We were dirt poor, and I remember the day my father brought home the Magnavox Odyssey box. My brother and I learned all the state capitals, we had fun with the ski game, and the other overlays that came with it which fit perfect on our Magnavox TV! I remember trying to put plastic wrap on the screen and use markers to make our own games. Wow, I just had a wave of nostalgia that warmed me up a bit! Static held the overlays in place. The controllers reminded me of an Etch-A-Sketch, and so I was able to navigate the square due to the muscle memory. This was 1972. I was 8 years old.
My first computer came five years later. It was a Commodore PET 2001 followed by a Vic-20. I had saved up $832 from working odd jobs - shoe shine boy, fixing bicycles, newspaper route (in a bad neighborhood), and saving my allowance. I always thank my Dad to this day for buying the Odyssey when I know there were days we didn't have anything in the refrigerator before this time. My Mom and Dad also bought us two sets of encyclopedias on a payment plan. It was the renaissance of my family's way towards getting out of poverty. When our top floor Brooklyn apartment burned down, amazingly the outward facing bindings of the encyclopedias were pitch black, and the end books, but the whole set survived the fire which was in the center of the apartment. My brother and I used those encyclopedias all through high school, and into university. He was the first to graduate in my immediate family. Good memories.
Encyclopedias. I kind of forgot about those, but now I can remember relying on a hand-me-down encyclopedia set for answering childood questions without having to go downtown to the library.
Late '70s, and my interest in space is met with the encyclopedia's entry on the moon: "Someday, man may go to the moon."
I was 5 when Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon in 1969. I remember watching it on a 12 in. black and white TV. Encyclopedias amazed me. I would thumb through them and look up each mention of something I didn't understand - the modern equivalent of link hopping, except I kept my thumb on the main article.
You actually saw that on tv good sir I am impressed. Encyclopaedias are probably the reason why I started making this website, I want to share something with the world and to list every game every made! It will take me a life time to achieve the PC games section when I get there that is intemidating and arcade machine..., I'm not even sure I can obtain this goal but I'll have fun trying.
I think having 4 of my fingers holding places on different pages in a reference book is the best analogue representation of the hundred tabs I open whenever I browse Wikipedia.
Exactly, but at least it is self-limiting. How many tabs can you keep open with 32 gb of RAM? ;) And if your finger slipped out, there was no 'back' key!
I'm 10 years younger than you but that encyclopedias thing: my great-grandmother (she lived until 99 so I knew her well into my late teenage years) offered us a great one, in 26 volumes (now that I think of it maybe some letters were joined together in a single volume, so maybe only 20 volumes or so, but still a lot) and I remember it was a big deal in the family, because it represented a significant amount of money. I spent countless hours reading it for it was my go to "Wikipedia" when I was a kid and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with fond memories of this.
I remember when the encyclopedia salesman came to our apartment to show my parents the three sets of encyclopedias they sold. We bought the Book of Knowledge (for grade school), the Encyclopedia Americana (high school and university), and The World of Science (a popular science set for high school IIRC)set. My older children make fun of me, because I sniff books at the bookstore, or when I get a new book in the mail. It goes back to opening up those encyclopedias and associating their scent with an enjoyable adventure of the mind.
Ignorance was/is bliss for the pleasure. I don't smoke (never did, really), gamble (parents were rabid horse bettors), or drink anymore, so let's say it is one of a few vices I am keeping for the pure pleasure of it. At least I am not huffing gas, and I always liked when my Dad pulled in and filled the car up.
I did paintings conservation for over 3 years, and I developed sensitivities to the benzene family like toluene and xylene; a whiff would give me an instant migraine, and I usually didn't get headaches much at all. All new construction, even the so-called 'green' techniques, has a lot more VOCs or other compounds that gas out, deteriorate, and otherwise create a by-product, which is why I liked my old drafty house. I lost some energy efficiency, but always had significant air exchange and all the glues had gassed off decades ago. New construction lead to Radon becoming more of an issue as a result of airtight basements and living spaces for the sake of energy efficiency. My old house was on top of glacial moraine, so Radon is something to be concerned about, but if it doesn't accumulate in concentration it is not as much an issue. That and simply caulking cracks and holes in your basement to keep it from entering in quantity is the other thing you can do. Also the drafty house ensured it never accumulated upstairs. The fix for newer homes was to put a vent to the outside the basement after caulking, sort of mini-chimney of stainless steel tube. And the fact is that it is the decay of uranium to radium to radon that releases alpha and beta particles, and gamma rays. Radon has a half-life of 3.8 days compared with uranium-238 of 4.5 billion years!
All of this reminds me of why I loved Wood Allen's movie Sleeper when I saw it with my Dad in 1973 (yeah, I know a 9-year-old shouldn't have seen such a movie, it was PG, and ratings had been less than a decade old). In short, a man is woken up 200 years later in 2173 in a dystopian future with a police state. In short, the scientists are perplexed by his request for wheat germ, tiger's milk, and something else. When they tell him all his friends are dead, he says, "But they ate organic rice!". We learn that steak, cream pies, and deep fat are good for you. Cigarettes have also been found to be very healthy! Hilarious movie! Now I have to see if I can find it!
