Magnavox Odyssey

About the family

Before the Atari 2600 and Nintendo, four American companies paved the way. The Magnavox Odyssey, from 1972, came out months before Pong and is based on the “Brown Box”, a prototype by Ralph Baer; it came with color overlays for the TV screen, dice, cards and chips, and sold about 350,000 units, not a commercial success (Smithsonian). The Fairchild Channel F, from 1976, was the first home console with interchangeable cartridges; engineer Jerry Lawson, Fairchild's head of engineering and one of the first Black engineers in Silicon Valley, co-invented the cartridge, and the Atari 2600, from 1977, ended up eclipsing it (The Henry Ford and Museum of Play). The Odyssey 2, from 1978, made when Magnavox already belonged to Philips (since 1974), swapped built-in games for cartridges, came with a full keyboard besides the controller and competed with the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision; in Europe, where it sold well, it was called the Philips Videopac G7000 (Science Museum Group). Mattel’s Intellivision was test marketed in Fresno, California, in 1979 with four games and went national in 1980; its controller had a 16-direction disc and a 12-button keypad, the console passed 3 million units and Mattel Electronics closed in January 1984 (Game Developer). The ColecoVision came out in August 1982 with Donkey Kong in the box, sold over 500,000 by Christmas 1982 and over 1 million by early 1983, and an expansion module played Atari 2600 cartridges; Coleco filed for bankruptcy protection in 1988 (TechSpot).