Magnavox Odyssey

A console that could only draw three dots

The Magnavox Odyssey went on sale in the United States in September 1972 at US$99.95, about $770 in money of the 2020s. It was the first commercial home video game console: an oblong box that wired into a television set and produced three square dots and one vertical line on a black screen. Two dots belonged to the players and the third was moved by the machine, each changing behaviour according to the game.

The console made no sound and kept no score. Players stuck a transparent sheet over the television glass to supply the picture the hardware could not draw: a tennis court, a hockey rink, a ski slope, a haunted house. Rules lived on paper while the machine moved the pieces: the only version of the idea a household would pay for.

Baer and the game box

The concept came from Ralph H. Baer, an engineer at the military contractor Sanders Associates. In August 1966, waiting for a bus, he returned to an idea from 1951: that a television could do something besides receive a station. He wrote a four-page proposal for a "game box" that would plug into a set and cost about US$25. Management funded the work with US$2,000 for labour and US$500 for materials.

Technician Bob Tremblay helped build "TV Game #1", which moved a vertical line on screen by December 1966. Bill Harrison built successive machines, and Bill Rusch worked out how to add a third, console-controlled dot and proposed a ping-pong game with it. Seven prototypes later came the Brown Box in January 1969. Magnavox signed a production agreement with Sanders in January 1971.

What Magnavox changed

A team led by George Kent turned the prototype into a product. Colour output was removed, partly because colour televisions were still a luxury item and colour circuitry meant extra expense and federal testing. The joystick and rifle controllers were dropped for a three-knob unit, and the dial for choosing a game gave way to plug-in game cards, printed circuit boards that rewired the console like a bank of switches.

Magnavox commissioned games from Bradford/Cout Design and the advertising man Steve Lehner, then added dice, play money, poker chips and playing cards to the box, which helped lift the price to US$99.95. The console was unveiled at the Tavern on the Green in New York City on 22 May 1972, for dealers in 18 metropolitan areas.

Cards, overlays and a rifle

Twenty-eight games were released on eleven game cards, thirteen of them included, twelve in America and ten elsewhere. Table Tennis sat on the first card and used no overlay. Several games shared a card, so the same circuitry served a ski run on one overlay and a movement-based Simon Says on another. Magnavox sold 20,000 of a light gun accessory, Shooting Gallery, whose rifle scored a hit when aimed at a light source such as a dot on the screen; the gun was designed and made by Nintendo from its 1970 Beam Gun toy.

The console attached through a switch box that presented it as a signal on television channel three or four, an arrangement that became standard for consoles since. Six C batteries were supplied; an AC adapter cost extra.

Pong, patents and twenty years of lawsuits

In May 1972 the Nutting Associates engineer Nolan Bushnell saw the Odyssey demonstrated. After he and Ted Dabney left to found Atari, Bushnell handed Allan Alcorn a cheap ping-pong game as a training exercise, without saying the idea came from the Odyssey Table Tennis card. The result was Pong, and it drove customers towards the Odyssey rather than away from it.

In April 1974 Magnavox and Sanders sued Atari and several competitors over patents covering games played on a television screen. In early 1977 the judge John Grady ruled that Baer's patent was, in his words, "the pioneering patent of the video game art". Atari settled in June 1976 for US$1.5 million. Sanders and Magnavox won or settled every case, taking more than US$100 million before the patents expired in the early 1990s.

Sales, and why production stopped

Magnavox sold 69,000 consoles in the first calendar year, 89,000 in 1973, 129,000 in 1974 and 80,000 in 1975. Baer put the lifetime total at 350,000; the product manager Bob Fritsche said 367,000. Production ended in the autumn of 1975: inflation had raised the cost of building the console from about US$37 to US$47, and the retail price could not follow.

Its replacement was a pair of dedicated consoles, the Odyssey 100 and Odyssey 200, released in November 1975 with the games built into the hardware. No other home console able to play separately produced games appeared until the Fairchild Channel F in 1976.

Legacy

Magnavox made no further games for the Odyssey after 1973, and it is not usually counted a commercial triumph, but it is remembered for defining the category. The Museum of Modern Art added the console to its permanent collection of video games in 2013, and Baer received the National Medal of Technology in 2004.

The consoles that followed took its two central ideas, a machine that puts moving images under a player's control and a television used for something other than broadcast, and made them ordinary. This one looked like three dots and a sheet of plastic, and it was enough to start an industry.