Magnavox Odyssey

In September 1966, waiting for a colleague at a bus terminal in New York, Ralph Baer began writing notes. Back home, he typed up a four-page proposal. Tens of millions of televisions sat in homes, and all you could do was watch what appeared on them — could you play through one instead? His employer, Sanders Associates, approved it as a small research project, and a prototype was built in 1967: a brown box, since known as the Brown Box (now held by the Smithsonian). The production Odyssey shipped in 1972, and by the end of production in 1975 it had sold roughly 350,000 units in total. It is often written as "350,000 units in 1972," but that figure is the cumulative total. This machine's real reach lay not in the game itself but in the paperwork — see the next 📜.