VideoSport MK2 © 1974 Henry's.
One of the earliest Pong consoles. It was sold in 1974 or early 1975 by Henry's, a British retailer of televison and Hi-Fi equipment.
It played 3 games: Tennis, Football & Hole in the Wall.
Tennis: Each player uses two knobs to move his paddle (one to move horizontally and one to move vertically), and one push-button to serve the ball. There are no on-screen scoring and no sound effects, which is a common thing with early analog systems.
Football: Same as Tennis but with two lines with a hole on their middle to act as goals. Because this game can be played with only two paddles, there is no football team, so each player acts as a goal for the other.
Hole in the Wall: another Ball and Paddle variant without central line, where one player is an inverted paddle so as to display as a vertical line with a hole instead of the paddle. Alghough this game is very common with analog systems, this one is played differently. First, the hole is located on the left of the screen, instead of the right like most other analog systems. Second, the hole is controlled by both players instead of one: not only the hole faces the paddle when the second player (right) moves vertically, but the first player (left) can only move the hole horizontally. Thus, each player moves the hole in one direction. This is a very strange version of this game, which has a major drawback due to the two-player control of the hole: it is not possible to play other variants like SQUASH (where the hole is located so high that it doesn't display), BASKETBALL (where the hole is located on the top of the screen), and MOUSE HOLE (where the hole is located on the bottom of the screen).
The hand assembled electronic circuit board is very basic: it has only two TTL integrated circuits containing four NAND gates each. The rest is made of discrete components.
Controllers: 2 wired controllers with 2 knobs (1 for vertical and 1 for vertical movement)and a push button to serve or kick (football game).
Knob: on the console to select a game
Switch: On/Off
Two versions are known to exist: the original one with gold letters, and the later one without gold letters (probably an attempt to reduce the production costs). The push-buttons could be black, yellow or white as these systems were mostly hand assembled with parts purchased "on the fly", as opposed to systems made by bigger companies who ordered their whole stock of electronic parts because their products were assembled by automatic tools.
The system was sold until 1977.
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