Fairchild Channel F - The first videoconsultation with Microprocessor

Between the first and second generation of game consoles there were many companies that developed diverse consoles, which had an important meaning in the history of videogames. Although some were not as successful as they deserved, they served as a basis, inspiration and example for future generations, not only in how they were designed, but also in the mistakes made by their designers and programmers.

For many Atari was the only video game company between the 70's and 80's, however, there were others that tried to compete against it, taking out innovations of all kinds, this task was attempted by the developer Fairchild Semiconductor with a very interesting video game called Fairchild Channel F.

Fairchild Channel F belongs to the second generation of game consoles which was launched in 1976 (1 year before Atari 2600) with the ability to run games through interchangeable cartridges. When it became known to the public, it was given the name of Fairchild Channel F Video Entertainment System.

It is now considered normal for a game console to have a central processor, but decades ago this was something few could have imagined, but the Fairchild Channel F or also known as Channel Fun was the first to incorporate this function through a microprocessor, its name was Fairchild F8 8 bit and had a speed of 1.78 Mhz.

As previously mentioned, this game console was released a year before the Atari 2600, at the time of the release of the console mentioned above, for marketing reasons slightly changed its name from Channel F Video VES to Fairchild, this with the purpose of not confusing the VES terminations with those of Atari VCS.

The peripherals of this console were somewhat different from what had been seen, the joysticks did not have a base on which to be supported, therefore these had to be held by pulse, something that may be a little uncomfortable for some people, plus the only button they had on the controls was their own joysticks that had to be pressed.

Now we'll touch on the main topic of why this console didn't have the same success as its competitor, the games. The name given to their cartridges was Videocarts and unlike Atari which had a hundred games, for the Fairchild only 28 were released. Each of them was developed by Fairchild, this means that there were no third parties to develop games for the Fairchild Channel F.

In spite of this big mistake the Fairchild had the capacity to do something that if it had been taken advantage of to the maximum in games of third its history would not have been so bad, thanks to its microprocessor this console could produce a very good artificial intelligence for those times, this made that to play against the CPU was an excellent challenge, the videogame where this function could be seen was the Tic-Tac-Toe.

Finally, in 1983 they would finish with the production of the Fairchild, having a life of 7 years in the market with only 28 games, this is very lamentable since it was a very innovative videogame console at the time, but was crushed by the Atari 2600 by multiple factors, however, left an indelible mark that will last forever in the life of video games.