First videogame console

The first videogame console was the Magnavox Odyssey. Released in 1972, it was a simple beast that worked through a television set and was powered by batteries. Despite poor sales, it is credited with starting the computer and videogame revolution, and by 1975 it was being distributed in Japan by Nintendo. The Magnavox Odyssey began life as "the Brown Box" – a prototype invented by Ralph H. Baer, in Nashua, New Hampshire, USA, in 1968.

The Magnavox Odyssey was the first videogame console marketed by Nintendo in Japan.

Magnavox was a prominent TV manufacturer in the USA.

Starting in 1966, American engineer Ralph Baer began work on a variety of prototypes for game-playing device that would work with a television. The first one to include a playable game was the 1967 TV Game Unit #2, also known as “the Pump Unit” for the handle control that moved up and down like a pump. The device, which predated Baer’s later better known TV Game Unit #7 prototype, also known as “the Brown Box” produced a raster, or video, output made up of pixels, making it the first true “videogame” device, although the term has since come to include all computer games, particularly ones that used a screen display.

This record focuses on the commercial release of the Magnavox Odyssey, but Baer produced many working videogame prototypes in the late 1960s. The most famous of these was the Brown Box, but the Pump Unit predated this and had working games. The TV Game Unit #1 was a proof of concept device that did not support a game.