1983 was a terrible year for video gaming in the US, The once mighty industry was crashing at blistering speed, and consoles were being discontinued left and right. In Japan, the story was the polar opposite. The video game industry was in a time of great innovation at the time, led by the introduction of the Nintendo Famicom in July of that year. Casio had experience porting games to the MSX computers in Japan, and decided to throw their hat into the thriving Japanese console market, releasing the PV-1000 in October 1983.
The system used the Zilog Z80 processor, also used in the ColecoVision, and used a joystick controller much like most other early 1980s consoles.
What Makes It Obscure?
The PV-1000's October 1983 release put it into direct competition with the Nintendo Famicom (later sold as the NES) and Sega SG-1000, each of which had vastly superior technical specs and third party support. Only 15 games were ever released for the system, mostly ports of popular arcade games of the time. The system was said to have been produced only for a period of a few weeks, and is extremely rare today.
In short, the system failed because it was competing with two vastly superior systems.
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