Odyssey

One of the first and most important steps, for what today is one of the largest industries in the world, was taken by Ralph Baer in 1967, when he developed the worlds very first console: The Brown Box. After negotiations with several companies, Baer partnered with the television manufacturer Magnavox. A redesigned Brown Box was released in 1972, under the name Odyssey. Sales of between 100.000 to 200.000 units were very disappointing, in part because of Magnavox wrongfully claiming that the Odessey would only work on Magnavox televisions. A very interesting detail is that Nintendo distributed the Odyssey in Japan, and with this got their first hands-on experience with the industry.

Technically the console consists of a simple analogue circuit, and around 40 transistors and 40 diodes. There is no RAM or microprocessors. The games worked by simply changing the circuit of the console in different ways, and as such a cartridge contains no active components. The Odyssey has no sound, and the graphics in every game consists of no more than two players, a ball and a line, parting the screen in half. Ralph Baer later developed a number of new games with active components, making new games with different graphics possible, but Magnavox never published them.

Out of the box, six games were included. Together with transparent colour sheets for the television, the combined result is 12 different games, where most of them are ping-pong-ish sports games. Later came more games, and even a primitive light gun was sold. It registered a 'hit' by measuring the light source, which meant that pointing at a normal lamp would also trigger a 'hit'. However, it was the sports games that defined the console, and those which Nolan Bushnell were more than inspired by, when he designed Pong.