It took the world of home entertainment by storm. In 1972, way before the first mass market video recorders were introduced, a US company called Magnavox started selling the Odyssey – the world’s first commercial home video console.
Odyssey easily attaches to any TV brand – black and white or color, to create a closed-circuit electronic playground. … Odyssey – a new dimension for your television. Now at your Magnavox dealer.
This was part of a Magnavox ad from YouTube, but the sound effects you just heard are not actually from the game itself, since the Odyssey had no sound capabilities at all.
The console, a rectangular black-and-white box with two wired controllers, was only able to display three dots in monochrome mode, with the movement of the dots depending on the game played.
Magnavox owners were able to play a total of 11 games, including table tennis, football, volleyball and basketball.
The code was lacking vital parts, like a screen background, and according to Irate Gamer’s review on YouTube, the Odyssey was a video game, but with board game attributes.
Magnavox took steps to extend the life of the product. And they did this by adding in a whole s**tload of accessories like flash cards, dice, stickers, and about a dozen of these thin plastic overlays.
That’s right, since the Odyssey was physically unable to display anything but three moving white dots, in addition to using game cartridges, players actually had to place semi-transparent sheets of plastic on their TV screen to put the dots into visual context, be it a basketball court or, in the case of the game “Simon says” – two characters, for which you have to correctly name body parts, matching them with paper flash cards.
To the average modern computer user, the way the Odyssey was built might sound a bit weird. It had no central processor and relied solely on diode-transistor circuitry that had to be rewired with the use of game cartridges to display different types of games.
The console retailed for $99 – the modern-day equivalent of about $569, which according to many consumers was “a bit too steep” for a totally new type of product. Nevertheless, more than 100 thousand Odysseys were sold in 1972. And since the idea of producing commercial video games led to the appearance of dozens of copycat products, Magnavox battled other manufacturers in court, winning an additional $100 million in various patent lawsuits.
According to Ralph Baer, one of Odyssey’s creators, besides the US, the system was also released internationally and was eventually available in countries like Austria and Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, and even in the Soviet Union.
The launch of the Odyssey marked the beginning of a big journey. A journey in which the commercial video game industry was born and thousands of professionals – artists, engineers, programmers and sales managers — started the battle for gamers’ hearts and minds.
