fusionaut74

> I do believe this newsletter does exist but maybe not as a specific game system (public) type >Newsletter, could be >part of a salesman pitch letter or part of a larger Fairchild company newsletter or even a >company end of year outlook >type report, Its hard to say but If anyone knows anything more about this I would love to hear >about it Yes, that definitely seems possible. Hopefully we'll be able to find out for sure one day! Speaking of "industry" type brochures, I was poking around the awesome "Bally Alley" site the other day and noticed something interesting. There's a great Bally advertising supplement in the "Ads and Catalogs" section of the site called "Chain Store Age" from June '78. Aside from utterly fantastic late '70s aesthetics, it features some very interesting data about the emerging videogame market of the time, including some Channel F related info. Check out the sales chart on page 5. It indicates that 3% of the videogame sales from 1976 were of programmable systems (which can only mean the Channel F/VES), and that they accounted for a whopping (ahem...) 10,000 units! I don't recall ever seeing hard sales data like that from so early in the game, so I thought it was worth mentioning. One other thing I'd like to ask about are those ancient newspaper articles you have on your site. Where did you come up with those things? Some of these are absolutely priceless, and it makes me wonder what else might be floating around out there from the early days. I especially love the Christmas report from the Reno Gazette, and the "Yuletime Game War" article. That has to be the earliest known example of "system wars" style smack-talk. The best part has to be: "Chuck Jacoby, Fairchild's marketing director, said Atari's games are merely take-offs of ball and paddle games. Jacoby says Atari's games are all similar. 'They call one game bi-plane, one jet, one submarine. Tanks, subs and ships. It's all just things floating across the screen.' " I nearly did a spit-take the first time I read that. Classic! -fusionaut74

Wow, great job! I'm a total geek for this kind of chronological detail. Regarding the theory of when Fairchild themselves stopped distributing stuff, I could SWEAR I saw Video Whizball and Hangman in a J.C. Penny circa the spring/summer of '79, for whatever that's worth. I'd guess that was the tail end of their support for the system. Also, regarding all this documentation that was released, I have a question for the Channel F experts here. I'm actually more of a magazine/newsletter collector than a game/system collector (weird, I know, but I just love old magazines...) and I remember reading in a Channel F FAQ about a supposed Fairchild newsletter that was released around the fall of '77. I think the FAQ this came from was quite old and outdated, so maybe the author was just mistaking it for a regular Channel F sales brochure, but I've long wondered about that. It would be of signifcant interest to me, because if it did indeed exist I'm sure that would make it the earliest "official" videogame newsletter ever released. I see that it's nowhere to be found on your excellent fndcollectables site, which makes me think it was just an error. But still.... Fairchild was definitely a "low key pioneer", if you get my meaning, so it seems plausible that this could have slipped through the cracks of history. Anyone have any knowledge and/or opinions on this? -fusionaut74