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The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console
- bryanlarsen 5y ago"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." 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.
- thesuitonym 5y agoOne of the first major school reports I ever did was on the Odyssey. It was a neat little system!
- ASalazarMX 5y agoAs 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. 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.
- eggy 5y agoI loved my Vic-20. I had programmed on my Commodore PET 2001, but the Vic-20 opened me up to so much.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoIt had the disadvantage that it didn't have manuals. The one that opened my eyes was an Atari 800 XL, also without manuals, but with a BASIC that didn't need esoteric POKEs. I always wanted to get my hands on a C-64, but somehow never saw one. Guess people loved theirs.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoIt had a great manual that unfortunately ended after thirty pages or so. I never knew you could program it in assembly until a year or two ago.
- at-fates-hands 5y agoRemember 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. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--0yx2OhN5dA/Tgg7mjflyKI/AAAAAAAAABs/9UzejE-Imlk/s1600/magnavox-odyssey-system.png http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--0yx2OhN5dA/Tgg7mjflyKI/AAAAAAAAAB...
- agys 5y agoThe true predecessor of the Wipeout series! Wipeout “1972”: https://voxodyssey.com/magnavox-odyssey/wipeout https://voxodyssey.com/magnavox-odyssey/wipeout (love the masked square that results in a trail-like sprite)
- eggy 5y agoWe 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. 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.
- dangle1 5y agoEncyclopedias. I kind of forgot about those, but now I can remember relying on a hand-me-down encyclopedia set for answering childood questions without having to go downtown to the library. Late '70s, and my interest in space is met with the encyclopedia's entry on the moon: "Someday, man may go to the moon."
- eggy 5y agoI was 5 when Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon in 1969. I remember watching it on a 12 in. black and white TV. Encyclopedias amazed me. I would thumb through them and look up each mention of something I didn't understand - the modern equivalent of link hopping, except I kept my thumb on the main article.
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- jonjon10002 5y agoPicked 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. 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. 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.
- dang 5y agoLooks like only one past thread: The Magnavox Odyssey -- is it still fun today? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908370 - Aug 2011 (17 comments)
- deckard1 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20121228052131/http://www.kymalabs.com/wormwall/displaywall?key=9cc89378626425cc1a0d7e8cdbe6bebd https://web.archive.org/web/20121228052131/http://www.kymala... tl;dr: no. Never tried the first, but I still have my Odyssey^2 with nearly all the games. Only games I remember playing are Breakout and Alien Invaders[1], because those were the only fun ones. The box packaging and art for Conquest of the World[2] was seriously cool though. No clue how the game was meant to be played. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w-NCS2FiM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w-NCS2FiM0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Jk4QFty8PE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Jk4QFty8PE
- ilamont 5y agoOdyssey 2 had a stock trading game if IIRC ... I remember the TV ads for it targeted dads, not kids! Looking at this list, it's probably "The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magnavox_Odyssey²_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magnavox_Odyssey²_game... A friend had the Odyssey 2 and the graphics seemed better than the 2600, although looking at the screenshots now not by much.
- icelancer 5y agoRelated: A great video documentary on The First Video Game, by one of the best YouTube producers in this field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ4WCU1WQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ4WCU1WQc
- dver 5y agoMy Dad was a TV repairman at a Magnavox dealer. My siblings and I would play this all the time in the shop. I've thought about that when I walk into one of kids rooms and they're playing some super realistic game.
- MBCook 5y ago50 years old. Wow.
- ghaff 5y agoTo 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.
- robmiller 5y agoWhen 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. Edit: Just found an image of the same one https://i.redd.it/kzvv4pq6f1h21.jpg https://i.redd.it/kzvv4pq6f1h21.jpg
- fizzychicken 5y agoThe 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.
- batch12 5y agoI have one of these Odyssey 2s still with the box. It is an interesting console.
- handrous 5y ago"My" consoles growing up were the NES and the Odyssey2. I had an NES, my grandparents had an NES and an Odyssey2. Where everyone else has one or another Atari as their blocky-graphics early console, I've got the Odyssey2. Man, those joysticks were something. I remember my favorite games were one that was probably intended to feel like shooting at TIE fighters with a quad cannon turret on the Millennium Falcon (the sprites even looked about as close to TIE fighters as they could get, without getting sued) and the basketball game. I think I played whatever version or port of Space Invaders the console had quite a bit, too. I vaguely remember some carts that used the built-in keyboard for more than just mode selecting, but can't recall what they were.
- marcodiego 5y ago> one that was probably intended to feel like shooting at TIE fighters Cosmic conflict.
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- redis_mlc 5y agoOh look. A Logan's run thread!
- jamesandthewolf 5y agoIt'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. 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