Magnavox Odyssey

~ the goodbye ~

Ralph Baer was an engineer at Sanders Associates, a military electronics contractor in Nashua, New Hampshire, when he worked out in august 1966 that every television set already sitting in an American living room was doing exactly one thing. He spent three years and seven prototypes on the argument, working with two colleagues, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch. The seventh prototype was a wood-grain vinyl box that everyone called the Brown Box. Magnavox signed an agreement to produce it in january 1971 and put it on sale in september 1972.

What arrived cost $99.95 and contained no microprocessor at all, because in 1972 there was nothing to put in it. The machine was discrete transistors and diode logic, and it drew three white dots plus a vertical line on the screen. There was no sound and no scoring. Games arrived as cards that pushed jumpers into a slot and rewired the circuits into a different arrangement, twelve of them in the American box. Color and the playing field came from translucent plastic overlays you taped across the front of your own television. The box included score sheets and plastic chips because the console could not count.

It sold 69,000 units in its first year and 129,000 in its best one, 1974, for a lifetime total of about 350,000. Baer blamed two things afterwards: the price, and the fact that Magnavox restricted sales to its own dealerships where salesmen implied the thing needed a Magnavox set to work. The advertising said otherwise. The salesmen were selling televisions. Production ended in the autumn of 1975 and was replaced that november by the Odyssey 100 and 200, dedicated boxes that played variations of one game and did keep score.

This machine stopped being manufactured nine years before I was born, so there is no version of this page where I remember it. What I keep going back to is that it has no software. The game is the wiring, and the cards are jumpers that choose which wiring you get, which means the Odyssey is closer to a piece of test equipment than to anything I would now call a console. Home machines reached Turkey in any number a decade later and they were Atari-shaped, cartridges with code on them. By then the idea that a game is a program had won so completely that the alternative reads as a mistake rather than as the other option.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Ninety nine dollars and ninety five cents in 1972 is around seven hundred and seventy in 2026 money, for a box with no sound that needed sticky overlays and paper to work. That was the first problem. The second was distribution: Magnavox sold it through Magnavox dealers, alongside the televisions, and a dealer with a margin on a console and a margin on a console plus a television set has an obvious preference. Buyers walked out believing they needed both.

The third problem showed up in may 1972, four months before launch. Magnavox ran a demonstration in Burlingame, California, and among the people who came and watched the ping-pong game was Nolan Bushnell. Pong went into bars that november. It kept score and made a noise when the ball hit something, and nobody had to tape anything to the cabinet or read an instruction sheet first. By 1974 the Odyssey was competing against its own idea, executed by people who had seen it working.

~ the patent that outlived it ~

In april 1974 Magnavox sued Atari and most of the rest of the industry for infringing Baer's patents. Atari settled in june 1976 for $1.5 million and became a licensee, which was the cheap way out and Bushnell knew it. In early 1977 Judge John Grady ruled that Baer's patent was the pioneering patent of the video game art, a phrase that decided the next twenty years of litigation before most of the defendants existed.

Sanders and Magnavox went on collecting into the mid-1990s and took in over $100 million across the various cases, which is a great deal more than the console ever earned. The commercial verdict and the legal verdict point in opposite directions here. Magnavox lost the market it created inside three years, then spent two decades being paid by everyone who took it.

~ what got buried with it ~

The overlays are the part that dates hardest and the part worth remembering. A console shipping a bag of plastic sheets that you tape over the glass is a company deciding that color is a physical accessory rather than an electrical problem, because in 1972 it was cheaper for it to be one. Nothing since has been allowed to make that trade. Every machine after the Odyssey has treated the screen as something it owns entirely.

Baer received the National Medal of Technology in 2006, thirty-four years after the launch and thirty-one after the discontinuation, which is roughly the delay you would expect for an invention that lost money. The Odyssey line kept the name through the 100 and 200 and eventually the Odyssey 2 in 1978, by which point there was a processor inside and cartridges with code on them, and the original had already become an object museums explain rather than one anybody played.

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