Cassette Vision

~ the obituary ~

Epoch was a toy company, and in 1981 that was not the handicap it sounds like. Nobody in Japan had yet built a home video game machine that ordinary families would buy, and the companies best placed to try were the ones that already knew how to get a plastic object into a toy shop at a price a parent would pay. Epoch put the Cassette Vision on sale on 30 july 1981 at 13,500 yen, with cartridges at 4,000. It was the first console in Japan priced like a toy rather than like an appliance, and that is most of the reason it worked.

The engineering underneath it was strange, and it was strange by accident. On the Cassette Vision the CPU lived inside the cartridge. Each game shipped with its own NEC processor, a uPD777C or a uPD778, and the console itself held little more than a power supply and the hardware that turned the result into an NTSC picture, with the controls built into the lid. This was not a clever idea somebody had. Epoch's earlier machines had been built in a way that tied the ROM and the processor together, and the team could not separate them in time, so the architecture of the previous product decided the architecture of this one.

It sold anyway, and it sold enormously by the standards of the moment. Around 400,000 units went out and Epoch took more than seventy percent of the Japanese home console market by 1982, which meant that for about two years the largest console manufacturer in Japan was a company best known for plastic baseball games. A cut-down model, the Cassette Vision Jr., arrived on 19 july 1983 at 5,000 yen. Four days before it, Nintendo had released the Family Computer, and Sega had released the SG-1000 on the same day as Nintendo. Twelve games in total were ever made for the Cassette Vision. Epoch stopped building it in august 1984, a month after putting the Super Cassette Vision on sale.

The machine went on sale three years before I was born and never left Japan, so this grave is assembled entirely out of other people's records. What crosses the distance intact is the design question. Epoch put the compute on the removable side of the connector because it had no other option, and got a console that cost almost nothing and a library that cost too much. My working days are spent on the same question in different words, deciding how much processing sits on the device and how much of it lives somewhere else. It is settled by price and by what the last product already did, which is how Epoch settled it in 1981, and nobody in the room ever calls that an architecture decision at the time.

~ the case file ~

~ twelve cartridges ~

Twelve games across three years is a small library even for 1981, and the cartridge design is why. Every title carried its own processor, so every title had a hardware bill of materials that a pure ROM cartridge would not have had. The 4,000 yen price on the games was not Epoch being greedy. It was Epoch selling you a small computer each time, and it put a floor under the cost of the catalog that no amount of volume was going to lower.

It also meant the platform could not really improve. On a normal console you can get more out of the hardware as programmers learn it, because the hardware is a fixed thing everyone is aiming at. Here the fixed thing was almost nothing, and the variable thing was inside the cartridge, so there was no accumulated skill to build on. The machine you owned in 1984 was the same empty shell you had bought in 1981 and it was never going to be anything else.

~ the five thousand yen version ~

The Cassette Vision Jr. of july 1983 was the same platform in a smaller and cheaper case at 5,000 yen, and it is the clearest signal Epoch sent about where it thought the market was going. Cutting the price by nearly two thirds is what you do when you believe the remaining buyers are the ones who would not pay the old price. It is also what you do when something much better is about to be on the shelf next to you.

~ the summer of 1983 ~

July 1983 is one of the more consequential months in the history of the business and Epoch spent it launching a budget refresh. Nintendo shipped the Famicom on the fifteenth, with Sega putting the SG-1000 out the same day, and the Cassette Vision Jr. followed on the nineteenth. Within a year the market had reorganized itself around a machine that could hold an arcade conversion without embarrassment, and the Cassette Vision could not, because its whole architecture had been settled in 1980 by a constraint nobody outside the building knew about.

Epoch answered properly a year later with the Super Cassette Vision, which had the processor in the console like everyone else and arrived into a market Nintendo had already taken. That machine gets its own grave. This one is the interesting corpse, because this one won first.

~ what it settled ~

Japan's console industry did not start with the Famicom, whatever the shape of the story people tell now. It started with a toy manufacturer proving that a Japanese family would buy a games machine at a toy price, and holding seventy percent of the market it had just demonstrated existed. Nintendo took that finding and built the correct machine on top of it.

The Cassette Vision is remembered, when it is remembered at all, as the thing the Famicom replaced. It is more accurate to say it is the thing that showed the Famicom there was something to replace.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »