In the late 1970s, before Atari ruled the living room and before personal computers had settled on anything resembling standardization, a New Jersey-based company named APF Electronics decided to get ahead of the curve. Their strategy was bold: They would build both a home video game console and a home computer, and then fuse them together into a hybrid machine the family could grow into.
This gave the world the APF MP1000, released in 1978, and its much stranger, more ambitious counterpart, the APF Imagination Machine, released soon after.
The MP1000 was a fairly typical second-generation console. Hardwired controllers, a Motorola 6800-derived CPU, and cartridges that resembled oversized 8 tracks. It also had games that looked like simplified versions of what the Atari 2600 and Intellivision were already doing better. Titles included Brickdown, Blackjack, Bowling, Baseball, and Space Destroyers, the obligatory “we have Space Invaders at home” that every console of the era needed to survive.
It was competent, inexpensive, and almost immediately overshadowed by the Atari 2600 and the also-doomed Bally Astrocade. Nothing about the MP1000 stood out except that APF had no intention of stopping there.
Enter the Imagination Machine, a full-sized keyboard computer that is physically attached to the MP1000 like an expansion dock from an alternate timeline. Connected together, the two units formed a single device with BASIC programming, cassette storage, expanded RAM, and the ability to use the MP1000’s game cartridges. APF advertised it as a complete educational and entertainment workstation for the whole family.
It was the right idea at the wrong time, and it cost several hundred dollars. By the early 1980s, Apple, Commodore, TI, and Atari were already offering computers with stronger software libraries and far more support, and APF’s hybrid approach confused retailers and consumers. Was it a console that could become a computer, or a computer that needed a console to function? Which part should be marketed first? Should software be sold as game cartridges, BASIC programs, or both?
The library never found traction, and in the end, the MP1000 had about a dozen cartridges. The Imagination Machine had a modest pile of BASIC programs, typing tutors, educational titles, and text-based games, but none of it matched the momentum of the rapidly growing home computer scene. Even worse, the combined unit took up more physical space than many contemporary computers, leaving it stuck between product categories with no clear audience.
By 1981, APF released the Imagination Machine II, an all-in-one redesign that removed the MP1000 link and tried to compete more directly with mainstream personal computers. It was too late, though, and APF could not compete with price cuts from Texas Instruments and Commodore. The crash of 1983 wiped out what remained of the company’s consumer electronics ambitions.
Today, the MP1000 and Imagination Machine are treasured by collectors precisely because they represent a bold attempt at merging consoles and computers. APF predicted a future in which gaming and computing would live side by side in the same box, something that would not become mainstream until decades later. The hardware was limited, the software sparse, and the market uninterested, but the vision was surprisingly forward-looking.
