It’s hard to imagine a time before home video games, but it wasn’t until the 1971 release of Odyssey, the first stab at bringing games to the television sets of America’s youth. The father of the home video game, an engineer named Ralph Baer ( the same guy who later introduce a popular memory game called Simon) was the mastermind behind this, first-ever foray into the world of video games and every video game introduced since, the Atari, The Playstation, The Wii, owes a debt of gratitude to this innovator of the way that kids would eventually spend the majority of their leisure time.

Bear and his associates first started on the video game concept way back in 1966. It would take another five years before they could receive the funding and backing of a major corporation, however, and make their dream a reality. That company was Magnavox, and together they released the first home game system, the Odyssey in 1972. By today’s standards, the first systems weren’t very pretty to look at. For one thing, many of the original concepts proved too expensive to offer in the mass produced systems. Color was sacrificed for black and white and there wasn’t even enough memory to actually keep score for the games. Worst of all, a mylar overlay for the television screen was needed to offer any semblance of graphics.

Each Odyssey game came with two box controlled, with separate knobs to control horizontal and vertical movement, as well as a handy spin-control knob. The initial games were sports-related, such as hockey, table tennis, Football, and Skiing but eventually games like Submarine, Cat and Mouse, and Roulette offered the non-sports fans a bit of the fun. A light gun from the lab prototype would eventually make its way onto the market as the Shooting Gallery Electronic Rifle.

The Odyssey did well initially, until the introduction of Pong, a game that Baer would eventually sue over, claiming it was a rip off of one of his earlier games. Still, it managed to survive, until the introduction of the Atari VCS (or 2600) forced Magnavox to design the new Odyssey 2 system. This updated version included an alpha-numeric keyboard for enhanced control but the Atari still looked better. Still, Odyssey managed to release a respectable amount of games, from the typical sports offerings, to educational games, to slightly altered renditions of popular arcade games of the day, such as Space Invaders (The Odyssey 2 version was dubbed “Alien Invaders Plus!)

For all of its previous success, the Odyssey 2 was starting to develop a dubious reputation as that “freaky looking version of an Atari.” The release of 1981’s K.C. Munchkin offered a twist on the popular Pac Man game by introducing dots that no longer remained stationary, but Atari didn’t feel the differences were enough, and since they held the licensing for Pac Man, they sued – and they won. Soon K.C. Munchkin was being removed from store shelves across the country, much to the chagrin of fans who found it to be their favorite Odyssey 2 game.

Magnavox did their best to remain competitive against the Atari by increasing their memory so that more elaborate games could be played and offering The Voice, a speech synthesizer that greatly enhanced the sound of the games, but also did its best to mimic any words that were typed by the keypad. None of these efforts, valiant as they may have been were enough to help the Odyssey 2 survive the infamous video game drought of 1983. Magnavox toyed with the idea of an Odyssey 3, even going so far as to release a small number of the systems in Europe. But ultimately, they determined that it was time to get out of the video game market. Today, the onslaught of video game systems and home computers make it hard to remember this innovative game but there are still devotees to the original video game who still maintain their love for original, the second incarnation, and all of the games that accompanied both systems. And while its capabilities are downright primitive compared to what today’s market offers, these are the Model T’s of the enormous video game field and if you should ever come across one of these innovative systems, give a tip of the hat to the ancient patriarch of what would eventually change the way every kid in the world played games.