1972 - The Magnavox Odyssey and My Sincerest Apologies
I know the canonical pick for this year is Pong. The problem is, like everyone else with even a passing interest in retro gaming (or who lived through the 70s), I’ve already played Pong. Pong is fine and all, but I don’t have a lot to say about it. So instead I picked the Magnavox Odyssey, and I set about finding an emulator for it so I could try out the games it had. I figured they were simple enough that I could sample the whole library. This is where I start getting into the sincere apologies.
The Odyssey is inherently a multiplayer system, and the emulator I was using, OdySim doesn’t support anything like netplay. I do not have anyone to play with, so while I can mess around, I can’t really get the full experience. Sorry to stumble hard on the second year, but that’s the breaks this early. I consider myself lucky that anyone’s made an emulator with the overlays and side materials included at all, but I really do apologize for taking shortcuts in the very second year. Also, OdySim has a control difference from the original console that takes a bit of explaining.
The Magnavox Odyssey controller. Image credit: Evan-Amos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Odyssey controller was a box with three knobs and one button. The horizontal and vertical knobs moved a lit square around the screen in the vertical and horizontal directions. The “reset” button had a different function for each game, usually serving the ball or toggling the visibility of a player’s square. The “english” knob is the odd one out, and it adjusts the angle the ball traveled at. This allows for amusing trickshots in Pong and is critical to gameplay in some games. In OdySim, the English knob resets to the center position when one of the English keys is not held down. On the real thing, you could leave this in a position. This causes problems for some specific games. There’s also two knobs on the console itself, one of which moves the wall/net, and the other changing ball speed. The console also had a light gun released for it, used for a few specific games.
To try and fill in the gaps in my experience at least a little bit, I watched the gameplay videos posted by OdysseyNow, a project at the University of Pittsburgh documenting the console. Their YouTube channel contains gameplay videos for the console’s official releases as well as a variety of homebrew games. I’ll be focusing on the official releases, myself, but man, isn’t it cool that there’s so much homebrew stuff for this console?
So, the Odyssey itself. The actual capabilities of the console are extremely simple. It can display three squares (two players and a ball) and a line, which usually represents a net or wall depending on the game. These three elements act and interact in different ways depending on the game card inserted, but there’s really only so many things they can do, especially since that’s all of the console’s display functions. There’s no sound. There’s no color or brightness. Instead, any further visual detail was filled in by translucent overlays which would be attached to the television screen, and any gameplay that was more complicated than a Pong variant or a shooting gallery was done with physical elements. The more complex Odyssey games, like Football, were pretty much board games with a few gameplay mechanics done via Odyssey minigame.
The pong-variant games I tried out were Table Tennis, Tennis, Handball, and Volleyball, various games where you hit a ball back and forth. It’s an interesting variety of games. Table Tennis is the standard Pong, and the one game that didn’t use an overlay. Tennis is essentially Pong but with some rules about where the ball must be hit (the english knob would be critical, I assume) and a scoring system that’s, well, tennis. Handball, my personal favorite, has both players taking turns hitting the ball against a wall that’s on the left side of the screen. Volleyball has both players at the bottom of the screen, using the english knob to arc the ball over a net. For a pong machine, this would be a good variety, but the Odyssey's got a way to do more complex games despite its hardware limitations.
The other games with more board game elements are more interesting to me, but they’re also the ones that are most awkward for me to play. OdySim integrates most of the board game elements, but it’s still just missing something compared to the physical pieces. This sort of mix of video and board game is always something that’s interested me, whether through old VHS games, more modern board games like XCOM that come with a companion app, or this. If I had the money to get a machine to play on and enough people who owed me serious favors, I’d absolutely force some people into an Odyssey night to try out the more complex games. My personal favorites were Football, for its sheer complexity, and Invasion, the first strategy game for a home console, where the strategy element is played out on the board and battles are resolved onscreen. There's real ambition in here to deliver a variety of good experiences across what we now recognize as a bunch of different genres, even if the hardware meant the board ended up being more important than the screen sometimes.
A screenshot of Football, one of the Odyssey's sports games, taken in OdySim. Displayed in front of the game screen is a card a player would draw when making a running play. If the offensive player could get past the defensive player and make it to the other side of the screen, they would advance a certain number of runs, higher the closer to the center of the screen they were. Different run cards had different values, along with a "breakaway" card where the player would roll dice to find out how far they went. The ball position was tracked on a game board.
I really wish I’d been able to actually try some of the games with others. If I ever get the chance, I might revisit this one, but don't hold your breath or anything. 52 more years (and certainly more by the time I reach the 2020s) is plenty on my plate already. Next time, 1973.