Magnavox Odyssey 300 – Computer Log

1 was listening to “The Secret History of PONG! – 50 Years Ago Today!” from Dave’s Garage YouTube channel. His channel is one of the few non Linux computer channels I follow regularly. Lately he’s been covering a lot of retro topics. And he has a entertaining way of talking about geek stuff. I was sure I had documented my old Magnavox Odyssey 300 Pong console. I mentioned it here. But didn’t show a picture of it. So I had to dig it out, and here it is.

Here’s the Magnavox genealogy:

Odyssey - released Sep 1972
Odyssey 100 - 1975
Odyssey 200 - 1975
Odyssey 300 - 1976

So the original Odyssey predates the Atari Pong

Atari's Arcade Pong released Nov 1972

However… to give Atari their due. They released Computer Space in 1971, which was patterned after DEC’s 1962 Spacewar. And was was the first commercial arcade video game.

To be complete Magnavox got the license from Ralph H. Baer, who actually held the patents for the game. So Ralph, not Nolan Bushnell of Atari, should be considered the father of home gaming consoles. Ralph also created the Simon game.