Odyssey gaming console

Magnavox Odyssey Tv Model Odyssey built-in. Results Pagination - Page 1 1 2. Magnavox One stop shop for all things from your favorite brand. Shop now. You May Also Like. Sony Personal Cassette Players. Sony Personal MiniDisc Recorders. While the home version of Pong is the system most often remembered by video game players who had their first experience in the '70s, the original home video game system and the system responsible for inspiring both Atari's coin-op and home versions of Pong was the Magnavox Odyssey.

The Odyssey was invented by an electrical engineer named Ralph Baer. While many consider Nolan Bushnell, the enigmatic founder of Atari, to be the father of the video games, this title should actually go to Baer. Ralph first came up with the idea for video games in when working at an early TV manufacturer by the name of Loral. Given the assignment of building the best TV system in the world, he submitted the idea that the TV should include innovative concepts — one of which was the ability to play games.

The idea was canned immediately by the managers, but not removed from Ralph's mind. Move forward to , when Ralph is Chief Engineer and Manager of the Equipment Design division at Sanders Electronics, who was under contract with the military to develop and build various electronic equipment. During September of that year, the television game idea returned to Ralph's thoughts, only it had evolved with the times. Now that TV sets were much more common in U. A small, easily affordable "game box.

Now in a position to do something about it though still not officially , Ralph jotted down plans and schematics, and had one of his technicians, Bob Tremblay, begin work on the circuits. Within a month, they had a primitive prototype working that put two spots on the TV screen and allowed play of a "game" of sorts that Ralph called "Fox and Hounds. In May, another engineer by the name of Bill Rusch joined the team, and they all started brainstorming on more games that they could design their game box to play.

By June of that year, they did their first actual demo for Sanders' top brass. By adding extra circuitry to allow the hookup of a tape recorder to the TV set as well, Ralph played taped descriptions of the games directly out of the TV speaker.

This created the effect of a full multimedia presentation when the game box was demonstrated long before the term "multimedia" was even coined. The brass was impressed by the demo, which included full color presentations of the two games, and gave permission for the project to continue. Ralph and the two engineers soon came up with the idea of a third blip on the screen, one that would be controlled by the circuitry itself, rather than the players.

Bill Rusch suggested the blip could represent a ball, and the team came up with ideas for various ball games, one of which was Ping-Pong. Every other Odyssey game requires the players to exercise more imagination and observe some special rules. Some of the games involve extremely simple visual upgrades: If you add the hockey rink overlay, table tennis suddenly becomes Ice Hockey.

Move the center line, and it becomes Volleyball. Other games seem closer in lineage to physical board games than to electronic ones, relying on accessories such as cards, poker chips, dice, play money, and scoreboards to enhance their play. Magnavox included those accessories with every Odyssey it sold. Magnavox designed these boxy devices to be set on a table and manipulated with two hands, one on each side of the controller. Each control unit sports three knobs and one button.

Here we see a circuit board with one regular potentiometer for vertical paddle control and two nested potentiometers to control horizontal paddle movement and English. A momentary push switch for the reset button sits in the center of the board. Magnavox designed the Odyssey with modular circuitry because modules cost less to manufacture and the company believed that this approach would lead to more-efficient testing and production.

Some of the modules are identical, so they could be built and tested in a separate assembly line process, and then plugged into the board. The four spot-generating modules on the main board are accompanied by four internal dials that technicians can adjust to calibrate the proper height, length, position, and brightness of each spot on the screen. Three of the dials are visible in this photo. They provides a very flexible and tunable system. Many other iconic gaming systems from the dawn of the medium accompany the Odyssey at the exhibit.

It stands as the very first home video game console. The system was developed by Ralph Baer , a German-American engineer who created the ping-pong style gameplay that the Odyssey offered. From a technical aspect, all its game programs were practically the same with slight variations.

Gameplay variation came more from the peripherals included with the Odyssey than from the game programs themselves.