Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

There’s a neat archive of old, old computer print advertisements on the web, which turned up this interesting little gem, a short-lived home computer called the Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P:

Whoa… what’s up with those joysticks?

Those, my friends, are Odyssey2 joysticks – the original detachable kind, seen below on the left side. (To its right, just for reference, is its immediate ancestor, the Odyssey 4000 joystick, which changed the orientation of the casing and the placement of the button for reasons unknown.)

(The Odyssey2 joystick is rotated that way for comparison to the Odyssey 4000 joystick – these photos were originally taken for the Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2 DVD. The Odyssey2 joystick was always held with the action button at the upper left corner.)

The Odyssey2 and the Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P were both released in 1978; the Odyssey 4000, the last dedicated console released by Magnavox before the Odyssey2, was released in 1977.

So the question becomes: who made the joystick? Did Magnavox (makers of the Odyssey consoles) make the joysticks and license the design to Ohio Scientific? Did Ohio Scientific originate the design and license it to Magnavox as early as ’77? Did both parties license the design from someone else entirely? (For that matter, did the joysticks for the Ohio Scientific machine actually look like that, or did they grab the first available joystick they could for the photo?)… Read more