Today’s tidbit: the NES grandfather

If you are a classic gamer, you most certainly know what the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Famicom were all about. If you are not a retro gamer, you still probably have heard of the archaic Nintendo systems, and even total non-gamers know what Nintendo is. But how many classic gamers are classic enough to have played the first home console offered by Nintendo? No, it wasn’t the NES.

Nintendo’s first actual home console came several years before the NES and was released in the seventies…yes the seventies. It was called The Color TV and it was released with a variety of model numbers that primarily reflected the variations available for the offered game. Each Color TV played a single game in multiple variations, and the first several were Pong-like, called Light Tennis.

From there, Nintendo moved away from the Color TV 6 and the Color TV 12 (which sold about a million units between them…pretty good for something most people have never heard of), and released the Color TV 112, which was actually a racing game instead of a Pong clone. The Color TV Block Kosure was a Break-Out clone from 1979, and the Computer TV game was a computerized version of the board game, Othello.

Each machine, like the current Nintendo releases, were a little more powerful and a little more successful than its predecessor. Of course, given that they were never released outside of Japan, they are a little bit hard to find…combined with low numbers of issues, they are darn near rare. In fact, one Computer TV game recently sold for $3000 USD.