First color video game?

[mecha]

why did color take so long? judging by some game design notes where they were deciding on B&W or color, it came down to money. color just cost more. and I'm guessing Galaxian gets credited as being the "first" because they were the first to get a substantial production run. it had some intriguing options with the Wells-Gardner K4500 (possible contender for worst monitor ever) and the Electrohome G02, a 25" color display, shoehorned into Galaxian with the picture dimensions compressed a lot. I've seen a K4500, but never a G02. why the G02? supply. color games weren't quite a thing yet then I guess.

argue away now.

 

[gwarble]

i think the reason galaxian gets lumped into this category is because it is supposedly the first with multi-color sprites... so where indy 800 had single color cars and wimbledon had green grass, galaxian had multiple colors in each sprite

i don't know if it was actually the first game to do that

 

[LaughingOtter]

What Was The First "True" Color Arcade Video Game?

What was the first "true color" coin-op video game? The answer to that question obviously depends on what you mean by "true color". I am n...

allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com

Just saw this question, but what's weird is that I saw this article just a few days ago.

Here's the recap:
What was the first "true color" coin-op video game? The answer to that question obviously depends on what you mean by "true color". I am not asking which coin-op video game was the first to make truly effective use of color. I mean, which coin-op video game was the first to produce actual color images (even ineffective ones) rather than using cellophane overlays to achieve the appearance of color.

Galaxian (Namco, 1979) Bzzt! Not even close. This used to be the standard answer and you can still find plenty of websites and books that say it is, but isn't. Now it may have been one of the first games, or even THE first game to make really effective use of color, but it wasn't the first to use color period.

Car Polo (Exidy, ca March 1977) - Nope. This was Exidy's first true color games and one of the earliest to combine color with a microprocessor, but it wasn't the first in the industry. Factoid: Death Race was actually intended only as a filler until Car Polo was ready.

Indy 800 (Atari/Kee, April 1975) - Yes, this DID use color (it kind of had to in order for players to be able to tell which car was theirs), but it wasn't the first arcade video game to use color. Heck, it wasn't even ATARI's first video game to use color (well, maybe it was but we'll get to that soon enough).

Pace Car Pro (Electra Games, debuted October 1974) - Wow! Where did you hear about this one? Electra Games was the coin-op video game division of URL (who later developed for Stern). Pace Car Pro was their first game. Interesting little company, that URL. They made circuit boards for Paddle Battle. Their Video Action (1974?) may have been the second home system released in the US. And Pace Car Pro was actually similar to a color home game that they ALMOST released in winter of 1975. You see…
but that's a story for another post.

Wimbledon (Nutting Associates, 1974??) - Maybe, just maybe. Yes, it was a ball-and-paddle game that used true color (at least I think it did). Why? Don't ask me. The question is, if it was released and (if so) when. Some sources (including TAFA) say it was released in 1973, others (like KLOV) say 1974. I'm not sure which it is (my library's run of Vending Times starts in March of 1974 or I might be able to confirm). In any event, it likely beat Pace Car Pro to market. But is it the absolute first? It all depends on that unconfirmed release date.
Table Tennis is another Nutting game that might have used color, but it looks like overlays to me.

Color Gotcha (Atari, October 1973) - Ladies and gents we might have a winnah! Or we might not. No, not Gotcha, I'm talking about COLOR Gotcha. And yes that is a flyer for regular old black-and-white Gotcha, but that's because I don't thik Color Gotcha ever had a flyer since it was (supposedly) a "limited run" game.
Color Gotcha did use real color and we seem to have a firm release date (from the internal Atari document) but did it come out before Wimbledon or not? Then there's the issue of whether or not it counts as "released". One person at Atari told me this: " Usually, an ultra-limited production run meant that we sold the pre-production prototypes and hoped nobody got mad at us." Color Gotcha was (I believe) developed at Grass Valley/Cyan Engineering and my guess is that less than 10 were produced (someone might have actually told me that), but until I can confirm Wimbledon's release date or find another contender that I missed (a distinct possibility), it gets my vote.

 

[Lathroum]

Monaco GP and Galaxian

Both 1978/79

 

[gwarble]

interesting video here, I wonder if this is how Color Gotcha and Wimbledon accomplished color, I don't think they had separate RGBS inputs to the monitor

 

[VectorCollector]

First COLOR VECTOR was ....



Space Fury is a multidirectional shooter arcade game developed by Gremlin. Sega/Gremlin released the game in North America in June 1981, and then Sega released it in Japan the following month. It is the first game with color vector graphics, and was Sega's second game to use speech synthesis.

 

[VectorCollector]

And not to be forgotten, Atari's first COLOR VECTOR was ... (in Oct 1981).
Though I must admit, for most of my collecting time, I thought Tempest was the FIRST.

Tempest (video game) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[HudsonArcade]

interesting video here, I wonder if this is how Color Gotcha and Wimbledon accomplished color, I don't think they had separate RGBS inputs to the monitor

Color Gotcha its RGB+S.

They took various signals from the board to generate the 3 color signals.

Schematics are available (but they don't appear to be fully accurate)

 

[gwarble]

thanks, what kind of monitor back then would have taken that input? I was under the impression they were using off the shelf tvs until around 74 when motorola was making b&w "monitors", so i assumed that was for color as well


edit: later games like sprint8/indy800 had some kind of interface/"chroma" board between the game and the monitor or something iirc, but wasnt the monitor still just a composite input tv?

