"Dissatisfaction with thine lot will be a great civiliser of the race, tho the self-same discontent, source of all improvement, will be parent to no small progeny of absurdities: future people, Future-Men, will seek the replacement of reality with alt-reality; tired of their day-to-day, weary of their vulgar chariots of Pinto and Gremlin and Comet and their dreary professions, the masses shall grovel and pray before the flashes and sounds and colors of miracles in art — art borne of electricity, not only of alternating variety, but of static, too! Shall grovel before creations of the new alchemist, the blasphemous Magna-Vox!"
There was no guarantee in the summer of 1972 that video games would ever be anything but a strange technological curiosity.
It was in this atmosphere that consumer electronics giant Magnavox marketed what up until that point had been known only as "the Brown Box" — Ralph Baer's electronic brainchild, a switch-programmable video game unit six years in the making. The man came up with the idea on his own while working at Sanders Associates Inc., a defense contractor operating out of New Hampshire. He jotted down his idea, designed the unit himself, and filed the first-ever U.S. patent for a video game two years later (a patent Magnavox would go on to defend in court dozens of times, earning more than $100 million in the process, more than it got from actual Odyssey sales).
Another three years would pass before any major U.S. television manufacturer agreed to take a chance on the device. Magnavox introduced the machine in 1972, promising a "closed-circuit electronic playground" for $99.95 — nearly $550 in today's dollars.
For that price, the Odyssey did remarkably little. Ralph Baer's little machine was a monstrous-looking thing — combination white plastic and faux wood grain, a jagged, unwieldy device tassled to a pair of box-shaped controllers. Its "cartridges" were actually mobile printed circuit boards, sans cover art or logo. It came packaged with twelve of these cartridges: Table Tennis, Tennis, Football, Hockey, Ski, Submarine, Cat and Mouse, Haunted House, Analogic, Roulette, States, and Simon Says, most of these only playable when combined with dice, poker chips, score sheets, and game boards included with the machine.
The narrator in an early Magnavox promo film decrees reassuringly that the Odyssey "master control unit" — a fantastic name for a machine with no onboard processor and exactly 0 bytes of memory — is, quote, "The electronic game of the future, and the family's best foul-weather friend."
"The game cards activate lights on your television screen that bounce, float, or extinguish on contact, depending upon the particular game you've chosen to play." More nuanced instruction follows: "Press the special tennis game overlay into position on the television screen and you're ready to begin an exciting, fast-paced tennis game!"
"Overlays" were the Odyssey's quaint little solution to a big problem: at a time when slide rules were king and digital watches were still the stuff of science fiction, the Odyssey's simple transistor-resister-capacitor architecture made it incapable of displaying anything like a Super Mario or Pitfall Harry, let alone a Mushroom Kingdom or a rattlesnake-infested jungle, even an 8-bit one.
Solution: each game came with its own translucent plastic overlay.
The Odyssey user manual provides clarification: "Static electricity will normally hold the overlay in place on your television screen. However, should the static charge not occur (and it may not, due to atmospheric conditions), two holes are provided in each overlay which will allow you to tape the overlay to your television screen."
So. In 1972, apparently, video games were expensive — but talk was cheap.
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