The Fairchild Channel F is the world's second cartridge-based video game console, after the Magnavox Odyssey (although it is the first programmable cartridge system as the Odyssey cartridges only contained jumpers and not ROM information). It was released by Fairchild Semiconductor in August 1976 at the retail price of $169.95. At this point it was known as the Video Entertainment System, or VES, but when Atari released their VCS the next year, Fairchild quickly renamed it.
A total of 26 cartridges were released for the system (though some cartridges contained more than one game), typically priced at $19.95. Cartridges for the system were large and yellow, and usually featured colorful label artwork. The console contained two built-in games: a Pong clone and Hockey. Hockey is a more complex form of Pong, where the reflecting bar could be changed to diagonals by twisting the controller, and could move forward and backward. "Dodge It" consisted of a randomly-sized playing field (a rectangle or square) with an increasing number of bricks of a size set for each level, which came out of the wall and bounced around the field. The speed of the bricks is set randomly for each level, and the size of the player's brick (which needed to be moved to avoid impact with the other bricks) is also randomly set per level. Rarely, two computer-controlled bricks would collide, forming a noisy and unstable-seeming "monster brick" that would go to the wall and work its way around it. "Sonar Search" is similar to the game "Battleship". In the game, hidden ships had to be exposed and sunk with sonar pulses. The game supports more than one player and has a gamer-controlled pace and fairly simple action, yet contains the challenge of finding the invisible ships. "Maze" / "Cat and Mouse") is another rather simple title. In "Maze", a player simply has to navigate a complicated maze, but in "Cat and Mouse", the player's brick is a mouse which has to not only successfully navigate the maze, but also has to avoid the cat brick. The mail-order Zircon game, "Alien Invasion", which was released after the Channel F was sold by its parent company, is a clone of the game "Space Invaders", and is possibly the most complicated game for the console.
