Before the NES and even before Pong, the Magnavox Odyssey braved the frontier as the first home video game console. Here's what it was capable of.

Before the NES and even before Pong, the Magnavox Odyssey braved the frontier as the first home video game console. Here's ...

It was with Pong in 1972, a game created by Bushnell and Dabney's newly-formed Atari, that led to much greater success and ...

That small start-up called Atari — which launched on June 27, 1972 — ended up changing the world: first with a rudimentary table tennis game called Pong and later a culture-shifting home console.

The popularity of Pong directly helped the sales of the Odyssey console that year, when it was "discovered" that the console had a "similar" game. By the end of the year, Magnavox had sold 100,000 ...