 

[HudsonArcade]

thanks, what kind of monitor back then would have taken that input? I was under the impression they were using off the shelf tvs until around 74 when motorola was making b&w "monitors", so i assumed that was for color as well


edit: later games like sprint8/indy800 had some kind of interface/"chroma" board between the game and the monitor or something iirc, but wasnt the monitor still just a composite input tv?

Most "arcade monitors" are just TVs with the composite demodulation board removed.

They depopulated TVs and tied right into the color amps.

 

[gwarble]

makes sense, thanks

 

[alfonzotan]

And not to be forgotten, Atari's first COLOR VECTOR was ... (in Oct 1981).
Though I must admit, for most of my collecting time, I thought Tempest was the FIRST.

Tempest (video game) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It was the first one I saw. Little burgh I grew up in didn't rate a Space Fury.

Interesting stuff in this thread. My knee-jerk answer (like a lot of people) would have been Galaxian.

 

[pat9000]

later games like sprint8/indy800 had some kind of interface/"chroma" board between the game and the monitor or something iirc, but wasnt the monitor still just a composite input tv?

These early games are all just B/W games with colorized outputs - taking each individually-generated section of video (like a Pong paddle, for example) and mixing it though some resistors of varying values into the 3 RGB outputs so you end up with the color you desire. B/W games just sum every component of the game together along with with c-sync to get a mono comp vid signal.

Like Mark said, they're all TV chassis that were modified to directly feed RGB. Indy 800 used a modified GE TV set chassis and the rest of the Atari 4/8p games used an E-Home GO2.

The Atari 4/8p games are a little weirder than most as the board has individual mono video outputs for each of the 8 colors used in the game - the actual colors are generated on the monitor's interface PCB. The Atari 8p games will have 8 video signals, c-sync and +5v fed to the color interface; 11 wires going to the monitor's video input.

You could probably take one of these monitors and tap off individual video signals on a different early B/W game PCB before the video output summer and apply any of the 8 colors to anything you wanted, which is basically what Color Gotcha is doing.

Indy 800 input PCB, mounted on the GE TV:

 

[greedycrisp]

You could probably take one of these monitors and tap off individual video signals on a different early B/W game PCB before the video output summer and apply any of the 8 colors to anything you wanted, which is basically what Color Gotcha is doing.

That is an interesting idea. Exidy was still doing something like it with their color adapter boards in Targ and Spectar as late as 1980. https://www.outerworldarcade.com/targ/targ_video.html

It could be done with B&W games with 19" screens but many games between '76 and '79 used 23" monitors. Finding 23" color TVs or monitors is almost impossible unless you get away from CRTs.

 

[HudsonArcade]

That is an interesting idea. Exidy was still doing something like it with their color adapter boards in Targ and Spectar as late as 1980. https://www.outerworldarcade.com/targ/targ_video.html

All of the Exidy games until Pepper II were 1bit per pixel colorized monochrome, with 7 classes of objects (+bg) each having its own color.
Later games just made the color table writable instead of using jumpers on the board.

Stuff like Space Invaders and Astro Invader and Berzerk colored pixels based on the location on the screen instead of by object type.

 

[HudsonArcade]

You could probably take one of these monitors and tap off individual video signals on a different early B/W game PCB before the video output summer and apply any of the 8 colors to anything you wanted, which is basically what Color Gotcha is doing.

That's what I did for my Color Pong, Color Dominos, Color Night Driver, etc...

 

[toledoflyer]

All of the Exidy games until Pepper II were 1bit per pixel colorized monochrome, with 7 classes of objects (+bg) each having its own color.
Later games just made the color table writable instead of using jumpers on the board.

Stuff like Space Invaders and Astro Invader and Berzerk colored pixels based on the location on the screen instead of by object type.

Not all of them. Exidy's color games Star Fire and Fire One used a very unique method of separate memory spaces for the luma (intensity on or off) and chroma (color). The really interesting part is the color resolution was lower than the BW resolution so adjacent pixels had to be the same color. My assumption is they did this to lower the total memory required since everything was bit mapped. (I'm sure it helped with the speed of the graphics as well but the games still suffered the performance hit of not having motion object hardware.)

 

[HudsonArcade]

Not all of them. Exidy's color games Star Fire and Fire One

Sorry, I meant all of the exidy games on that base hardware, not just the one with the color interface board dangling off.
The others merged it into the sound board.

used a very unique method of separate memory spaces for the luma (intensity on or off) and chroma (color). The really interesting part is the color resolution was lower than the BW resolution so adjacent pixels had to be the same color. My assumption is they did this to lower the total memory required since everything was bit mapped. (I'm sure it helped with the speed of the graphics as well but the games still suffered the performance hit of not having motion object hardware.)

That's basically what Berzerk did, but even chunkier... on/off was in the DRAM, colors were 8x8 blocks on the BSC.

 

[pat9000]

The really interesting part is the color resolution was lower than the BW resolution so adjacent pixels had to be the same color.

The "Technical Magic" hardware felt like a really weird compromise because of this. High-res gfx but low-res color applied to them. Fire One seemed to make the most of it, the smooth scrolling & window effects were pretty neat.

...and the monitor in these games is interesting:

 

[HudsonArcade]

That's certainly an interesting way to mount the game boards -- great for debugging!

TV looks like a 4600.