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History
The story of the PV-1000 begins right after the Second World War. In April 1946, Tadao Kashio, an engineer specialised in manufacturing techniques, opened a small workshop called Kashio Seisakujo in Mitaka, a suburb of Tokyo. At first, the company worked as a subcontractor, making parts such as microscope components and gears. Tadao’s younger brothers Toshio, Kazuo and Yukio soon joined him. The workshop’s first original product was the yubiwa pipe, a ring that held a cigarette so it could be smoked to the very end without burning the fingers. It was invented by Toshio, and its sales gave the brothers the money they needed for a much more ambitious project.
In 1949, the brothers visited a business show in Tokyo and saw electric calculating machines for the first time. Convinced they could build a better one, they started working on their own calculator. Their first prototype, finished in 1954, used solenoids. To make it e
asier to mass-produce, they rebuilt it around relays, the same switches used in telephone exchanges. The result was the Casio 14-A, released in June 1957. It could add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers of up to 14 digits. It had a simple ten-key number pad instead of the huge keyboards of office machines of the time, and a single display for both the numbers entered and the result. Casio describes it as the world’s first compact, fully electric calculator.
To build and sell the 14-A, the family founded Casio Computer Co., Ltd. on June 1, 1957, with the brothers’ father, Shigeru Kashio, as its first president. At first, the company’s Japanese name was written with the kanji for “Kashio”. In October 1960, it switched to katakana, giving the name カシオ (Casio) still used today.
Casio then moved from relays to electronics. In 1965 it released the 001, its first electronic desktop calculator, and it began exporting to Australia in 1966 and to Europe in 1967. The real breakthrough came in August 1972 with the Casio Mini, a small six-digit calculator for personal use. At ¥12,800, it cost about a third of the price of its competitors. It sold one million units in ten months, and the series went on to sell more than ten million. With the Mini, the calculator became an everyday object, and Casio became a household name.
Using the know-how it gained from calculators, Casio began expanding into other consumer electronics. In November 1974, it entered the watch market with the Casiotron, a digital watch with an automatic calendar. In January 1980, it launched its first electronic keyboard, the Casiotone 201, which could play 29 instrument sounds. In 1983, it released the first G-Shock watch.
At the same time, Casio took its first steps into electronic games. In August 1980, it released the MG-880, a calculator with a built-in game inspired by Space Invaders. Numbers advanced from the right side of the display, and the player had to shoot them down by matching their digit. It was a big hit in Japan (Casio reissued it in 2018 as the SL-880). From 1980 to the mid-1980s, Casio also made a series of game watches, digital watches with small LCD games built in, which competed with Nintendo’s Game & Watch, launched the same year.
By 1983, Casio was one of the most respected electronics brands in Japan. Home video games had become the next big market: Epoch’s Cassette Vision was a success, and Nintendo and Sega were both preparing their first cartridge consoles. Casio decided to enter the race with two machines at once. The first was the PV-1000, a dedicated video game console. The second was the PV-2000 “Rakugaki” (“Doodle”), a home computer sold for ¥29,800 that could also play games. Both were released in October 1983. Their hardware and cartridges were completely different, and the two machines could share only their joysticks.
Release
The PV-1000 was released in Japan in October 1983. At ¥14,800, it was priced to compete with the Nintendo Famicom and the Sega SG-1000. It launched with a good selection of arcade conversions, mostly licensed from Konami and Namco, so Casio hoped it could become a serious contender in the 8-bit console race. The Famicom was very popular at the time and was sold out in many stores. Casio hoped to take advantage of this by offering an alternative to Nintendo’s hit console.
The console came with a controller shaped like a fighter-plane control stick.
Demise
The PV-1000 never came close to the sales of the Famicom or the SG-1000. Several factors probably played a role, including weak marketing and the confusion created by the PV-2000. The PV-2000 also used cartridges, sometimes with the same game titles, but its cartridges did not work on the PV-1000. According to retrogames.co.uk, the console was withdrawn after only a few weeks because of poor sales. Then, in 1984, Casio released the PV-7, a computer based on the MSX standard, and moved its game efforts to that platform. The PV-1000 was abandoned less than a year after its launch, which makes it very rare today.
Casio would not return to video game consoles until 1995, with the Loopy.
Technical Specifications
- CPU: NEC D780C-1 (Zilog Z80A compatible) at 3.579 MHz
- RAM: 2 KB, shared between the CPU and the video chip (see note)
- Video and sound chip: NEC D65010G031 (custom)
- Graphics: 8 × 8 pixel tiles in a 32 × 24 grid
- Resolution: 224 × 192 pixels visible (240 × 192 in some sources)
- Colours: 8 (3-bit RGB)
- Sound: 3 square-wave channels
- Media: ROM cartridges
- Controller: Joystick shaped like an aircraft control stick
Games
Only 13 games were released for the PV-1000, all of them in 1983. Catalogue numbers GPA-108 and GPA-113 were never released, so at least two other games must have been planned. It is often rumoured that they were Galaga and Front Line, which both came out on the PV-2000. All games sold for ¥3,800.
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| GPA – 101- Puyan | GPA – 102 – Super Cobra | GPA – 103 – Tutankham | GPA – 104 – Amida |
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| GPA – 105 – Dig Dug | GPA – 106 – Warp & Warp | GPA – 107 – Turpin | GPA – 109 -Pachinko UFO |
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| GPA – 110 – Fighting Bug | GPA – 111 – Space Panic | GPA – 112 – Naughty Boy | GPA – 114 – Dirty chameleon |
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| GPA – 115 – Excite Mahjong |