Odyssey 5000

[Dastari Creel]

So as I've gone about tracking my other White Whale, I happened to open my new book Phoenix IV by Leonard Herman. There on Page 58 I was confronted with this.

 

It looks like there wasn't only one picture of the Odyssey 5000 out there. Makes me wonder where Mr Herman found this one.

[rolenta]

I got it from an ad sheet that David Winter sent me. By the way, what do you think of the book? I haven't received the hardcover edition yet.

 

PS: It's actually on page 38

Edited July 19, 2017 by rolenta

[Dastari Creel]

I got it from an ad sheet that David Winter sent me. By the way, what do you think of the book? I haven't received the hardcover edition yet.

 

PS: It's actually on page 38

 

Yeah, that's a simple typo from writing this up so late at night. It's interesting because around these parts it was long thought that a single Odyssey 5000 image existed from a trade journal that Pboland dug up. It was black and white and fairly grainy. This is a pretty nice find.

 

I haven't read the book too deeply yet. I just flicked through the pages. It's beautifully illustrated.

 

I do have to say that your original version of Phoenix is what inspired me to start looking into video game history. You do such a fantastic overview of the whole subject, but there are so many rabbit holes to tunnel down and get really specific on the details of what happened and when.

 

Out of curiosity, do you know where the Magnavox Odyssey systems were manufactured? I'm my own attempts to look into the history of video gaming I'd love to find people who worked on the original Odyssey whether that was in manufacturing, engineering, marketing, sales, etc.

 

Anyway, appreciate the work that you do for the community.

[Dastari Creel]

Since I don't want to host that particular picture on my own website, I'm going to upload it here, so eventually the picture from my first post will disappear. Just look at this one instead.

[rolenta]

Sorry, can't help you with this one. David Winter may know.

 

Out of curiosity, do you know where the Magnavox Odyssey systems were manufactured? I'm my own attempts to look into the history of video gaming I'd love to find people who worked on the original Odyssey whether that was in manufacturing, engineering, marketing, sales, etc.

 

[Dastari Creel]

Well, everyone, thanks to Leonard Herman we now have an actual Odyssey 5000 flier to drool over. I really cannot express enough gratitude for this.

 

 

[BassGuitari]

Hot damn!

Never thought something like that would ever turn up!

[onmode-ky]

The Odyssey 5000 is outside the scope of my own plug-n-play games research, but this is a really remarkable find. There's a decent amount of info on the Internet about the rest of the Odyssey series, and there has been for some time, so it's kind of amazing that info on the 5000 has remained so deep in the underbrush, escaping the eyes of the Odyssey fan community for all these years. It's good to finally have a very solid look at what it was planned to be.

 

onmode-ky

[+pboland]

Well, everyone, thanks to Leonard Herman we now have an actual Odyssey 5000 flier to drool over. I really cannot express enough gratitude for this.

 

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20269804_10159046467905203_1938977985_n.jpg

 

WOW! That is a awesome find.

 

Now I want one more than ever.

[Dastari Creel]

The Odyssey 5000 is outside the scope of my own plug-n-play games research, but this is a really remarkable find. There's a decent amount of info on the Internet about the rest of the Odyssey series, and there has been for some time, so it's kind of amazing that info on the 5000 has remained so deep in the underbrush, escaping the eyes of the Odyssey fan community for all these years. It's good to finally have a very solid look at what it was planned to be.

 

onmode-ky

 

Except that, I don't think that there's really all that much information on the internet about the Odyssey series. There's a ton online about the original Odyssey, but the 100 - 5000 are fairly obscure. People have detailed their differences in playability, but their hardware specs, marketing history, or engineering history aren't well recorded. Even with the original Odyssey almost everything that we know comes from Ralph Baer, someone who was mostly shut out of the process once Magnavox got the license to design the system on their own. There is so very much left to learn about the history of this entire line.