Henrys Video Sport Mk2

The VideoSport MK2 was sold in 1974 or early 1975 by Henrys, a British retailer of televison and Hi-Fi equipment. It is one of the earliest European PONG systems and uses analog circuits. It was still available at Henrys in early 1977. Customers could either buy it in the stores, or have it sent by mail. The box of our specimen was shipped to its original owner in January 1977 and shows a hand-written 2819 in large digits. If this is a serial number, then less than 3000 specimens were sold in two years, which is very low. In this case, it is possible that only a few thousands of units were built. Seeing that sort of model being still sold and discounted in stores in 1977 was common back in the 1970s. The rush for the latest and more advanced model did not exist: although many advanced models were available, earlier ones were still proposed at a lower price (hence the discount between the two advertisements below and our boxed unit, originally purchased for £20.20).

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. This is a typical design for an analog system released in small amount. The electronic circuit of this system is the simplest one after the Magnavox Odyssey. The system is only powered by the mains. Curiously, the bottom sides of the case and hand controls are glued rather than screwed, making it difficult to open the main unit without damaging the borders.

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 plays three games without any difficulty level, although it would have been easy to adjust the ball motion, paddle size, etc. Such settings were common with analog systems.