Retronauts - 569: The Odyssey2

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

 This episode of Retronauts is Voice-enhanced with sync-sound action, as Kevin Bunch, Jared Petty and Earl Green delve into the topic of Magnavox's Odyssey2! Join us for a chat about the only game console to feature keyboards, board games, AND Killer Bees! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week on Retronauts, the keyboard is the key to a good podcast. Another exciting episode of Retronauts. I'm your host, Kevin Bunch. And this week, we are going to be talking about the great silver beast of the late 70s and early 80s, the Magnovox Odyssey 2. A delightful little platform put out by Magnovox in the U.S. and Phillips in other parts of the world. And I brought with me some great experts who also have a great amount of adoration for this interesting little. machine. I guess it's not really little, is it? It's pretty chunky.

It's a chunky boy. It's a fat bear. It certainly is. It's a chunky boy. It sure is. So who do we have joining us from the middle of the heat dome? I'm Earl Green. You may or may not know me as the guy behind phosphorot fossils, whether that means the websites, the DVDs that are long out of print, and they're now on YouTube, and I also do

YouTube videos where I will play older games for about, oh, 10, 12, 15 minutes somewhere in there, kind of give the history of them, and, you know, try not to suck at the game while I am imparting that information. Sometimes it's just kind of a shut up and drive situation. And who else do we have with us? I am Jared Petty from Limited Run Games, the Top 100 Games podcast, a few other places. And I'm here because we're talking about the Odyssey 2, which is a weird and strangely radical hardware design that's just so baroque and fantastic that I can't help but

be interested in it. I feel very lucky to be here today. I never quite thought we'd actually get all the way to Odyssey 2 on retrograde. or not. Yet here, a few hundred episodes later, we are. And I'm thrilled. You know, its time is now. So I wanted to go around and ask everyone what their experiences are with The Odyssey II and how they came to it and why they're interested in it. And I guess, you know, Jared, we can start with you since you were just hyping it up real quick. Yeah. So I first encountered the Odyssey II in the early 1980s, along with the Maloney.

of other video game paraphernalia that was laying around people's houses and people in the mid-70s had purchased Pong machines that were still plugged into their television sets years later because TVs lasted forever then. And in addition to that, a number of programmable systems

you'd find around. You'd find Feral Childs and you'd find bally's and you'd find in televisions and, of course, the ubiquitous 2600. And among those, the Odyssey II really stood out aesthetically. You got to remember how big a deal it was this thing, had a keyboard on it.

For us, that doesn't seem all that special. But at the time this thing came out, most human beings barely had a conception of what a home computer was and couldn't tell the difference. So if it had a keyboard, in their minds, it registered as a computer. And as a kid, the idea that the computer was sitting on top of somebody's television with these weird flat buttons and this big, like silver body, but also joysticks coming out of it. It was really appealing and exciting and something I remember loving, but I didn't own one for a while. I encountered and played them several times through the course of my life.

And then my real love affair began, actually, when I was in high school, and I was at a church youth lock-in, an overnighter. And one of their rooms in the church, for some reason, had an Odyssey 2 and, like, 30 cartridges plugged in in this lounge room. And instead of, you know, being a healthy and balanced young person and going and flirting and mingling and being friends and playing games and socializing, I spent the entire night without sleeping in that room playing all these weird games on this weird console.

And that's how my love for The Odyssey 2 really began. And Earl, how did you come to The Odyssey 2? I was already an arcade addict, specifically a Pac-Man addict. I kind of missed the first, you know, the first wave of arcade addiction that came along with Space Invaders. But I was just the right age for Pac-Man to get me. And, you know, the number of quarters that I was asking my parents for, they quickly figured out, okay, if we spent all that on something that was at home all the time, Maybe he won't want to play arcade games anymore.

Well, no, now I wanted to play that at home and then go out and play arcade games. So, you know, sorry, Mom and Dad blew that plan all to hell. But the Odyssey, too, actually came from my uncle, my dad's brother. And a bizarre little trade was worked out where my uncle wanted a certain liquor decanter that my dad had. and that was exchanged for the Odyssey 2 and 3 cartridges, which was, you know, the pack-in game, baseball and computer golf. And around about that same time, my mom picked up Alien Invaders Plus and UFO, and I was hooked immediately. It did not occur to me that this was somehow less popular than Atari, and I didn't really care. It was, you know, it was just kind of the mainstay of what I did at home.

Any physical activity that I was engaging in up to that point, you know, any ambition toward going out and playing, gone, gone. It's a joystick jockey from that moment on. God, I can feel that so well because I know my parents also always considered, hey, why do you need to go out to play arcade games? I mean, you could just play these games at home, and, you know, it didn't stop me for wanting to go play arcade games. They were so shiny and tall, and they had big cover, the art,

and they flashed colors you couldn't get at home, and they had giant marquees, and there was that sound of the pool table in the back of the room, like the clacking and Michael Jackson music coming into the ceiling. You can't replicate that at home. I mean, I guess you could, but you have to work really hard at it. Yeah, it just made things worse, really. It's kind of like the meme of, you know, could we pick up a hamburger for McDonald's?

