Magnavox Odyssey 500

The Magnavox Odyssey 500 (model number: 7520) was released in 1976 as Magnavox's high-end companion to the Odyssey 300 and Odyssey 400 systems. The Odyssey 500 is essentially a deluxe version of the Odyssey 400 with several crucial improvements. The 500 featured color graphics (the first Odyssey game unit to do so) and replaced the standard paddles with sprites representing the athletes of its various games: a tennis player, a squash player, and a hockey player. The three players and three playfields were each chosen by separate toggle switches; games were thus selected by matching the player to its appropriate playfield. In addition to the Smash, Hockey, and Tennis games, Odyssey 500 featured a fourth game, Soccer, by using the squash player graphics with the hockey playing field. Unlike the Odyssey 400, however, the 500 does not support four onscreen "players." The Odyssey 500's manual acknowledged that the player graphics, being of different sizes, essentially represented different difficulty options. Interestingly, while Magnavox exploited the "mismatching" of players and playfields to market the Odyssey 500 as having a fourth game, the remaining five possible game combinations were not advertised or documented. Odyssey 500 offers automatic serve, displays digital on-screen scores between plays, and provides manually adjustable ball speed control. As with all previous Odyssey units, power is delivered via an AC adapter or six "C" cell batteries.