Wow, this sounds a lot like my childhood except it was my grandparents who had the encyclopedias and the Odyssey. They also had 100s of back issues of National Geographic. Because we (my mom and dad) had so little, and my parents were always working, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents. Thank you for the nostalgia.
My parents also got the full encyclopedia set on a payment plan. I think it was $1000 back in the mid 90s for about 30 books. Before the web, that is how we could browse information from home. I would search some topic in the index books, then read the related article in the other books. That would to more articles in other books. Spent hours browsing.
Picked up one of these as a kid at a garage sale for a buck, mostly to take it apart and see how it worked. Internally, it was a board with maybe a dozen daughter boards, each a vertically-mounted, removable card. All transister-diode logic. The game "cartridges" were just cards with different jumper wires inside them that physically rewired the system.
In addition to the overlays, it came with dice, money, poker chips, and some other board game components you used in conjunction with the video game itself. I'm guessing everyone promptly lost all of this, which would make a complete system even more rare.
Magnavox didn't sell many of these, but made their real money patenting everything and then suing Atari and anyone else making a video game system attaching to a TV.
"It is capable of displaying three square dots on the screen in monochrome black and white, with differing behavior for the dots depending on the game played, and with no sound capabilities."
Almost all the games were some sort of Pong variant, but what you could do with a plastic overlay and some imagination are quite impressive.
When I was a kid in the '80s, we had a Magnavox TV with built-in Pong. The game mode button was at the top of the side panel with the VHF and UHF knobs. Blue and Red controllers plugged into the back of the set, each with a rotary encoder and trigger.
As a pre-Internet kid I had the hobby of buying mysterious old computers or videogame consoles I found cheap at bazaars. One day I got a Magnavox Odyssey and a VIC-20 for like 5 bucks, both without accessories besides the power adapter.
The Vic-20 was a joy to tinker around until I got the basics (ha) of it, but the Odyssey, without games, overlays or even controllers, remained a baffling puzzle for many years.
It had the disadvantage that it didn't have manuals. The one that opened my eyes was an Atari 800 XL, also without manuals, but with a BASIC that didn't need esoteric POKEs.
I always wanted to get my hands on a C-64, but somehow never saw one. Guess people loved theirs.
To be honest, it wasn't that much fun at the time (assuming I'm remembering my game consoles correctly). I got one as a kid (presumably Christmas). Played with it for a few weeks until one of the controller connectors became flaky. By then I was getting pretty bored of it, so my parents just returned it for a refund.
Remember my roommate in college bringing his grandfathers
Odyssey 2 gaming system back to college after he passed away to tinker on. Many nights fooling around playing those old games on it - what a blast from the past.
The Odyssey2 , branded as Philips Videopac g7000 where I lived, was my first computer, though I only ever used it for games. The joysticks were quite harsh, always gave me a blister between my thumb and index finger.....long before I discovered 'Nintendo thumb'. The noises of these games are burned in my memory, along with the layout of Pickaxe Pete. I also had the glorious box set of 'Quest for the rings' which had a fantastic concept but I never figured out how to play correctly.
The box art for these games, and those of systems that followed, always had such imagination compared to the simple blocks that made up the game. I remember when games reached a point where the box art ended up being screenshots of the actual gameplay and thinking tomyself 'The technology has finally caught up with the imagination', yet now it seems we have reverted and only yesterday I watched a trailer for the next Battlefield game that was majority pre-rendered content.....it feels like a step backwards.
"My" consoles growing up were the NES and the Odyssey2. I had an NES, my grandparents had an NES and an Odyssey2. Where everyone else has one or another Atari as their blocky-graphics early console, I've got the Odyssey2.
Man, those joysticks were something. I remember my favorite games were one that was probably intended to feel like shooting at TIE fighters with a quad cannon turret on the Millennium Falcon (the sprites even looked about as close to TIE fighters as they could get, without getting sued) and the basketball game. I think I played whatever version or port of Space Invaders the console had quite a bit, too. I vaguely remember some carts that used the built-in keyboard for more than just mode selecting, but can't recall what they were.
It's nice to read all these comments about the first console. I'm so glad people have happy memories and are sharing them, it's exactly why I picked video games to be the centre focus point of the website.
The website voxodyssey is named after this console there is a story behind this if you are interested if not I leave you in peace friends
Never tried the first, but I still have my Odyssey^2 with nearly all the games. Only games I remember playing are Breakout and Alien Invaders[1], because those were the only fun ones. The box packaging and art for Conquest of the World[2] was seriously cool though. No clue how the game was meant to be played.
My first computer came five years later. It was a Commodore PET 2001 followed by a Vic-20. I had saved up $832 from working odd jobs - shoe shine boy, fixing bicycles, newspaper route (in a bad neighborhood), and saving my allowance. I always thank my Dad to this day for buying the Odyssey when I know there were days we didn't have anything in the refrigerator before this time. My Mom and Dad also bought us two sets of encyclopedias on a payment plan. It was the renaissance of my family's way towards getting out of poverty. When our top floor Brooklyn apartment burned down, amazingly the outward facing bindings of the encyclopedias were pitch black, and the end books, but the whole set survived the fire which was in the center of the apartment. My brother and I used those encyclopedias all through high school, and into university. He was the first to graduate in my immediate family. Good memories.