No, we have hamburgers at home. The hamburger at home is, you know, Todd Fry's Pac-Man. With all due apologies to Todd Fry. Because I spent a lot of time playing that game. I'm not going to lie. Yeah, so did I. I spent a lot of time playing that game the past few weeks for a video I've been working on. Oh, no kidding.

It's probably out by the time this will be, so feel free to watch that. As for me, I came to the Odyssey 2 fairly late. I first heard about it when I was, God, 9 or 10 or so. So this was in the early 90s. I was an Atari kid. I had no exposure to anything else before that point, other than, you know, I guess the NES eventually. but the library near me had a copy of Craig Cuby's book,

The Winner's Book of Video Games. And unlike most strategy video game books from, you know, 82, 83, his was also a, I guess you'd say, it sort of focused on the broader realm of video games, sort of the context around everything. And it kind of got me into game history as well. But he had a section in there about home video games. and I remember reading about the Intellivision and the Odyssey 2 in there.

And I had never seen or heard of either of these. Not too long after I read that, my grandmother found an Intellivision at a church sale, and so I got to try that out. But the Odyssey 2 continued to elude me for years, and it sort of gnawed at me. I'm reading these descriptions of these games, and I'm like, these sound really fascinating and weird, and I want to see these with my own eyes. And then finally, I think I had just gotten out of high school, and I discovered eBay, and someone was selling an Odyssey 2 with about a dozen cartridges for about 25 bucks, which is an absurd deal. I honestly can't believe they were ever that cheap.

Oh, the Halcyon days. Yep, I got that, and I never looked back. I eventually got the whole set because an old coworker of mine also had an Odyssey 2, and one day, She just came into work with it and asked if she could get anything for it, and this was like 2005, so honestly no. Yeah. So she just gave it all to me, and I ended up buying the last, like, five or six games. So you have a complete Odyssey II collection.

That's impressive. All the U.S. games, most of them boxed. None of the European games. I'm not jumping down that particular rabbit hole. You don't want to play chess against your Odyssey? Oh, man. Yeah, we'll get to the chess. module. That's

a whole thing. Yes, there's a chess module because the Odyssey II hardware itself can't really run chess because it's very strange. And I guess that's a good segue into the... the Odyssey 2, like, machine. But first I wanted to back up a little bit, give a little bit of context to the Odyssey 2 and the Odyssey line in general. So, you know, 1972, Magnavox starts selling the Odyssey,

which honestly could be a podcast episode in itself. There's so much to talk about there. That was the only game in town up until about 75, other than a couple dinky little runs of consoles in 74 that were essentially just pawing arcade boards that companies were trying to get off their shelves, basically. This was originally designed by Ralph Bayer, Bill Ruch, and Bill Harrison over at Sanders Associates.

They shopped it around a bit, finally Magnavox bit, and published the actual machine. It's extremely primitive. sort of has a couple blocks and lines on screen. Well, one line and two player blocks and then an additional block. You sort of make your graphics and such with screen overlays, and you play games using a couple of controllers, like a light gun for some things, a light rifle.

Oh, Kevin, it uses the highest fidelity, the imagination. It does. It's actually secretly the most powerful console because it harnesses the human brain. My favorite is that a lot of the games use board game components to sort of flesh it out. There's a YouTube channel called Odyssey Now, based out of a university, I think, in Pennsylvania, where they've been recording footage of people actually playing Odyssey games. It's really fascinating stuff, and they kind of revisit that idea in the Odyssey 2 a little bit.

So the Odyssey 2 itself, that started work in 1976. This was after Fairchild had announced they were going to be doing a microprocessor-based video game console, the Channel F. And then suddenly there was a run of other companies that said, oh, we need to get in on this microprocessor game. This is clearly where home video games are heading, you know, selling these dedicated consoles. That's like a fad that's not going to last very long. So Magnavox announces in August they're going to be doing this. they had a patent settlement because, you know, because they had access to these Sanders Associates patents with all these video games. Yeah, the video game technology used in the Odyssey.

Basically, they went after any other company that was trying to sell video games to make them a licensee. If they wouldn't do that, they took them to court. Atari didn't do that. They took them to court. They settled out of court. Atari became a licensee. And as part of that agreement, Atari had to share any technology they had regarding a home game development with Magnovox,

in case Magnovox wanted to license it. As far as we can tell, Magnovox never did anything with this, so they never ripped off the video computer system, the 2,600, while it was in development, really kind of a missed opportunity, but I digress there. The hardware was designed by Roberto. Leonard Doozzie, who is a young engineer at Magnavox, according to Ed Averett, who wrote like two dozen Odyssey 2 games. Roberto was inspired by the Apple Computer 1 and its keyboard, and he wanted to make sure

that was included in this Odyssey 2 that they were working on. It uses an Intel 848 microcontroller, along with a custom Intel 8244 chip to handle audio and video, or in Europe, they used in 82.45, it's just the PAL equivalent. It's got 64 bytes of internal RAM for the 8048, which is not very much. There's also an additional 128 bytes to manage audio and video stuff. To save on memory, it uses this interesting approach that you saw again with the in television, where they have all of these built-in characters, letters, numbers, trees, balls, little stickmen that run around.

