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History
Epoch Co., Ltd. (株式会社エポック社) was founded on 6 May 1958 in the Kikuyabashi area of Taito Ward, Tokyo, by Taketora Maeda and three partners. The company began with a capital of ¥1 million and focused on the planning, manufacturing and sale of games and toys.
Its first and most important product was the Baseball Board (野球盤 / Yakyūban), a mechanical tabletop baseball game released the same year. The idea reportedly came to Maeda when a pachinko ball fell into a hole in a jigsaw puzzle he was working on, inspiring the core mechanism of the game. The Baseball Board became a major success and remained Epoch’s signature product for decades, with numerous revised versions released over the years.
In 1960 Epoch signed an advertising contract with Yomiuri Giants star Shigeo Nagashima and became the first Japanese toy company to run television commercials. The company expanded steadily through the 1960s, relocating to Komagata in 1963 and participating regularly in the Japan International Toy Fair from 1962 onward. It also began exhibiting at the Nuremberg International Toy Fair in 1970.
During this period Epoch released a range of other mechanical and board games, including soccer games, remote-control toys, and the Torpedo Battle Game (魚雷戦ゲーム) in 1967. By the late 1960s the company had grown into a solid mid-sized toy manufacturer focused on original Japanese game designs.
This foundation positioned Epoch to enter the emerging electronic and video-game market in the mid-1970s. In September 1975 it released TV Tennis, Japan’s first domestically produced home video game console. The system was built entirely from discrete TTL logic chips, a complex and time-consuming approach. Epoch released only one other console using the same technology, the System 10, a Pong-style machine with ten built-in games.
While developing the System 10, Epoch collaborated with NEC to create a custom microprocessor (the µPD77xx series). This chip dramatically reduced development time. The first stand-alone console to use the new technology, TV Baseball, was released in August 1978—one month before the System 10 itself—even though work on TV Baseball had begun nearly a year later.
By 1979 Atari was looking to expand outside North America, although Japan was not considered a priority market and was difficult for foreign companies to enter. At the same time, Epoch wanted to strengthen its position in the Japanese video-game market. With competitor Bandai developing its own cartridge-based Super Vision 8000, Epoch needed a rapid response. The successful Atari 2600 (VCS) appeared to be the ideal solution. Since Atari had no immediate plans to enter Japan on its own, a distribution agreement with Epoch proved mutually beneficial.
Release
Epoch released the Cassette TV Games in Japan on 8 October 1979 at the steep price of ¥57,300. Sales in the first few months were poor. The main problem was the price itself: most video-game consoles at the time sold for around ¥15,000—roughly a quarter of the Cassette TV Games’ asking price. Even though those competing systems were dedicated machines without interchangeable games, it remained difficult to convince customers to invest so much in a home gaming system.
A second problem appeared in December of the same year with the launch of Bandai’s Super Vision 8000. Although its price was similar, the Super Vision 8000 had a major advantage: it included Missile Vader, an unlicensed clone of Space Invaders. Released by Taito on 1 April 1978, Space Invaders had become the arcade phenomenon of the year. By the end of 1979 more than 400,000 cabinets were operating across Japan, each grossing around ¥10,000 per day. The presence of a Space Invaders clone alone was often enough to make buyers choose the Super Vision 8000 over the Cassette TV Games.
Epoch quickly contacted Atari and asked them to secure a licence from Taito so that an official Space Invaders port could be released for the Atari VCS. Atari obtained the licence and developed the game. When Space Invaders appeared on the VCS in March 1980 it immediately became the system’s best-selling title and helped push North American sales of the console past two million units.
Even with the Japanese release of Space Invaders, however, sales of the Cassette TV Games remained disappointing. The Super Vision 8000 faced similar difficulties, suggesting that the high price point was simply too much for the market at the time. By the end of 1980 the price of the Cassette TV Games had been reduced to ¥47,300, but by then Epoch had largely lost faith in the system and was already shifting its efforts toward other projects.
Demise
While distributing the Cassette TV Games, Epoch continued developing its own hardware. In 1980 the company released the dedicated TV Vader, a Space Invaders clone. Drawing on experience with its own proprietary designs, Epoch realised it could produce a much cheaper cartridge-based console. The result was the Cassette Vision, launched in 1981 at only ¥13,500.
The far lower price and better suitability for the Japanese market quickly made the Cassette Vision a success and rendered the expensive Cassette TV Games obsolete. Epoch discontinued the Atari-based system around 1981.
Technology
The Cassette TV Games is basically the first released of the Atari VCS also known as an Atari Heavy Sixer. The only difference is that the Cassette TV Games can only output on the channel 1, therefore there’s no channel selector switch on these units. There is a sticker on the top right of the console and also on the bottom to this effect.