Super Cassette Vision
Eight years before the Famicom existed, a toy company put the first home video game console into Japanese living rooms.
Epoch opened for business in 1958 on a tabletop baseball game. In 1975 the same company released TV Tennis, Japan's first home video game console, eight years before the Famicom existed. Neither Nintendo nor Sega got there first. A toy maker did.
Pull a cartridge out of a Cassette Vision in 1981 and you were not swapping a game. You were swapping the console's brain. The processor was not built into the machine at all; it lived inside a NEC single-chip microcontroller sealed into each cartridge, so a new game meant a new mind for the box under the television. By September 1983, roughly seven of every ten cartridge-swappable consoles sold in Japan were Epoch's.
On 15 July 1983, Nintendo's Famicom reached the same shelves. Epoch answered on 17 July 1984 with the Super Cassette Vision, one year and two days later. Both machines carried the same price: 14,800 yen. The new one could put more single-colour sprites on screen at once than the Famicom could. Its palette was fixed at sixteen colours. The Famicom's ran to fifty-two. Thirty games were made for the Super Cassette Vision in total.
Epoch did not build a third console. In 1985 they released a line of small animal families living in dollhouses. Sylvanian Families was a hit. It did not need a television to work.
Super Cassette Vision — at a glance
- Released
- Cassette Vision, 30 July 1981. Super Cassette Vision, 17 July 1984.
- Launch price
- 12,000 yen for the first machine. 14,800 yen for the Super, exactly what a Famicom cost.
- CPU
- The 1981 machine had no processor inside it at all. The chip lived in the cartridge.
- Display
- The Super could put up to 128 single-colour sprites on screen, from a fixed palette of 16 colours
- Library
- Eleven games for the Cassette Vision. Thirty for the Super.
- Units sold
- About 400,000 to 450,000 Cassette Visions. About 300,000 Super Cassette Visions.
- compatibility
- The Super does not play Cassette Vision games. Nothing carried over.
- Region
- Japan, and France, where Yeno sold it with games of its own
What actually happened
The Cassette Vision launched on 30 July 1981 at 12,000 yen, with the AC adapter sold separately. The Super Cassette Vision followed on 17 July 1984 at 14,800 yen, and was also sold in France by Yeno, with some titles made for that market alone. The most-quoted numbers in this story carry conditions that matter. The Cassette Vision's roughly seventy per cent share, and its 400,000 to 450,000 machines sold as of September 1983, describe the market for consoles that took interchangeable cartridges. Nintendo's Color TV-Game series, four machines with no cartridge slot at all, which played only the games built into them, sold about three million between 1977 and 1983. The two totals answer different questions and should not be set against each other as a single ranking. The Super Cassette Vision sold about 300,000 machines and its library closed at thirty titles in 1987. The usual explanation for why the Cassette Vision's processor sat in the cartridge rather than the console, that running a processor over a bus to separate memory risked noise and misbehaviour in the electronics of the day, is an account handed down rather than a statement from the engineers who made the decision. The same is true of the story that a small team, led by Masayuki Horie, abandoned an in-progress model called the Super 10 and turned to a cartridge-swapping design: it rests on a single source, with no primary interview found to confirm it.
The idea behind the machine
Epoch and NEC kept the console's job small. Rather than build a general-purpose processor into the box under the television, they put a complete single-chip microcontroller into every cartridge, so the machine itself had to do almost nothing but read what the cartridge told it. Every game arrived with its own brain. What the decision left behind is a console that was cheap, simple and stable, and a library where changing the game changed what kind of machine you owned.
Things worth knowing about the Super Cassette Vision
- The Cassette Vision had no processor inside the console at all. It sat in the cartridge, a NEC single-chip microcontroller sealed into every game, which means changing the game changed the machine's brain.
- Epoch was a toy company. It opened in 1958 on a tabletop baseball game, and in 1985, the year after its last console, it launched Sylvanian Families.
- There is a pink one. A magenta and translucent pink Super Cassette Vision, sold in a pink case as the "Ladies Set", is recorded by several independent Japanese collectors, and owners still surface with one. When it was sold, at what price, and how many were made are all still unestablished, and we would rather say so than fill the gap.
Where this leads
Thinking of buying one? What to check before you do →