Nightmare magnavox odyssey 2 cover11/14/2023 Much of what we know about the early history of the Odyssey comes courtesy of Ralph Baer’s fascinating autobiography, Videogames: In The Beginning, which was released in 2005, nine years before his death at the age of 92. and a whole new way of playing games that radically changed how large subsets of this planet's population spend their free time" - Ralph Baer, Videogames: In The Beginning " What started as an idea to build a "box" that could make novel use of any garden-variety TV set became an industry. Spacewar! formed the basis for Computer Space, the world’s first arcade video game, which was created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1971 – the pair would go on to found Atari the following year.Īnd it’s Atari that tends to dominate any conversation about the early history of video games, perhaps unfairly overshadowing the achievements of the Odyssey and its creator, Ralph Baer – after all, the Odyssey predates the release of Atari’s first arcade game, Pong, by several months, and there’s convincing evidence that the Odyssey directly inspired Atari’s smash-hit machine, as we’ll see later. More importantly, Steve Russell and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology coded the game Spacewar! in 1962 on a PDP-1 computer, and code for the game was circulated to computers at other institutions. The Odyssey was by no means the first time a game was put onto a screen: as far back as 1952, the University of Cambridge computer scientist Alexander Shafto Douglas had created a game of Tic Tac Toe on a room-filling EDSAC computer, and the American physicist William Higinbotham made the game Tennis for Two in 1958 using an oscilloscope. In short, it was enormously exciting: no one had seen anything like the Odyssey before.Ī replica of Ralph Baer’s ‘Brown Box’ prototype on display at the US National Videogame Museum in Texas - Image: WikipediaĪlthough perhaps we should qualify that statement. ![]() Anecdotal reports from early adopters rave about the machine, calling it things like "the most unique product I’ve seen" and "the best product on the market." There were even stories about Los Angeles Air Traffic Control using an Odyssey to train recruits by simulating air traffic and about the University of Kentucky measuring the brain waves of monkeys while the simians moved objects around on the screen. But the Odyssey suddenly allowed TV viewers to become players, controlling objects on the screen in what must have been a revelatory experience. Up until that point, television had been an entirely passive medium. But whenever it arrived in people’s homes, it caused a sensation. Having said that, we can’t celebrate its anniversary with any degree of accuracy - the exact launch date of the machine is unknown, and all we can say for certain is that it went on sale in the United States at some point in either August or September 1972, making its way over to the UK the following year. It’s been an astonishing 50 years since the debut of the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first-ever game console.
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