The Odyssey puts Ralph Baer's television games in stores

What happened

Inside the case was analog circuitry rather than a processor: three controllable spots of light, a vertical line, and no sound or scorekeeping of any kind. Everything else came out of the box. Translucent overlays taped to the television supplied color, playfields and rules for tennis, haunted houses, roulette and a simplified version of American football. Plug-in cards rewired the connections to select a game. Dice, poker chips, play money and printed score sheets handled the bookkeeping, an unusual admission that the machine was one component of a boxed game rather than the whole of it.

Sales were real but modest, in the low hundreds of thousands across the product's life, and the reasons are still argued over. The console reached buyers only through Magnavox dealers at a price close to a hundred dollars, and much of the advertising was read by shoppers as meaning it worked solely on a Magnavox set, which was untrue and expensive to correct. A separate rifle accessory sold well. What the Odyssey did settle, months before any arcade success, was that a television could be something other than a receiver.

The world at the time

American homes in 1972 had one or two television sets, watched three networks, and had never seen a screen respond to a person. Consumer electronics retailing ran through brand-loyal dealer networks that sold whatever the manufacturer supplied. Baer's employer was a defense contractor with no consumer division, so licensing the design out was the only realistic path to a store shelf.

What it changed

Successor models added sound and scoring through the decade, ending with a cartridge system that competed directly with Atari. The patent portfolio proved more valuable than the hardware, producing settlements and licensing income for years. Museums now treat the console as the starting point of home gaming, and the prototypes that led to it sit in a national collection.