Fascinating Look Back at the Video-Volley, an Extremely Rare Game Console You Probably Never Knew Existed

The Video-Volley is an old home video game system from around 1980, probably made right at the end of the big Pong craze in the late 1970s. It was built by TD Manufacturing Company, a name you won’t find in big gaming books, so it was likely a small company or one that only sold stuff locally in Texas. They might have jumped into video games after seeing Atari’s Home Pong hit it big in 1975, but didn’t stick around long.

From old sales posts (like on eBay), we know it’s a fixed-game console—its games were built right into it, not swapped out with cartridges. The name “Video-Volley” makes it sound like it had a volleyball game as the main attraction, but instead has hockey, handball, and tennis, all of which were super common sports back then.

The console itself looks like those Pong knockoffs from the late ‘70s: a plastic rectangle with built-in controllers (like knobs or dials) and some switches to pick games or tweak things. It hooked up to your TV with an RF switch and showed basic black-and-white or slightly colored graphics—just blocky shapes and lines, not much fancier than a bouncing square and paddles.

There’s not much known about TD Manufacturing. It’s not the same as TDIndustries, a modern Texas company that fixes machines (started in 1946 as Texas Distributors, Inc., renamed later)—they share initials and a Texas link, but that’s just a fluke, since TDIndustries never made games or gadgets. Instead, TD Manufacturing could’ve been a little electronics company or a side project trying to cash in on the video game boom.