Yeah, all that boiled in stuff. I love the fact that the Atari, Mattel, and Magnibox were all facing the same problems of limitations and came up with such vastly different solutions. You know, you have the $2,600 go, well, well, we'll just kind of let the software guys figure that out and create the famous Racing the Beam approach. And then just the idea, it's so baroque and weird. You know, we'll just bake sprites under the hardware, like actual pictures. It's almost like the pet character key set or the trash 80.

We could draw all the graphics out of the things in the pseudo-aski that those had. It's just such a weird but strangely elegant way to solve a problem. I love that about the opposite. What's really fascinating to watch with all of these platforms, is what they start to do when they, you know, their built-in character sets are no longer adequate to cover the breadth and depth of games that they are trying to come up with for the system. Yeah, they do some really funky stuff with some of those late Odyssey 2 games. You can make, you know, custom sprites on the Odyssey 2. There's just not a lot of memory to make very many of them.

So that's sort of the limitation they were working around. But you can kind of cut up pieces, can't you? Like, they figured out how to do that eventually, like pieces of the built-in stuff and combine them together in other ways, or am I remembering that correctly? That is correct. That is how they made, like, the robots in Killer Bees, if I remember correctly. Oh, we're going to talk about Killer Bees. What a game.

Definitely talking about Killer Bees. That game's great. You've got to say it like this, though. Killer Bees! Because it's got their explanation point on the end. I just like the play. Lame tooth buzzing at the beginning of it, you know, it's not, it's not really ginning up any excitement.

It's just, Mrerere. Yeah, so it's back to the development of this thing. They wanted to get it out in 77, if I remember right, but the 82-44, while it was in development, they were suffering from layer mask issues, which caused a bunch of delays, made Magnavox upper management, and the people above that at Phillips, which bought Magnavox in, I think, 1974, kind of nervous. Ralph Bayer was brought in around August 77 to give his expert opinion on if it was worth pursuing this system further. He helped convince the upper management that, yeah, they should go for it.

So next year, March 78, they announced it to retailers, started getting to stores around September, sold about an estimated 100,000 units in 78, which is pretty good. For how anemic the video game market was in 78 and later in 1979, like the dedicated console fad had crashed and burned at the Christmas of 77 and programmables, they were not, they had not yet proven themselves as the next wave. So, you know, Phillips sort of looking for an excuse to wind down the Odyssey 2 after that. The internal game dev team at Magnavox was broken up, but it was kind of saved by Ed Averett, who was an Intel employee alongside his wife, Linda.

They started making games for the system on a contractual royalty-based agreement basis. so that's why fully half of the library for this thing in the U.S. is pretty much all games by the Averets. And I'm completely shocked that they managed to cram out that many games that quickly, and I really would like to talk to Ed

just to figure out what his process was just to churn those out like that. Yeah, I'm amazed by that. The Odyssey 2 library is not, it's intravistic. I wouldn't call it. captivating. But I'm shocked that you could get that many games of that relative level of

polish out in that time. Releasing over 20 bad games in a short period of time is still quite an accomplishment. And most of them are pretty good. Yeah, okay. I think the library, well, we'll get there. We'll get there. The library is, you know, where it's good, it's really good. And, you know, And as I point out, and then there's football. Although, I know some people who swear by that game. You know, a friend of mine calls him Madden 78. So obviously, it struck a chord with someone. It's just, I wasn't, you know, that jazzed about football to begin with.

You know, football tried on all of those systems. Most of them just didn't do it very good justice early on. So many, that 22 players, man. And that puts old hardware, has a lot of trouble with that. Mm-hmm. And then, yeah, Phillips also published to the machine itself under several different names. The most common one, I think, online today is VideoPack over in Europe, various European markets, starting in the 78 Christmas season, extended into 1979 in some regions. I think Sweden got it in 79.

And then in 1983, if I remember correctly, that's when it made its debut in South America, in Brazil, and I believe Peru, under just the Odyssey. Those were also pretty notable markets for the machine as well. It also got a Japanese release. I don't think anyone really talks about it in Japan because, like all of these import systems, it was obscenely expensive. There's this one angry dude to Japan right now just shouting it as like podcast device. like, oh, nonsense! Must have been a real big fan of computer golf.

Yeah, totally. He's a fan. So, yeah, it's just a weird little machine that was sort of the primary competition to Atari as soon as it came out because Fairchild was sort of circling the drain after the digital watch market, totally bottomed out. And I believe it was 77, 78. Yeah.

And that was their bread and butter. So even though they were making money off of the Channel F, it was not enough to sustain the whole company. So they had to cut back dramatically on that. It had a lot going for it. It had financial backing from a significant player in the space, in the electronic space, that understood that part of the industry a little bit. It had a decent library of games. The price point wasn't bad.

