather it seemed that you were being offered a product from a different branch of video games. That's when the Atari 2600 had the land completely taken over.

And the second of its problems were the games, it only had a total of 30 official video games, compared to the competition was simply absurd, perhaps if the developers had been encouraged to release more games to this console their story would have been different, but for the low sales it had not seemed at all convenient.

This is how a powerful and promising game console failed, living only 6 years in the market, precisely in 1983 when the crash of videogames occurred. In spite of its short catalogue and bad publicity it did not stop being an interesting console, it had the capacity to expand its RAM memory, to program in BASIC language and other small functions that made it special.