JEFFERSON CITY, Tennessee — Before Nintendo and Atari, before pixels danced across screens in arcades and bedrooms, before gaming became a multi-billion-dollar industry, it began in silence. No sound effects. No color. No memory. Just a white blip on a screen, a plastic overlay, and imagination. But this was not simplicity. This was a revolution.
The video game revolution began with the Magnavox Odyssey. Its quiet creation forever altered how the world plays and it was manufactured in East Tennessee.
In 1968, Ralph Baer, an engineer at Sanders Associates in New Hampshire, developed what he called the “Brown Box,” a primitive prototype of a home video game system…