Magnavox introduced the first commercial video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972.
The Odyssey grew from Ralph Baer’s “Brown Box,” a prototype developed at Sanders Associates in the late 1960s. Magnavox licensed the technology and released the system in North America in September 1972. It connected to a television and included removable game cards, controllers, and transparent screen overlays that added colour and scenery to the otherwise simple display.
The console was not the same as later programmable systems: its game cards changed electrical connections but did not contain software in the modern cartridge sense. Its best-known game resembled table tennis, inspiring later products such as Atari’s Pong, although Pong was an arcade game and arrived afterward.
A common mix-up is calling Atari the first console company because Atari became much more prominent during the home-console boom. Magnavox, however, was the company that commercialized the Odyssey first. Ralph Baer is generally credited as the system’s inventor, while Magnavox was the manufacturer and marketer.