Game cartridges were all the rage in the late 70s through the 90s until the CD took over, though Nintendo somewhat stubbornly has hung onto the technology in some form or other, up to the Nintendo Switch that uses SD cards.
These days digital downloads or streaming through services like Game Pass are common ways to play games. If we go back to cartridge roots, a 6’6″ tall man named Jerry Lawson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Lawson_(engineer)) was at the center of the promotion of the first game system to feature the game cartridge, the Fairchild F (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Channel_F).
Interesting video on Mr. Lawson and the history of the cartridge and wanted to share it here.
I have never played a Fairchild F (have you?), but we did have an old black and white system that had pong and two other games. Also had a a light gun. This was in the 70s. The Atari 2600 was the first console game system that we played heavily in our home and vividly remember playing a lot of the 2600 and Activision games when they were newly released.
Would love to hear from any owners and/or gamers that played the Fairchild F in the comments. Let us knwo what you thought of the system? Obviuously in 2023, it appears very old game tech, but this is the kind of system that emulation, love it or hate it, saves from completely disappearing.