History’s First Home Video Game Console — The Magnavox Odyssey.By the 1970’s video

History’s First Home Video Game Console — The Magnavox Odyssey.By the 1970’s video games were not a new thing, albeit they were not something very common in the everyday household.  The first video games, originating in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s were complicated pieces of software requiring complicated pieces of hardware.  Often large mainframe computers were needed to play simple games such tic tac toe or some kind of Pong ancestor.  But in the late 1960’s, a man named Ralph H. Baer believed that the future of video gaming was with home systems, and he was the man who wanted to introduce video games to every home in America.  In 1968, he finished a prototype system which he called “The Brown Box”.  By 1972, Magnavox became interested in the idea, and began producing the game system in August under the label, “Magnavox Odyssey.The Magnavoy Odyssey is a very simple system, and it would certainly not be fair to compare it with the Playstation 4 much like it wouldn’t be fair to compare the Wright Flier with an F22 Raptor.  It was a pioneer of its field, something no one had ever done before.  The game system consisted of a console with two controllers.  The system contained no chips or CPU, but rather a network of 40 transistors and diodes which created the graphics.  The graphics were extremely simple, consisting of only a few dot or stripe shaped objects of differing size, depending on what game you wanted to play.  There were no background graphics to speak of, rather, the game system came with translucent plastic overlays which would stick to a TV screen and simulated color graphics.Using these overlays, the players could play a wide variety of games such as football, baseball, soccer, hockey, tennis, and volleyball.  For example in the soccer game above, players would play a "pong-like” game where users would try to get the ball into each others goalie nets.  In the skiing game picture below, the user had to trace a circle within the doted line of the overlay. Yeah, exciting stuff!  Altogether there were 28 games available with the Magnavox Odyssey, 12 came with the console, the rest were sold separately. Pong was added in late 1972, shortly after the introduction of the Pong arcade game, a situation that resulted in a long legal battle between Magnavox and Atari. Along with the overlays, the games were sold with dice, poker chips, and score sheets since it was up to the players to keep score. Games were stored on game card that you inserted into a ROM slot.  The cards were not labeled with the games, but simply labeled by number from 1-28.  The instruction booklet had all of the names for the games and the proper overlay that was to be used.  In addition, a rifle accessory was available sold separately for a few shooting gallery games.  The Odyssey’s controllers were featured two large spinning dials, a smaller spinning dial, and a reset button.Production of the Magnavox Odyssey began in August of 1972 and ended in 1975.  During that time 350,000 consoles were produced and sold, costing 75$ a piece (about $450 today).  One interesting fact to note is that the Odyssey was only available for sale at Magnavox stores, and sales people told customers that they would only work on Magnavox TV’s, which was a blatant lie.  As a result, many people bought Maganvox TV’s with their game systems.  Magnavox discontinued production of the Odyssey in 1975 due to the popularity of Pong.  It later released the 100, which was a scaled down system which only had Pong and a hockey game, and later the 200, which featured on screen scoring.  All of Magnavox’s system would be overshadowed in the late by the legendary Atari 2600.Ralph Baer’s “Brown Box” prototype is current on display at the Smithsonian. -- source link

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