Bandai Super Vision 8000

~ the goodbye ~

Bandai had been selling home game machines for years before this one, under the name TV Jack, and not one of them contained a computer. They were built the way arcade cabinets had been built at the start of the decade, out of discrete logic wired into the shape of a single game, with the rules living in the copper rather than in any code. There was nothing to program because there was nothing running. The Super Vision 8000, which went on sale in december 1979 at 59,800 yen, was the last machine in that line and the only one that broke with it.

Inside was an NEC D780C-1, a licensed Z80 clone, running at 3.58 MHz against a kilobyte of RAM and three kilobytes of video memory. Graphics came off an Ami S68047, a copy of Motorola's 6847, with sound from a General Instrument AY-3-8910, the same three-voice part that would end up in half the home computers of the following decade. The games arrived on cartridges. That combination made it Japan's first cartridge console with a processor in the box, eighteen months before Epoch shipped the Cassette Vision and nearly four years before the Famicom.

Seven games were made. Missile Vader, Space Fire, Othello, Gun Professional, PacPacBird, Submarine and Beam Galaxian, every one of them written inside Bandai Electronics and released in 1979. Then the catalog stopped. The console remained on the price list into the early eighties with the same seven cartridges behind it, and at 59,800 yen it was asking Famicom-era money three years early for a shelf that never moved. Bandai signed instead for the Japanese rights to Mattel's Intellivision and put its own badge on that console in 1982.

None of this reached me. It went on sale five years before I was born and never left Japan, so the machine is only a set of records. What survives the distance is the arithmetic. Bandai treated the seven games as part of what it cost to launch, in the same budget as the tooling and the box art, and once the launch was paid for there was nothing left in the line. Platforms do not work like that. The software is not something you ship alongside the hardware, it is rent you keep paying for as long as the thing is on sale, and Bandai stopped paying in the first twelve months. Every hardware team eventually discovers that the expensive part of a product begins on the day it ships, and it always surprises somebody in the room.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the seven ~

Two of the seven titles are worth looking at for what they say about 1979. Missile Vader and Beam Galaxian are both unlicensed reaches toward Taito and Namco arcade hits that were current at the moment of writing, which tells you the machine was being aimed at the arcade audience rather than at anyone who wanted a computer. Othello, sitting in the same list, tells you Bandai was hedging toward the family board-game shelf at the same time. Seven cartridges is not enough of a library to establish which of those two bets was right, and the console was withdrawn without ever finding out.

All seven are preserved and playable now through the Internet Archive's browser emulation, which is a more complete distribution than the cartridges ever managed while the hardware was for sale.

~ the year the sources argue about ~

Wikipedia's infobox says the console was discontinued in 1982. The Wikibooks history of the platform says Bandai dropped it less than a year after launch in order to concentrate on the Intellivision, which would put the end somewhere in 1980. Those two cannot both be right, because Bandai-branded Intellivision consoles did not appear in Japan until 1982.

The 1982 date is the one that holds together with the Intellivision reason attached to it, so this grave takes 1982 and flags the disagreement rather than picking the more dramatic version. What both accounts agree on is the shape: the software stopped in the first year, and the hardware outlived its own catalog by a long stretch of doing nothing.

~ what Bandai did instead ~

Selling somebody else's console turned out to be a habit. The Intellivision was followed in 1983 by the Bandai Arcadia, a rebadged Emerson Arcadia 2001, and a decade later by the Playdia and then the Pippin, the second of which was Apple's architecture wearing a Bandai case. Bandai kept entering the console business through other companies' designs and left it without ever shipping a successful platform of its own.

The Super Vision 8000 is where that pattern starts. It is the one time Bandai built the whole machine, processor included, and got there before everyone else in the country. Being early is only worth something if you keep going, and the seven games are the record of a company that decided, almost immediately, not to.

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