It was smart enough to use joystick controllers, just like the $2,600, which were instantly comprehensible. and again, going back to it, the impressiveness of that keyboard in a day and age when computers were practically mythic. If you bought a $2,600, you knew you were buying a game machine. But if you bought an Odyssey 2 in 79, you could lie to yourself and convince yourself you were buying a computer. And you might not know the difference for a while. It didn't matter that it only had enough memory to hold 64 characters, you know, that you could only type 64 letters. before all the space and the thing filled up. But that keyboardish look made it seem like something that was more.

And this modular idea made it seem like something that could be more. And that was enough for a lot of people. I think about the power of keyboards early on. When they stuck just a couple of years later, when Commodore stuck a good keyboard on the VIC-20, they sold a million of them at a $300 price point, almost entirely on the strength of, quote, a real keyboard, end quote.

That was what did it for him. I think the Odyssey is an earlier example of that phenomenon in the video game space. Yeah. And you know those early games, football aside, they hold up remarkably well against what else was out there at the time. I agree. You look at these

early Odyssey 2 games. Computer golf was one of them. Well, I got a list. Baseball, football. The pack-in titles Speedway, spin-out, Crypto Logic, Alpine skiing. These are all games that they run smoothly, the characters and the sprites.

You can have tons of them on screen at once, unlike with the Atari. The Atari is very limited on how many objects it can have at once without flickering, like, mad. So that was definitely to the Odyssey II's credit, and it's particularly strange design. And yeah, I think you are on to something with the keyboard, because they did release a fair number of games that used it in various capacities. They have a version of moo on there. I'm trying to remember what that one is. I think it's buzzword or logics or something. And it uses the keyboard entirely.

And there's other games that use it for various functions as well. So, you know, they did their best to make use of it. I'd argue maybe they didn't make the best use of it, but they certainly tried. Yeah, I think the best use of it was putting it on the box. But I think the second best use was, you're right, they did make some real games around it. And I think that's neat. I think it ultimately turned out to be more of a marketing tool than anything. But it was a, it is a cool advancement.

And it makes the machine so memorable. looking. I like to look at the Odyssey 2. I mean, obviously, the heavy six or 2,600 is a great industrial design. But in its own way, the Odyssey 2 is every bit as compelling. The 2600 seems friendlier. The Odyssey 2 looks more like in the late 70s that might be coming from the future. It's like, hi, we have visited you from 1984. It kind of has that vibe to it. I love that. Yeah, it's got very smooth curves, I would say. It looks like. something out of maybe not Star Wars, but certainly Star Trek

the motion picture. Yes, that's a great analogy. I absolutely agree with you there. Buck Rogers in the 25th century. It looks like something you know tweak you could just walk up and use that keyboard. Biddy, middy, bitty hit old Buck. Kind of surprised they never used it as a prop now that you brought it up.

Yeah, because, I mean, they used like that Parker Brothers' Zodiac game, the one with the blue, the sliding blue dome cover. They used that a lot. that was like every other control panel on that show. So there's no excuse for them not to have dragged out the Odyssey 2. Or actually, the one I really have always loved the look of, even though I've only ever seen it with a black and white monitor,

is that European variant where it's got the built-in screen. And, I mean, it's all just compound curves. And, I mean, that thing, you know, that is definitely from the future. Yeah, that is the G70. 200, which has a built-in black and white screen, so it's kind of portable. And I think that might be the first console to ever do something along those lines. It's pretty cool looking. I definitely recommend trying to find a photo of it or like a video in action.

Yeah, I think this is a good reason to start delving into some of the games for the machine that we wanted to talk about. I know we all have our favorites. I was going to start off. I wanted to talk about computer golf. Oh, yeah. Because this was sort of a pioneering. video game for its time. Of course, they started off with

different sports games, you know, baseball and football and those were fine. They were genres that had not really been done justice yet on console by the time they were being produced. And the same is true of golf, but I feel

like computer golf works better at what it's trying to do to the extent that Atari just straight up ripped it off for their own $2,600 Golf game, which I do have it on the record, as I believe, Ferg from the 2,600 Game by Game podcast interviewed the guy who made 2,600 golf, and he straight up admitted that he played computer golf and thought it was good and decided to make a 2,600 version of it.

Okay, that's awesome. If that's not a good selling point for computer golf, I don't know what to tell you. My dad was a, well, I say he was a golfer. He said he went out and played golf a lot. I think it was kind of like all the deer hunting expeditions that somehow managed to be beer hunting expeditions. But he, you know, he was definitely in this world of, you know, schmooze with your office buddies over a game of golf. And so he, this was a rare thing where he and I actually connected over something. and he always found it hysterically funny

the little fit the guy would throw if he knocked the ball into a tree to the point that, you know, my dad would completely wreck his par on that game just to see the dude do that. That made the game for him. It is exceptionally funny animation. It's so demonstrative, yeah, it's such a great idea.

