Vintage Consoles: Magnavox Odyssey

The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercially released video game console when it launched in 1972.

The consoles internal hardware is very different to what we expect from a games console now. There is CPU or RAM in the Odyssey. Instead a series of transistors, resistors and capacitors made up the system. The 11 available game cards used switches to alter the behaviour of the machine to produce 28 different games.

These games all consisted of white squares and lines. To make them into a game the system shipped with a selection of screen overlays that attached to the TV screen by static electricity. These overlays could be anything from a tennis court to a race track.

When the system launched in the UK in 1973 for £99.99, or £1,034 in todays money, it was received quite well by those that could afford the very expensive toy.

When the system went out of production in 1975 it had sold 300,000 units and was considered a success my Magnavox.