At a glance: Tic-Tac-Toe / Shooting Gallery / Doodle / Quadra-Doodle (Videocart-1) · Channel F · Fairchild, 1976 · Compilation / launch cartridge · Score: 6.5/10
Every cartridge era has a first cartridge, and this is the first one of all: Videocart-1, sold alongside the Channel F at its November 1976 launch, the original piece of removable software for a home console. Its contents make the ambitions of that moment plain. Fairchild did not lead with a sport or a space battle. It led with a compilation of four programs — a board game played against the computer, a shooting gallery, and two drawing toys — as if to say that the point of the cartridge was not any single game but the fact of software itself: one machine, endlessly re-purposed, the television as a page the console could keep rewriting. Brett Weiss called the cartridge “surprisingly versatile,” and versatile is exactly the word its makers were reaching for. This was the demonstration that the future had a slot in the front of it.
The headliner, Tic-Tac-Toe, gives the compilation its historical weight: you play noughts and crosses against the machine, and the machine — as MobyGames’ retrospective reviewers noted with respect — does not make mistakes. A perfect tic-tac-toe opponent is a draw machine, so the game’s drama is inverted: you cannot win, you can only avoid losing, and when you do lose, the console informs you, in the library’s most quoted sentence, “YOU LOSE TURKEY.” Video magazine scored it 5 out of 10 in 1978, a fair mark for a solved game — but the solved game was not the point. The point was that in November 1976 a television in a living room was playing a game against its owner, competently, for the first time in the cartridge medium’s history, and seasoning the lesson with an insult.
The gallery and the doodles
Shooting Gallery, the compilation’s action piece, was the reviewers’ favourite of the four — Video magazine scored it a 7, “challenging” — and it is easy to see why. Targets move across the screen and must be hit from a choice of ten fixed positions and angles: not a light-gun game, which the machine could not support, but a geometry game, marksmanship by selection, where the skill is reading a target’s path and committing to the firing position that intersects it. It is the cartridge’s most game-like game, and Fairchild clearly knew it — the same Shooting Gallery reappears on Videocart-2 alongside Desert Fox, the library’s only encore.
Then the doodles, which history has treated as filler and should treat as prophecy. Doodle is a drawing program: steer a point around the framebuffer and lay down lines in red, green and blue, painting directly on the family television. Quadra-Doodle goes further into the generative — the machine composes its own kaleidoscopic patterns, which the player can influence and steer, a screensaver with a collaborator, in 1976. Video magazine was unimpressed (4 and 3 out of 10 respectively; Doodle was “not really a game,” with difficult controls, and of the drawing controls that verdict is partly fair). But judged as software — as evidence of what a programmable television could be — the doodles are the cartridge’s most far-sighted contents: art tools and ambient toys, shipping in the launch window of the first programmable console, decades before either category had a name.
Judging the first cartridge
The fair way to judge Videocart-1 is as a portfolio. No single program on it sustains an evening in the way Baseball or Casino Poker sustain evenings; the tic-tac-toe is solved, the gallery is a single screen’s discipline, the doodles are toys with a drawing control scheme that fights the artist. Its score must reflect play value, and by play value it sits in the library’s lower middle. But portfolios are judged on range, and the range here — opponent AI, target shooting, a paint program, a generative art toy — is a map of the next fifty years of home software drawn in four small programs on a 2K cartridge. Fairchild’s software team, at the very first opportunity the medium offered, did not make one game. They made a demonstration of kinds.
The first cartridge ever sold contains an unbeatable opponent who calls you a turkey, a geometry shooting range, a paint program and a generative art toy: the whole future, in four small programs.
There is also the small matter of what the cartridge taught its machine’s owners to expect. A family that bought the console in 1976 learned from Videocart-1 that new software would be various — that the yellow slot was a bookshelf, not a single-purpose socket. Every games library since, on every platform since, has traded on that expectation. The turkey insult, the perfect opponent, the doodles blooming in kaleidoscope on a wood-panelled television: this is what the cartridge era looked like on its first morning, and it looked surprisingly like everything that followed.
First, therefore examined
Because Videocart-1 is first, it carries a burden no other cartridge in this package bears: it must stand as evidence in the argument about what the cartridge era was for. Its defenders point to the doodles, already reaching toward creative software; its detractors to the solved board game and the toys’ thin play value. Both miss the compilation’s actual thesis, which is range itself. In November 1976 the competition was a wall of dedicated machines, each one a single idea frozen in circuitry. Videocart-1 answered with four ideas in one box — competition, marksmanship, drawing, watching the machine dream in kaleidoscopes — none of them exhaustive, all of them pointing somewhere. A portfolio that points in four directions at once is not a failure to commit; it is a map of a medium that had not yet chosen its directions, drawn by the only team then in a position to draw it. The turkey insult has outlived most of the era’s marketing, and rightly: it is the sound of the first software talking back. Every cartridge since has lived in the world this yellow box sketched — a world where a console is a library, a library is a personality, and the personality, occasionally, calls you a turkey for losing at noughts and crosses.
Availability completes the case for the defence: as the pack-in companion of the console’s launch era, Videocart-1 is the commonest cartridge in the library and the cheapest doorway into it. The most historically significant object in this entire package is also the one any collector can own by Friday. The cartridge era’s founding document is not locked in a vault. It is a yellow box, priced like lunch, still insulting its owners in capital letters.
The verdict
Videocart-1 is not the Channel F’s best cartridge, and this review has not pretended otherwise. It is the most important one in this package: the founding document of the medium, versatile exactly as advertised, its four programs ranging from a solved board game to two toys that accidentally predict art software and generative screensavers. Play it for the gallery, respect it for the doodles, and lose to the turkey at least once, for the history. Every cartridge collection on Earth descends from this yellow box.
Score: 6.5/10 — The first cartridge ever: a versatile, uneven portfolio whose importance dwarfs its play value — and whose play value is real.