It's such a great idea of making the little character so much a part of the story. Your story, it's great, giving you that kind of franchise to let him do that. And this is like 1979. Games usually didn't give characters much personality, but they sure did here with computer golf. And I think those are all good reasons why I had to put it on my list of things that I really wanted to highlight on this podcast. It's a very neat little golf game. It does not use the golf meters that everyone uses as standard now.

nowadays. But it approaches the issue of, okay, how do you control your angle and your power in a very interesting way, sort of ratcheting up your golf club and then letting go with a button and letting it fly and the ball moving in whatever angle based on where you're standing. It's an interesting approach to that problem, and I'm really impressed with what they did there. That youth group night I was talking about, this was one of the games that I just played and played. And again, obviously,

there were far more advanced golf games in the world by then, but it was a video game, and therefore I was entranced. So I played a lot of this early on, and I played since. I agree with you, it's something special. Also, Earl, I identify with going off into the woods to, quote, unquote, hunt. Whatever I visit my in-laws,

and I can't stand to be around them anymore. I go into the deer stand and read a book. They take the rifle and then just hide it up there for a few hours, and nobody bothers me. Hunting's a great way to get away from people. Are there any games either of you would like to roll into from here? There are so many. I mean, the Challenger series, for the most part, is legendary.

I mean, those things had. a, well, not a 1,000 batting average. I'm going to say about 900. The only one I never really connected with was the only one I failed to connect with, I should say, was Freedom Fighters because of the dual stick

control scheme. And there's really, now I think good deal games now has a holder. I don't know if they 3D print them or what, but they do have a twin stick holder for the Odyssey 2 that makes

Freedom Fighters, a playable game now. But back then, there was really no way, I mean, to manage two joysticks in your lap. One for warp speed, one for sublight. And it just, I don't know, it seemed like they should have thought of something else for the control scheme on that. But the rest of the Challenger series games were amazing. You had some of the earliest level editors in video

gaming with the KC. Munchkin games. You had, you know, volatile, you know, at least until you turn the power off. You had, you know, your version of the high score initials at the arcade. And then once you get to the voice, you have this really interesting thing going on because so much of what the voice had in it, you know, what I call the demented game show voice, the demented game show host, that was all canned. And so there was a specific vocabulary it was stuck with, and a lot of it was geared towards Sid the Spellbinder and Nimble Numbers Ned. But as for the rest of it, you got to games like Smithereens, which is one of the best party games I have ever seen on any console, including to the present day. If you can't break the ice over a game of smithereens, you just need to send everyone home.

Earl, would you mind describing this for folks? This is a game I've never gotten to play with other people. Can you tell us what makes it so great? Oh, really? Oh, my gosh. You're missing out. Basically, you have two guys. They are each behind a barrier, which looks sort of like a castle.

They each have a catapult. You hold your joystick down to, and it's kind of like computer golf. You know, it's sort of the tension thing. The longer you hold it, the more power the projectile has coming out of the catapult. And you can accidentally hit your own castle, you can accidentally send it into the moat in between the castles, you can hit the other castle, you can hit the other guy or his catapult and temporarily put him out of commission. Or, you know, if you're not careful, you can send it into low Earth orbit. But in the meantime, the voice is trash talking you. I mean, it's like, come on, Turkey, hit it.

It's insane because, you know, there's Berserk and Gorph kind of trash talk to you a little bit, but it sounded like a Cylon trash talking you. Right. This was like some demented game show host in a box, and he's got the long skinny mic. It has to be the long skinny mic. They stopped using in the early 80s. And he's just letting everyone have it with both barrels. He has no allegiance to anyone. He trash talks everyone.

He wants to see violence. It's playable without the voice, but you are really cheating yourself of the full experience if you don't play smithereens with the voice, because that is what makes it funny. It's the simplest possible game, but the voice just going off on everyone full blast for the whole game, that makes it. It's the secret ingredient. Thank you very much for that description. I appreciate her.

Yeah, the voice is very interesting. Interesting. This was a voice synthesis module released for the Odyssey 2 in September 82. It plugs into the cartridge port, but it doesn't run audio through the TV like the rest of the game system does. It has a speaker and a little volume slider. So you can plug whatever games you want into the voice unit, and those that are programmed to have voice synthesis in them, they'll start speaking to you, either in the Demented Game Show host or some of them have more of a robot voice. It also had the ability to say different syllables, phonemes, however it's pronounced.

And so you could combine those into all sorts of weird noises, which is how you ended up with the buzzing sound at the start of Killer Bees or Turtles, which is one of the few arcade ports on the Odyssey 2. It uses the voice to sort of hum the music to the arcade game, which is a really funny experience. I don't know, playing voice-enhanced games without the voice just loses so much. I totally agree with you. Smytherines especially, but really any of them. Kevin, beyond turtles, what are the other arcade licensed ports on the Odyssey?

From Magnavox themselves, or Phillips, I don't really think there were any, technically, P.T. Barnum's acrobats was licensed with P.T. Barnum, but that was it. That was it. Okay. I was trying to remember if there was anything else. If you get into the European releases, Parker Brothers. put out several arcade ports. Frogger, Popeye, Super Cobra, and Cuberts, and

Cuberts pretty good. Does it do a, does Cupert do a six-tier or seven-tier pyramid? The top of my head, I don't know. I was wondering. Six-tier pyramid ports are, Cupert ports are the, are the being of my existence.

