The TV Baseball was released by Epoch in August 1978. It is a stand-alone system and it can play only one game: baseball. Indeed, baseball has always been very popular in Japan. It was logic that it inspired first videogames there. The game can be played by two players, one launching the ball and the other manipulating the bat. There is a detachable controller with only one fire button, and all the other controls are on the system itself.
The console was Epoch’s videogame version of its famous Baseball Board. It was also Epoch’s first console that employed a microprocessor, the uPD77xx which had been jointly developed by Epoch and NEC. In this game two players switched off as pitchers and batters. The pitcher had access to buttons on the console to set the pitch. The batter used an external controller that featured a single button to bat at the appropriate time.
Epoch initially priced TV Baseball at ¥18,500 ($78) to compete against Nintendo’s Color TV Game Racing 112 which had been released two months earlier at the same price. However, once TV Baseball was on the market, Nintendo immediately lowered the price of its console to ¥12,500 ($65). Epoch quickly dropped TV Baseball to ¥13,400 ($56). Despite its simplicity, the console managed to sell 230,000 copies.
