Welcome to OdysseyNow, a comprehensive archive of information regarding the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first video game console. Everything you find on this site was produced by the OdysseyNow project, a multi-year, multidisciplinary project to study, play, document, and expand the Odyssey gaming platform. OdysseyNow is based in the Department of English’s Vibrant Media Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. In this site you’ll find a comprehensive page devoted to each of the 28 games produced for the Odyssey in 1972 and 1973, including high-rez downloads of every game element, from overlays to cards and gameboards (and sometimes even 3D models). You’ll also find, for every game, a Let’s Play video that demonstrates actual gameplay, as well as a corrected set of rules for play. This site strives to make available, for the first time, an exploration of the experience of playing the Odyssey. We hope that you will be able to imagine, as you browse our site, what it would have been like to be confronted in 1972 with a media system that connected to your television (nothing was ever connected to a television other than an antenna), and allowed you to produce images on that television (this was unheard of), and allowed you to play games that combined a screen with a tabletop (something that is still nearly unheard of). Now imagine that you didn’t even have the vocabulary to name this experience (no one had invented the term “video game” yet).
Developed by Ralph Baer in the mid to late 1960s and finally released by premium TV manufacturer Magnavox in 1972, the Odyssey was a revolutionary system that dared to imagine a world of gameplay that would combine familiar tabletop play (card games and board games) with the familiar medium of TV, but with an entirely new twist: your play would extend throughout the room, from the world of the table to the world of the screen. The Odyssey also pioneered the light rifle, a later staple of video games, and introduced the game Table Tennis, which was later ripped off by Atari as Pong.
The Odyssey is widely misunderstood by individuals today who don’t have access to the context of the Odyssey’s release and vision. Before we started this project in 2017, the few videos released online of Odyssey play misrepresented the system as something like a primitive version of later video games. Actually, Odyssey games were far more complex than later video games, often incorporating so many elements (complex controls, gameboards, physical playing pieces, cards, elaborate overlays, etc.) that they required concentrated play, and many had steep learning curves. Gamers use to today’s video games, which are graphically complex but conceptually simple, have a difficult time learning or processing a game system that is the reverse: graphically simple but conceptually complex.
Of course, not all Odyssey games were complex, and not all Odyssey games were masterpieces of game design. Some, however, were aesthetically and mechanically innovative, beautiful, funny, and even awe inspiring. The Odyssey attempted something that very few games have since: to marry the real-time, interactive nature of screen gaming with the physicality, spatiality, and strategy of tabletop gaming. Part of our mission at OdysseyNow is to give contemporary folks (gamers, academics, and those merely curious) a better understanding of what the Odyssey actually was, not what it appears to be when viewed through the narrow lens of current media. We hope to make this misunderstood platform accessible to today’s audience.
In the pages of this site you will find rich media documenting every one of the original Odyssey games, as well as a growing archive of information about the system, new games developed by the OdysseyNow team to explore the potentials and push the limits of this unique platform, and many upgrades and expansions to the Odyssey developed by our hardware team. Welcome to 1972, new again.