But that'll have to be the decider. I can't imagine they got the resolution for seven, though. I'll have to play that. I played the Popeye one on an emulator somewhere. I know that I don't have any of the video pack equipment. Yeah, the video pack stuff is a little tricky. Some of them you can get U.S. compatible cartridges. Some of them are the European versions.

Some of the Brazilian versions. I think Earl knows all about that. I think he's imported all of those back in the day. I'm impressed. My limited collection is entirely American. So it's cool. The safest route with the Parker Games is to just get the South American versions because the South American versions used a video system called PALM, which was

kind of unique to South America. And it's close enough for jazz to NTSC. Whereas if you, like the European games, I think you can get Frogger and Cuber to work on an Odyssey 2, but I believe it's Popeye and Super Cobra that will not. or it may just be Popeye. Popeye was one that I definitely had to source from south of the border. Wow, that means it sounds somehow illicit. Or maybe you visit Taco Bell, I'm not sure which. But the PALM video system used by the Brazilian Odyssey,

it's close enough that it works on American hardware. And of course, if you have a multi-cart, you skip past, all of those issues in their entirety. Right, just go straight to it. They're very good Odyssey 2 multi-card options out there, which a lot of the games for it are super cheap, but if someone really wants to get

into Odyssey 2 hardware, I definitely recommend picking up one of those, because there's a lot of really cool homebrew stuff that's been happening in recent years as well. So you talked about the Challenger series, and one thing I always thought was really fascinating is that

almost all of these you get one life and that's sort of like the Odyssey 2 guarantee they won't give you multiple lives you're just seeing

how high you can score in one go and at the end of that it's like a metaphor Kevin yeah I really liked UFO also that's sort of

their asteroids kind of sort of clone and it's an interesting one because the way you fire is you have to let your beam charge up and then it's sort of rotates around your ship based on your movement in a really baffling manner that's hard

to work with. Or you can just ram into the enemy ships with your shield once it's fully charged and destroy them that way. I always went for ramming speed, man, shooting the UFOs. That was for chubs. It's just like, you know, I just dived in there. It's like, oh, come on, let's go. That game can be downright brutal when it wants to.

I really enjoy UFO. I find it quite challenging, but I think it's fun. And I have to shout out a couple of the games that won Arki Awards, which was the arcade awards that Bill Kunkle and Arnie Katz were doing for video magazine and electronic games. Cosmic Conflict, which is sort of a first-person pseudo-clone of Atari Starship arcade game, or I guess sort of kind of sort of Star Raiders,

if you simplify it down a lot. I like it more than Starship. It's more fun than Starship. It's actually pretty good. Yeah, I like it. And the other one that I know won an award would be Quest for the Rings, which was one of their three master, what do they call it, master strategy games? Master Strategies, yes, thank you.

Yes. So these were hybrid board game and console games. This is one of the ways they used to get around. the hardware limitations of the Odyssey 2, slap an overlay on that keyboard, put down a game board, get out some pieces, and throw in the cartridge, and now you have a board game

that has a sort of interactive video elements to it as well. I remember you played a Quest for the Rings with one of your kids a while back, and that particular podcast recording was a lot of fun. It was kind of interesting because The Quest for the Rings and Conquest of the World, both really the board is optional. You could just go kill some dragons or die trying, more likely. Conquest of the world, I mean, you talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

That's basically air-sea battle. It's air-sea battle with a board game. But what could possibly be more fun than that, aside from Root Canal? But Quest for the Rings, I mean, that's really, that is one of the signature games for the Odyssey Team, as far as I'm concerned, because it's, okay, it may not be adventure. They weren't even trying to be as adventurous as Warren Robinette, but in its own way, it kind of outdoes adventure in some areas. You know, you're not a square for starters. You have classes, like you pick which kind of character you want to play as, and then they have different skill sets.

That's just really interesting for a game from, oh, God, was that 81? Yeah. Yeah, it was like someone, it stopped just short of being close enough that someone needed to send Jerry Gygax a check. Yeah. But at the same time, you know, it was closer to your tabletop gaming experience with or without out the board than, you know, a lot of, especially your console adventure games. I, you know, I think Mattel kind of caught up a little bit because they actually got the advanced Dungeons and Dragons license, and so that gave them some cachet.

But there is a beautiful simplicity to Quest for the Rings that strikes just the right balance between, you know, your paper and dice complexity with the character classes and so on, and just being able to get out there and kill some stuff. Yep. And it's one of those games where you have the two players who are using the controllers and they're going through the game board, but there's also the option to have a third player who is the antagonist, or the DM, if you want, whose whole goal is to try and put obstacles down

to stop the other players from winning, mostly on the game board, put them into bad situations they have to play through. on the actual console. So I thought that was a really interesting part of the rule set. And I'm really surprised that this game doesn't really seem to make its appearance on the convention circuit where it usually have these kinds of experiences that are hard to emulate. Like, I was just Jared and I were both at the Long Island Retro Expo a couple weeks ago. And they had Steel Battalion set up, for example, on the Xbox.

