[HN Gopher] The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home v... ___________________________________________________________________ The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console Author : jamesandthewolf Score : 37 points Date : 2021-11-04 21:05 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (voxodyssey.com) (TXT) w3m dump (voxodyssey.com) | dver wrote: | My Dad was a TV repairman at a Magnavox dealer. My siblings and I | would play this all the time in the shop. | | I've thought about that when I walk into one of kids rooms and | they're playing some super realistic game. | thesuitonym wrote: | One of the first major school reports I ever did was on the | Odyssey. It was a neat little system! | eggy wrote: | You wrote about it in a school report? You couldn't write on | the Odyssey from my recollection. | ddingus wrote: | Report on = subject of report, not vehicle of action to | author report. | | :D | jonjon10002 wrote: | Picked up one of these as a kid at a garage sale for a buck, | mostly to take it apart and see how it worked. Internally, it was | a board with maybe a dozen daughter boards, each a vertically- | mounted, removable card. All transister-diode logic. The game | "cartridges" were just cards with different jumper wires inside | them that physically rewired the system. | | In addition to the overlays, it came with dice, money, poker | chips, and some other board game components you used in | conjunction with the video game itself. I'm guessing everyone | promptly lost all of this, which would make a complete system | even more rare. | | Magnavox didn't sell many of these, but made their real money | patenting everything and then suing Atari and anyone else making | a video game system attaching to a TV. | dang wrote: | Looks like only one past thread: | | _The Magnavox Odyssey -- is it still fun today?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908370 - Aug 2011 (17 | comments) | deckard1 wrote: | https://web.archive.org/web/20121228052131/http://www.kymala... | | tl;dr: no. | | Never tried the first, but I still have my Odyssey^2 with | nearly all the games. Only games I remember playing are | Breakout and Alien Invaders[1], because those were the only fun | ones. The box packaging and art for Conquest of the World[2] | was seriously cool though. No clue how the game was meant to be | played. | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w-NCS2FiM0 | | [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Jk4QFty8PE | ilamont wrote: | Odyssey 2 had a stock trading game if IIRC ... I remember the | TV ads for it targeted dads, not kids! | | Looking at this list, it's probably "The Great Wall Street | Fortune Hunt": | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magnavox_Odyssey2_game. | .. | | A friend had the Odyssey 2 and the graphics seemed better | than the 2600, although looking at the screenshots now not by | much. | ASalazarMX wrote: | As a pre-Internet kid I had the hobby of buying mysterious old | computers or videogame consoles I found cheap at bazaars. One day | I got a Magnavox Odyssey and a VIC-20 for like 5 bucks, both | without accessories besides the power adapter. | | The Vic-20 was a joy to tinker around until I got the basics (ha) | of it, but the Odyssey, without games, overlays or even | controllers, remained a baffling puzzle for many years. | eggy wrote: | I loved my Vic-20. I had programmed on my Commodore PET 2001, | but the Vic-20 opened me up to so much. | ASalazarMX wrote: | It had the disadvantage that it didn't have manuals. The one | that opened my eyes was an Atari 800 XL, also without | manuals, but with a BASIC that didn't need esoteric POKEs. | | I always wanted to get my hands on a C-64, but somehow never | saw one. Guess people loved theirs. | at-fates-hands wrote: | Remember my roommate in college bringing his grandfathers Odyssey | 2 gaming system back to college after he passed away to tinker | on. Many nights fooling around playing those old games on it - | what a blast from the past. | | http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--0yx2OhN5dA/Tgg7mjflyKI/AAAAAAAAAB... | eggy wrote: | I didn't know they made a 2. We had the original in 1972! | Sindisil wrote: | A friend of mine had an Odyssey 2. It was a blast. Even had a | primitive programming cartridge | agys wrote: | The true predecessor of the Wipeout series! | | Wipeout "1972": https://voxodyssey.com/magnavox-odyssey/wipeout | | (love the masked square that results in a trail-like sprite) | bryanlarsen wrote: | "It is capable of displaying three square dots on the screen in | monochrome black and white, with differing behavior for the dots | depending on the game played, and with no sound capabilities." | | Almost all the games were some sort of Pong variant, but what you | could do with a plastic overlay and some imagination are quite | impressive. | icelancer wrote: | Related: A great video documentary on The First Video Game, by | one of the best YouTube producers in this field: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ4WCU1WQc | eggy wrote: | We were dirt poor, and I remember the day my father brought home | the Magnavox Odyssey box. My brother and I learned all the state | capitals, we had fun with the ski game, and the other overlays | that came with it which fit perfect on our Magnavox TV! I | remember trying to put plastic wrap on the screen and use markers | to make our own games. Wow, I just had a wave of nostalgia that | warmed me up a bit! Static held the overlays in place. The | controllers reminded me of an Etch-A-Sketch, and so I was able to | navigate the square due to the muscle memory. This was 1972. I | was 8 years old. | | My first computer came five years later. It was a Commodore PET | 2001 followed by a Vic-20. I had saved up $832 from working odd | jobs - shoe shine boy, fixing bicycles, newspaper route (in a bad | neighborhood), and saving my allowance. I always thank my Dad to | this day for buying the Odyssey when I know there were days we | didn't have anything in the refrigerator before this time. My Mom | and Dad also bought us two sets of encyclopedias on a payment | plan. It was the renaissance of my family's way towards getting | out of poverty. When our top floor Brooklyn apartment burned | down, amazingly the outward facing bindings of the encyclopedias | were pitch black, and the end books, but the whole set survived | the fire which was in the center of the apartment. My brother and | I used those encyclopedias all through high school, and into | university. He was the first to graduate in my immediate family. | Good memories. | dangle1 wrote: | Encyclopedias. I kind of forgot about those, but now I can | remember relying on a hand-me-down encyclopedia set for | answering childood questions without having to go downtown to | the library. | | Late '70s, and my interest in space is met with the | encyclopedia's entry on the moon: "Someday, man may go to the | moon." | matwood wrote: | Wow, this sounds a lot like my childhood except it was my | grandparents who had the encyclopedias and the Odyssey. They | also had 100s of back issues of National Geographic. Because we | (my mom and dad) had so little, and my parents were always | working, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents. Thank you | for the nostalgia. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-04 23:00 UTC)