"'The Odyssey came out in May of '72,' Baer says. 'By December, 100,000 of them had been sold. That probably means that 2-300,000 people had [access to] one,' though they shared his earlier dilemma. 'They had to figure out what the hell videogames were in the first place, simultaneously.' The arcade business soon followed. 'The Pong arcade game showed up in fall of '72. It was a knockoff of the Odyssey game, because Nolan Bushnell, he'd played an Odyssey game at a dealership, a Magnavox dealership, in May of that year, and he started the arcade business going.' Magnavox would go on to win a patent infringement lawsuit against Bushnell, but the electronic gaming genie was out of the bottle. 'By the time '74 came, the Odyssey was already obsolete,' Baer says."
Shannon Drake speaks to the father of the home video game console.
