In 1971, Baer and two associates from Sanders Associates designed the first ever prototype video gaming unit called the Odyssey. This unit was then licensed to the company Magnavox and hence came to be known as the Magnavox Odyssey. Nicknamed the "Brown Box" because of the brown adhesive woodgrain covering, it had no microprocessors and hence had no need for memory. It was equipped to play 12 games like tennis, the mouse game, football, hockey and many many more.

The Odyssey originally came with two controllers, six cartridges, a 36-page user manual for the twelve games offered by the system, and a number of accessories <http://www.pong-story.com/odyitems.htm> like a light gun and even a golf club!

The operation of the Odyssey is very basic. A special plastic overlay sheet had to be placed on the TV, which provided the background graphics for the games because the system could not display them. A special scoreboard was used to mark the scores. Some games used plastic chips, cards, or other accessories such as a pair of dice, small chips and game decks.

In a span of five years, the brown box was exported to several countries like Germany, France, Australia and sold more than 3,50,000 units in the USA itself. It was so popular that the games on the Odyssey - tennis or pong - was turned into a arcade machine by Nolan Bushnell, the President of Atari.

Recently, in 2005 he was awarded the National Medal of Technology by none other than our very own Dubya Bush. The console must have died, but Baer's legacy still lives on. Hey, it gave birth to the Xbox 360, didn't it? Who knows where the future of gaming might be? But it sure looks bright!

Radhika Sharma