The Odyssey² was just one product Magnavox sold during its post-acquisition period, but it had a problematic and troubled history, despite the influence of Ralph Baer, who worked on the original Odyssey system through his employer Sanders Associates. Baer, who died in 2012, is widely credited with inventing the home video game console. Ralph Baer, shown working on a “brown box” replica in 2010. Yes, that’s right, they bought a large competitor partly for the name. This eventually forced two solutions to this problem, both corporate in nature-first, they bought Magnavox, a manufacturer that had an existing reputation in electronics, and later, they bought out Philco proper, acquiring it from GTE in the early 1980s. So essentially, Philips, despite being a technical powerhouse that had developed both the compact cassette and the laserdisc, was unable to properly brand its products in the U.S. Philco had a record of innovation of its own, inventing the rectifier tube, which allowed radios to be charged using electrical outlets, and was essentially in the same market as Magnavox by the 1960s-that is, televisions. Philco (Philadelphia Battery Company), a company that was formed just a year after Philips was but didn’t gain its best-known name until 1919. Why was this? Simply put, another manufacturer with a similar name forced obfuscation. market before the 1980s or so, utilizing a house brand, Norelco (North American Philips electrical Company) to sell to the masses instead.
Koninklijke Philips N.V., the Dutch conglomerate commonly shortened to Philips, had gained a long reputation in consumer electronics even before it had purchased Magnavox in 1974, just two years after the Odyssey’s release, having developed, for example, the technology behind the compact cassette-itself a key part of computing.ĭespite this growing reputation as an electronics firm on the rise, Philips was relatively unknown in the U.S. In many ways, the Odyssey², despite representing the continuation of the first home video game console, was something of an also-ran to the market, emerging nearly two years after the Atari VCS helped grow out the market and quickly being overshadowed by both Atari and its eventual competitor, the Mattel Intellivision.Īnd while Magnavox may have been the name behind the original Odyssey’s reign, it was the firm’s parent company that may have had deeper influence on what consumers ended up seeing. (Evan Amos/Wikimedia Commons) The fateful meeting that saved the Odyssey², and the conglomerate that gave it a global presence Ralph Baer convinced a skeptical Magnavox that this console was worth selling.
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