We were dirt poor, and I remember the day my father brought home the Magnavox Odyssey box. My brother and I learned all the state capitals, we had fun with the ski game, and the other overlays that came with it which fit perfect on our Magnavox TV! I remember trying to put plastic wrap on the screen and use markers to make our own games. Wow, I just had a wave of nostalgia that warmed me up a bit! Static held the overlays in place. The controllers reminded me of an Etch-A-Sketch, and so I was able to navigate the square due to the muscle memory. This was 1972. I was 8 years old.<p>My first computer came five years later. It was a Commodore PET 2001 followed by a Vic-20. I had saved up $832 from working odd jobs - shoe shine boy, fixing bicycles, newspaper route (in a bad neighborhood), and saving my allowance. I always thank my Dad to this day for buying the Odyssey when I know there were days we didn't have anything in the refrigerator before this time. My Mom and Dad also bought us two sets of encyclopedias on a payment plan. It was the renaissance of my family's way towards getting out of poverty. When our top floor Brooklyn apartment burned down, amazingly the outward facing bindings of the encyclopedias were pitch black, and the end books, but the whole set survived the fire which was in the center of the apartment. My brother and I used those encyclopedias all through high school, and into university. He was the first to graduate in my immediate family. Good memories.
Picked up one of these as a kid at a garage sale for a buck, mostly to take it apart and see how it worked. Internally, it was a board with maybe a dozen daughter boards, each a vertically-mounted, removable card. All transister-diode logic. The game "cartridges" were just cards with different jumper wires inside them that physically rewired the system.<p>In addition to the overlays, it came with dice, money, poker chips, and some other board game components you used in conjunction with the video game itself. I'm guessing everyone promptly lost all of this, which would make a complete system even more rare.<p>Magnavox didn't sell many of these, but made their real money patenting everything and then suing Atari and anyone else making a video game system attaching to a TV.
"It is capable of displaying three square dots on the screen in monochrome black and white, with differing behavior for the dots depending on the game played, and with no sound capabilities."<p>Almost all the games were some sort of Pong variant, but what you could do with a plastic overlay and some imagination are quite impressive.
When I was a kid in the '80s, we had a Magnavox TV with built-in Pong. The game mode button was at the top of the side panel with the VHF and UHF knobs. Blue and Red controllers plugged into the back of the set, each with a rotary encoder and trigger.<p>Edit: Just found an image of the same one <a href="https://i.redd.it/kzvv4pq6f1h21.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/kzvv4pq6f1h21.jpg</a>
As a pre-Internet kid I had the hobby of buying mysterious old computers or videogame consoles I found cheap at bazaars. One day I got a Magnavox Odyssey and a VIC-20 for like 5 bucks, both without accessories besides the power adapter.<p>The Vic-20 was a joy to tinker around until I got the basics (ha) of it, but the Odyssey, without games, overlays or even controllers, remained a baffling puzzle for many years.
The true predecessor of the Wipeout series!<p>Wipeout “1972”:
<a href="https://voxodyssey.com/magnavox-odyssey/wipeout" rel="nofollow">https://voxodyssey.com/magnavox-odyssey/wipeout</a><p>(love the masked square that results in a trail-like sprite)
To be honest, it wasn't that much fun at the time (assuming I'm remembering my game consoles correctly). I got one as a kid (presumably Christmas). Played with it for a few weeks until one of the controller connectors became flaky. By then I was getting pretty bored of it, so my parents just returned it for a refund.
Remember my roommate in college bringing his grandfathers
Odyssey 2 gaming system back to college after he passed away to tinker on. Many nights fooling around playing those old games on it - what a blast from the past.<p><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--0yx2OhN5dA/Tgg7mjflyKI/AAAAAAAAABs/9UzejE-Imlk/s1600/magnavox-odyssey-system.png" rel="nofollow">http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--0yx2OhN5dA/Tgg7mjflyKI/AAAAAAAAAB...</a>
The Odyssey2 , branded as Philips Videopac g7000 where I lived, was my first computer, though I only ever used it for games. The joysticks were quite harsh, always gave me a blister between my thumb and index finger.....long before I discovered 'Nintendo thumb'. The noises of these games are burned in my memory, along with the layout of Pickaxe Pete. I also had the glorious box set of 'Quest for the rings' which had a fantastic concept but I never figured out how to play correctly.
The box art for these games, and those of systems that followed, always had such imagination compared to the simple blocks that made up the game. I remember when games reached a point where the box art ended up being screenshots of the actual gameplay and thinking tomyself 'The technology has finally caught up with the imagination', yet now it seems we have reverted and only yesterday I watched a trailer for the next Battlefield game that was majority pre-rendered content.....it feels like a step backwards.
It's nice to read all these comments about the first console. I'm so glad people have happy memories and are sharing them, it's exactly why I picked video games to be the centre focus point of the website.<p>The website voxodyssey is named after this console there is a story behind this if you are interested if not I leave you in peace friends
Looks like only one past thread:<p><i>The Magnavox Odyssey -- is it still fun today?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908370" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908370</a> - Aug 2011 (17 comments)
Related: A great video documentary on The First Video Game, by one of the best YouTube producers in this field:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ4WCU1WQc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ4WCU1WQc</a>
My Dad was a TV repairman at a Magnavox dealer. My siblings and I would play this all the time in the shop.<p>I've thought about that when I walk into one of kids rooms and they're playing some super realistic game.