Magnavox Odyssey
Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAG : Magnavox Odyssey
The Magnavox Odyssey is the first home video game console, predating the Atari Pong home consoles by three years. The Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, who had a working prototype finished by 1968. This prototype is affectionately known as the "Brown Box" to classic video game hobbyists. Unlike most video game consoles, the Odyssey is analog rather than digital, which makes its invention all the more amazing in spite of its rather crude graphics and controller responsiveness. Also, unlike any conventional console today, this system was powered by batteries. The Odyssey and its variants (excluding the Odyssey²) also lack sound capability (hence a silent console), which was not uncommon in early Pong systems of that era.
The Odyssey uses a type of removable circuit card that inserts into a slot similar to a cartridge slot; these do not contain any components but have a series of jumpers between pins of the card connector. These jumpers interconnect different analog signal generators to produce the screen output. The system was sold with translucent plastic overlays that gamers could put on their TV screen to simulate color graphics, though only two TV sizes were supported. Some of these overlays could even be used with the same cartridges, though with different rules for playing. It was also sold with plastic game tokens and score sheets to help keep score, much like traditional board games.
The Odyssey was released in May 1972. While it didn't perform badly, it didn't take long before the console succumbed to poor marketing by Magnavox retail chains. One of their mistakes was misleading consumers into believing that the Odyssey would work only on Magnavox televisions. It did, however, prove that consoles for the home could be created. In addition, Magnavox won a court case against Nolan Bushnell for patent infringement in Bushnell's design of Pong, as it resembled the tennis game for the Odyssey.
The Odyssey was successful enough to support an add-on peripheral, the first-ever commercial "light gun" called the Shooting Gallery. This detected light from the TV screen, however pointing the gun at a nearby light bulb also registered as a "hit".
Ralph Baer went on to invent the classic electronic game Simon for Mattel in 1978. Magnavox later released several other Pong-like consoles based on the name Odyssey (which did not use cartridges or game cards), and at one point a truly programmable, cartridge based console, the Odyssey², in 1978.
Nintendo's first venture in the console world was selling the Magnavox Odyssey in Japan, before the company introduced its own consoles.
See also
| Selected video game consoles |
|---|
| First generation |
| Magnavox Odyssey > Pong | Coleco Telstar |
| Early second generation |
| Fairchild Channel F > Atari 2600 | Magnavox Odyssey² | Intellivision |
| Later second generation |
| 5200 | ColecoVision | Vectrex | SG-1000 |
| Third generation (8-bit) |
| NES | Master System | 7800 |
| Fourth generation (16-bit) |
| PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16 > Mega Drive/Genesis | SNES | Neo-Geo | CD-i |
| Fifth generation (32/64-bit) |
| 3DO | Jaguar | Saturn | PlayStation | PC-FX | Nintendo 64 |
| Sixth generation |
| Dreamcast | PlayStation 2 | GameCube | Xbox |
| Seventh generation |
| Xbox 360 > PlayStation 3 | Wii |
References
External links
- [Ralph Baer's story of the development of the Odyssey]
- [The Dot Eaters entry] on the history of the Odyssey
- [Magnavox Odyssey]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.