[HN Gopher] The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home v...
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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.
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(page generated 2021-11-04 23:00 UTC)