Gaming Flashback: The History of Video Game Consoles

We’ll be starting a new article series about the history of video game consoles. The ambition is to commemorate how far gaming has gone, showing from where we started and the milestone we went by.

This opening article will present the dawn of home gaming. So buckle up and let the tale begin!

The Brown Box of Ralph Baer

The year was 1951, in The Bronx, New York. A German Television Engineer named Ralph Baer was  building a television from scratch for a defense contractor called “Loral Corporation”.

Baer had suddenly the idea of making the television interactive, it wasn’t about gaming at the time, it was just having the ability to, somehow, interact with the content on the screen. True, he didn’t work on that idea at the time, but he stored it somewhere in the back of his head.

He waited 15 years until he was working for Sanders Associated in 1966. Baer used a television called Chaser to implement a basic two-player video game, just as a proof of concept. The game was, get ready for the gameplay, about two dots chasing each other on the screen!. That was enough for him to convice the R&D department to designate a budget to support his work.

The prototype was called “Brown box”. The name is a marketing nightmare, I know. It had two controllers, a light gun and sixteen games.

The Almighty “Magnavox Odyssey”

Baer ran after television manufacturers trying to commercialize his new invention. He finally succeeded to sign an agreement with Magnavox, so the “Brown Box” was released in 1972 under the name “Magnavox Odyssey”!

The Odyssey cost $99 when it was released. According to Wikipedia, it’s the equivalent of about $599 in 2019!. The price was quite high, but in three years Magnavox was able to sell 350 000 units.

The basic set contained two controllers, each one had 3 knobs and a reset button. An additional light gun was sold separately, it came with four gun-oriented games.

Odyssey Magnavox had no audio capabilities. Since it was only capable of rendering three square dots and a vertical line on the screen, the set contained plastic television overlays that players could hang on their TV screens. It helped give life to the games they’re playing, as of setting a mountain background or a tennis court to enhance the gaming experience.

Nintendo’s first appearance

While Ralph Baer was having his first ideas about making a home video game console, Nintendo was trying to build a reputation in the toy making industry in Japan. Since toy guns were a part of their know-how, they were able to make a partnership with Magnavox. They started building optoelectronic guns for the Odyssey.

Later, in 1974, Nintendo secured rights to distribute Odyssey Magnavox in Japan. It was then when it had the first taste of the game industry.

After these events, a lot of other companies were drawn to the game industry, feeling the urge to race to the gold mine. The tale shall continue in other articles!