You may think that name is weird and if a console with a name like this came out today you bet it would be the joke of the gaming world, but it was called this because of its simulated woodgrain self-adhesive covering. After two years of working ended with the prototype unit, they named the Brown Box. It all started with the with a man named Ralph Baer working at Sanders Associates along with Bill Harrison and Bill Rush. The very first home gaming console The Odyssey I will be releasing these at least once a week and I hope you enjoy this look back on video game history as much as I enjoyed researching it. This will be the first in series as a look back on all the major video game consoles ever made. I'll be going through the background on the events that lead to the making of this historic console and the impact it had afterward and how the console met its demise. Well, I can tell you that there was a console that came before that called the Magnavox Odyssey. Did not actually contain any ROM or data of any kind.Most people mistake the first video game console as the Atari 2600.Cartridges contained a series of jumper circuits that connected different components on the main board together.In the first production runs of the Magnavox Odyssey and the Philips 7000, these were permanently attached to the console in later models, they were removable and replaceable. Two 8-way, one-button, digital joysticks.No actual CPU, just very simple logic circuitry.In fact other than a basic table tennis game (which would later be copied by Atari as "Pong") a majority of the games relied almost as much on the overlay and an imagination as it did on the image appearing on the television. Various shooting games where the white block would appear behind an overlay lighting up various targets.Īnd many more of that ilk. GamesĪ Simon-says type variant where one moves the white block to a part of a body on an overlay of a boy and a girl.Ī roulette game where players placed a poker chip on a (physical) numbered sheet, and hope that the white block goes into their desired number on the overlay.Ī 50 state educational game where one player would name a state and the other would have to place the white block so it would appear in the state on the overlay To get around the graphical limitations Magnavox included various overlays with the various carts. Most of the games were two player only, and consisted almost exclusively of two white blocks on the screen which the players could move via dial controllers. Most of the games on the Magnavox bear little resemblance to the games of today. The system however used cartridges to tell the system which game (or series of games) to play. Most (if not all) of the games were built into the system itself. This made it so pointing the gun at any light source would count as a hit. It would recognize any light source as the screen. However, you would not need to point the light gun at the screen to be successful. The Odyssey also had the first optical video game light gun, which was made for the Odyssey game Shooting Gallery. Magnavox settled or won many court cases against various companies including Nolan Bushnell for eerie resemblance between Bushnell's Pong and Tennis for the Odyssey. The Odyssey's sales were poor due to bad marketing by Magnavox retail stores and the consumer misconception that the Odyssey only worked on Magnavox televisions. The prototype Odyssey (referred to as the "Brown Box") that Baer got to work in 1968 is now in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It was released in Fall of 1972 and was designed by Ralph Baer in 1968. The Magnavox Odyssey is the very first video game system.
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