That's not a game you can really emulate very easily. but neither is this. And you never really see Quest for the Rings set up for people to play in its whole entirety with the game board and pieces. Too many people lost the pieces. That's probably,

that's probably honestly a lot of the issue because, especially if you like me were a kid at the time, it's like, you know, ooh, coins with, you know, rings on them and, you know, how well did that stuff stay with the box? Sometimes not too well.

Exactly. You know, not going to lie, I am actually on my third copy of that game, so I finally have all the pieces. Yeah, I suspect that's why you don't see it in the convention circuit much, too, is the same reason. Just trying to get a collect a full box put together. I remember I had as a kid, you know, some of my video game board games, even things like Pac-Man, centipede, Xxon, you know, all those pieces are lost. Like, the boards are still laying around, but the pieces are gone. You just have to go with the traditional D&D approach where you just use whatever weird stuff you can find laying around

to take the place of your miniatures and your pieces. Oh, yeah, that's how you do it. I mean, and I'm all about that, but am I going to go on the road with it? That's my question. Maybe I should. Maybe we'll become Quest of the Rings influencers. That'll be our calling.

We'll bring the game to the East Coast circuit. There we go. We can bring it to Long Island next year. There you go. And speaking of challenger games, or was this a challenger game? Casey Munchkin, I think we got to talk about Casey Munchkin because, you know, Earl brought up that this was an early game where you can design your own mazes, which is super cool. I was testing it out the other day when I was playing Casey Munchkin

and it's really easy to use. It's really straightforward to make a fun little maze in a couple of minutes and play through it all you want. And in a lot of ways, this game is better than Atari's 2,600 port of Pac-Man, which is probably why Atari went after MagnaVox with a lawsuit for it.

Yeah, they saw a threat there. I think you play both games and you're very quickly like, oh, it doesn't, the screenshots don't look as good, but you play it and it just plays so much better. And I've tried for a while to get my head around why. I honestly think a lot of it is the enemy behavior and the maze design are just better balanced, even though it's a smaller maze. It's a more interesting space to move around. It's not as symmetrical as the Pac-Men setup. And likewise, as Israel pointed out, the fact that there's any kind of, you know, game creators became a big thing. on early home computers, but the fact that somebody was trying to die out on a console,

that was back to that I'd heard of. And it was just such a cool feature. Even if your maze was super simple, it was your maze. And, yeah, it was simple, but since you didn't have a save feature, you know, that meant you could rebuild your maze if you memorized it and do it again, which you probably did a lot as a kid. Yeah, I mean, you just get a piece of paper, write down what you put in, where, and you're off to the races. Yeah, because it doesn't take it very long to put it back together.

There's only so many possible configurations with that tool. Right, and there's like eight built-in mazes on top of that, and half of them are invisible mazes where it vanishes when you're moving. Yeah. And I guess to describe what really sets this apart from Pac-Man, other than the fact that you've got some really wacky mazes, is that the dots move. There's only like a dozen of them, but they're moving through the maze, and you have to chase them down. Yeah. And the last two get pretty quick, and are actually, like, you have to sort of follow them into corners and put yourself at risk of getting, you know, killed by the ghost equivalence. I forget exactly what term they call them, like the munchies or something.

They're enjoying their edibles, and they're coming for KC next. It's a game with a food chain. You don't want to be eaten by the monsters. The dots don't want to be eaten by you. Exactly. Everyone starts singing. It's the circle of life. It is a circle of life.

So, yeah, Atari went after them and Sierra Online as well, separately, for a video game copyright infringement. Because they had the Pac-Man license, and they saw these, you know, gobble games as infringing on that, quote-unquote. Yeah, what that became Jawbreaker, right? The Sierra one? Was it Jobbreaker? It was Jawbreaker and Gobbler on the Apple II. Yeah. So Sierra ended up settling out of court, if I remember, and Magnovox actually won in district court the arguments over whether or not Atari would succeed on the merits of their lawsuit, and therefore whether or not Magnovoc should be allowed to keep selling Casey Munchkin.

Atari lost that one. That sort of emboldened Phillips to get further into video games because they saw a lot of money and they saw Casey Munchkin was flying off a shell. So they doubled in, they rebuilt their game development studios in the U.S. and opened up a few in Europe as well. And then in March, Atari took the case to the U.S. appeals court in Chicago. They changed their arguments to basically say, well, it's not so much that they swiped our code. It's more like the look and feel and it's not really fair to us. And the appeals court was like, okay, we'll put in the injunction.

and send this back down to district court, and it never actually went anywhere because the whole market had a meltdown not too long afterwards. But it was like, it's one of those early video game copyright cases that really sort of defined what you could and couldn't do early on.

