Retrospectives

I mean, who doesn’t love Analogic?

The Magnavox Odyssey was designed by a man named Ralph Baer. He is a German American video game pioneer, inventor, engineer, and widely known as ‘The Father of Video Games’. In the year 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology for inventing the home console for video games and spawning the video game industry. So in turn, you can thank him for all the gaming we have today. He began working on a prototype of the Odyssey known as the Brown Box in 1966 and finished it in 1968. The Brown Box can be seen in the Nation Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. After the Odyssey was released, the Odyssey² shortly followed only 6 years later. But that is a retrospective for another day.

This first generation console was released in August of 1972. Sales suffered due to the terrible marketing by Magnavox retail stores. Many consumers thought that the system would only work with Magnavox televisions, thus decreasing sales that much more. The boxes later had ‘Works on any television set, black and white or color’ written on them.

The system is as simplistic as you can get. The Odyssey used cartridges which were just little cards with numbers on them. The games that were made for the Odyssey only had slightly different programming as the games didn’t use graphics. The console only uses little lights the shape of squares/rectangles on the screen and you place overlays on your television screen to simulate graphics.

When you look at the controllers, you will wonder what everything does. Well, it’s just a block on a thick cord with 3 knobs and a button. One knob is for vertical movement and the other is for horizontal. The last mini knob is pretty much used to screw with the game. In other words you could call it the first cheating system in video games. The button on top is just a reset button; self explanatory. You will find that the cords on the controllers are short and bulky, so in order to play you will need to move the console closer. There was also a light gun that was produced. This gun looks nothing like you would see in todays market. It literally looked like a rifle. The light gun was used for a game called Shooting Gallery and detected light. If you wanted to, you could cheat by holding it up to a light bulb as it only needs to detect light to count as a hit.

The games may be simplistic and dumb looking, but you’d be surprised how much fun you could have just by screwing around with it! If you have one or plan on getting one, just have a friend over and just try different stuff out. Maybe play Simon Says or even just the basic Table Tennis (aka Pong). Sometimes the simplest things can be the most entertaining.

The Magnavox Odyssey only sold around 330,000 units. To find one now would probably be hard and expensive at that. If you can get your hands on a working one, then you should definitely buy it. This is first video game console to ever be made. It’s the first game device to use video signals.

Ralph Baer is possibly the biggest person in gaming history. He’s currently 88 years of a age and he seems to be going strong still. Ralph, you will always be a gaming god!