Installing the Odyssey included extensive – by today’s standards – antenna and wire connections and television adjustments, and the console could be powered by six C batteries or an AC power supply, the latter of which was sold separately.ĭespite the Odyssey’s low sales of 350,000 units, the Odyssey was the predecessor to all home gaming systems and directly influenced Atari’s runaway hit Pong. The Odyssey also came with score card sheets, dice, and playing cards, with later optional peripherals being a “light gun” and a golf putting joystick. Games included with the system were Table Tennis, Simon Says, Submarine, and more. Translucent plastic overlays placed on the television set the scene for each game, which had very little variation between them without the different overlays. One knob had an inner knob that could be rotated to control spin. It came with two large controllers with knobs on each side to control the onscreen paddles. ![]() Its outside is a cream plastic with wood-grain trim and a slot for cards, which use card edge pins to program the Odyssey to play games. Based on a 1967 prototype by Ralph Baer known as “ The Brown Box,” the Magnavox Odyssey sold only around 300,000+ units at $99.95 each, about $570 in today’s dollars. “ODYSSEY is thought, action, and reaction.” So proclaims an advertisement for the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first home gaming system. Or have a look at the best stuff from the Mirth Canal in The Top Picks.Written by Season // Ma// Game Lore // No comments Sega considered adding a feature where they would drive to each customer's house and punch them in the face, but couldn't decide what to charge for it.įor more idiotic gaming hardware, check out The 6 Most Ill-Conceived Video Game Accessories Ever. You also couldn't tilt, turn, drop, shake, bump or otherwise move the Nomad lest it freeze or just quit working altogether. Oh, and the rechargeable battery ran out even faster. But strangely enough, after spending the equivalent of $380 on this thing, it still wouldn't blow you. Sure, you could order a rechargeable battery pack, for about 80 bucks more ($110 in today's dollars). So, yeah, it would blow through five bucks worth of batteries every time you fired it up, and you'd barely have time to get past a couple of levels. And while it played Genesis games, it only did so for about an hour and a half before all six of your AA batteries died. It was more than twice the price of a Game Boy (around $270 in today's money). So how could this not take the handheld world by storm? It came out several years after Nintendo's Game Boy with its crappy black and white screen. They apparently figured their first system failed because awestruck consumers were intimidated by its technical prowess, so they corrected this by making the Junior much smaller and shittier than the original. So the thing sold horribly and then, in 1983, Nintendo released the Famicom (the NES to us) and the Epoch Cassette Vision was forgotten forever.Įpoch, however, struck back with the Cassette Vision Junior. Keep in mind this thing came out five years after the Fairchild up there and its handy wired controllers. ![]() Imagine booting up the ol' Xbox and then holding it on your lap as you play. ![]() Well, if you did that with the Epoch, you'd be out of a system, seeing as how the controllers were just knobs built onto the console itself. You know when you're playing video games and you're leaning left and right with the controller, throwing it in anger, all that? Hook that shit up to your 72-inch HDTV and you've got yourself a party.Įpoch had a unique vision of fixing this by bringing Japan a console that was quite a bit shittier than others on the market. If you're one of those late adopters and would like to get in on the Odyssey 200 fun, you can usually find them on eBay for almost nothing (we found one at ten dollars with zero bids). "Finally, something that combines the excitement of tennis with my passion for writing down numbers."ĭespite dismal sales, Magnavox kept plugging away, later releasing even more consoles with even more variations of pong (the Odyssey 300 and 400, finally including the amazing innovation of on-screen scoring). There was no reason to buy this stupid thing that made you keep your own score. Copyright laws were very loose in the gaming world at the time, and Pong rip-offs pretty much flooded the market. You had to do it yourself, with a manual slider thing (even Pong kept score for you, on-screen). To give you an idea of what the technology was like at the time, the Odyssey 200 was not smart enough to keep track of your score.
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