Magnavox Odyssey 1972 - few people know about the "brown box"

Magnavox Odyssey is the world's first home game console. It was first introduced on May 24, 1972 and released in August of the same year, thus beating Atari's Pong system by three years.

The idea of creating a game console came to Ralph Baer back in August 1966. Over the next three years, he, along with Bill Harrison and Bill Rush, created seven successive game system prototypes. A seventh prototype, known as the "Brown Box", was shown to several manufacturers before Magnavox agreed to produce the console in January 1971.

After releasing the console through their dealerships, Magnavox sold 350,000 units by the time the console was discontinued in 1975. The console spawned the Odyssey series of specialized gaming systems, and after them, the Magnavox Odyssey released in 1978. One of the 28 games created for the system, a game of ping pong, inspired Atari's successful 1972 arcade game Pong, which in turn propelled sales of the Odyssey.