5 HUGELY Important Video Game Consoles (You Haven't Heard Of)

5. Magnavox Odyssey

There is considerable debate about what the first ever video game was. Programmers began sharing creations that could be rudimentarily defined as ‘games’ as early as 1950. A precursor to Pong first emerged in 1958, before Spacewar, a game created at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) in 1962, was replicated and commercially released by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1971.

Bushnell is often cited as ‘the father of the industry’. He and Dabney founded Atari in 1972 and the history is much clearer from there, as their development of Pong for arcades in the same year kickstarted an industry that has gone from strength to strength in the 48 years since. Atari's most famous creation was suspiciously similar to ‘Table Tennis’, one of the titles included within Ralph Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey, which Bushnell attended a demonstration of in California in early 1972.

Though it achieved reasonable sales figures in its three years on the market (350,000 units) and wouldn’t be challenged as a home console until Atari began releasing home versions of Pong in 1975, the Odyssey quickly fell into obscurity, largely forgotten by all but video game historians. No new games were developed after 1973 and no move was made to sell the system outside of Magnavox stores or make it available for non-Magnavox televisions.

Though flawed, the Odyssey was first and will always viewed as ground-breaking as a result.