The Magnavox Odyssey holds the distinction of being the very first commercial home video game console.

The hardware was designed by a small team working under Ralph H. Baer at Sanders Associates. Magnavox took over final development and released the system in the United States in September 1972, with an international release following the next year.

The console itself is a white, black, and brown box that connects to a television, with two rectangular wired controllers attached. It can produce three square dots and a single line of adjustable height on screen, displayed in black and white, with the dots behaving differently depending on which game is being played. To add visual context to each game, players attach plastic overlays to the television screen. One or two players per game control their dots using knobs and buttons on the controllers, following the rules provided for each title.

The Odyssey was packaged with dice, paper money, and other board game accessories to support gameplay, while a separate peripheral, which became the first video game light gun, was sold on its own.

The original concept for a home video game system came to Baer in August 1966. Over the following three years, he worked with Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch to build seven successive prototype consoles. The seventh, called the Brown Box, was demonstrated to a number of manufacturers before Magnavox agreed to produce it in January 1971. The console was sold through Magnavox’s dealership network following its release.

Magnavox moved 69,000 units in the first calendar year and reached 350,000 total sales before the console was discontinued in 1975.

It was actually a digital console rather than an analog one, using binary electronic signals throughout. Ralph Baer himself had to clarify this point on multiple occasions, as the analog label stuck and became common in public discourse.

The game cards that came with the system did not contain data in any conventional sense. They were jumper cards that physically rewired the console’s internal circuitry to change how the game logic operated, essentially reconfiguring the machine itself rather than loading new software.

Because the console had no scoring capability, players were entirely responsible for tracking their own results using the included accessories, among them dice, poker chips, paper money, and printed score sheets.

The system produced no sound whatsoever. Audio would not appear in Magnavox gaming products until it was introduced in later Pong-era consoles.

The controllers were unusually designed for their time, featuring three dials including one labeled for applying English, the term for spin, giving them an operational feel closer to an Etch A Sketch than to anything resembling a modern controller.

A ping-pong game included with the Odyssey became the direct inspiration for Atari’s Pong. Magnavox and Sanders Associates subsequently sued Atari and a number of other companies over the resemblance, ultimately collecting more than $100 million in legal settlements.

Sales of the Odyssey were also hampered by poor marketing decisions. The console was sold exclusively through Magnavox retail locations, and customers were frequently told, incorrectly, that the system only functioned with Magnavox televisions. This misinformation significantly limited how many people considered purchasing one.