And, of course, they didn't really seem to go after other, you know, Pac-Man clones after their home versions came out quite as much. I think it was mostly because Casey Munchkin hit what, six months before 2,600 Pac-Man and the Atari 8-bit Pac-Man

that really hit her so hard. Scared silly at that point, I think that was it. Yeah. I don't think they wanted to put two TVs in front of a jury and, you know, say which is the you know, which is the original and which is the rip-off and one of them is Todd's

Pac-Man and it's just like, we don't even know what that is. We can laugh at Todd Fry, but then he can count his money, and he can laugh at us. So it works out pretty well. That's true. He made a lot of money, and then he made SwordQuest. Yeah. But yeah, so Casey Munchkin, I remember reading in the coverage of this whole court case while I was doing research recently, that this was the best-selling Odyssey 2 game.

They sold more copies of this in the two or three months. it was on the market at the end of 81, than every other game that they'd published up to that point combined. Which is why, even though they had to take it off the market, in March 1982, it's still super common, and you can find it pretty much anywhere you find Odyssey 2 games. It's just everywhere, and it's a great game, so. Yeah, I think it is legitimately a great game.

Like, a lot of these were like, yeah, that was neat for the time. I think that game's, like, there are ideas there that are, universal that they could be repurposed into something modern. I really dig that game. Well, and I think that's something that Bill Kunkle both spoke about and wrote about when he was

talking about participating in that case, that it was, it was like Atari was trying to lock down a genre and not a specific game. It's like, okay, we've got a guy in a cape. No one else can do superheroes. And it doesn't really work that way.

Yeah. I'm glad they got him as an expert witness, because I think he did a lot for that argument, even going forward. And of course, Casey's Crazy Chase, the sequel to the game, also fantastic. Voice compatible has the map editor. Instead of chasing little dots around, you're chasing around the drata pillar, and you're trying to eat all its body segments. And there's like little monsters running around as well. and this game kind of reminds me

of a Pac-Man Championship Edition DX with like the ghost trains where you're eating one and then you just start plowing through the rest of them because you can do that to the Dratapillar and it's so satisfying it is such a cool little game and has such cute little animations yeah, both of these KC games, fantastic.

I'm sure that the fact that Casey's Crazy Chase was basically Pac-Man versus centipede, there is nothing metaphorical there at all. Nothing, absolutely nothing. One thing I do like about Casey's crazy chase is if you come to a halt anywhere in the maze, Casey starts doing little somersaults waving his antennae at you. I mean, it's the precursor to Sonic stamping his feet. You're right.

I was sitting there the other day. Someone was asking me if I knew what the first idle animation really was in video games. And, yeah, I think it is Casey's Crazy Chase. What year is Casey's Crazy Chase? Is that the same year as Major Havoc or is Major Havoc a year later? I think Major Havoc's 83, but I'm not positive on that. I think Tempice is 82 and Major Havoc's 83 or something like that, yeah. Because Major Havoc has one, but I think this would be earlier.

Because, yeah, not that you'd ever do it in an arcade, but if you leave Major Havoc alone, he'll just start leaning against the wall and tapping his feet and stuff like that. I also wanted to bring up Pickax Pete, which I know is a favorite of Earls in particular. It's a very interesting take on sort of a Donkey Kong style genre that is not very much at all like Donkey Kong. It's, yeah, it's actually very different from Donkey Kong because, you know, you can die at any. any time on any floor of that maze. And it starts deleting pieces of the structure out from underneath you. And that it must be on the moon because it changes the physics of gravity.

And stuff starts bouncing around differently. And, you know, it's real easy early in the game to think, okay, if I hang out over here right on the edge of the top level, I'm safe. and then it starts deleting parts of the structure at the bottom. And all of a sudden, stuff is bouncing up the shaft at you. And you're like, wha! And, you know, you've gotten nowhere to run because, you know, you're out there on the edge already. It's a really fascinating game that kind of...

And I believe, if I remember correctly, it started life as Hammer and Hank. And then they decided, hey, you know what? This whole hammer thing, Mario's got one of those. Maybe let's not. do that. But the fact that they switched it to a pickax, which, you know, gives you, you know, kind of a destructive means to cut your path through the game at least for a few minutes because it starts to deteriorate very quickly. So I'm, you know, guessing again, this is on the mood and the pickax is made of ice or something like that. But it's, they made it different enough.

I think pickax-P was a lot more bulletproof than Casey Munchkin was. Now, clearly, they learned their lesson there because I believe Pickax was in development at the time that Casey went to market and then the court case started and obviously there was a rethink that went beyond the title. I wish we had the ability to show people these games in motion because if they're looking them up and they're just seeing a screenshot or even watching a short YouTube video, you don't get what they look and feel and play better than that. look. Pickaxp is a perfect example of that, a game that just

looks awful if you stare at it, but it's so much fun if you play it. Yeah, there's just a lot going on in that game, and the fact that the pickax when it spawns drops one end of the screen, but the key to go to like another stage and get a bunch of bonus points

goes to the other end where it's arguably more dangerous to try and pick it up. It was a really clever design choice. I've never really gotten good, dead-pick-X-P, but I enjoy trying over and over again, which, you know, it's really easy to do

because the game just automatically puts you back in after you die. I used to scotch tape index cards into the bottom of the box, you know, where the cartridge would go. Because for the most part, you know, we kept those boxes. And those were really nice

storage boxes. You know, unlike, you know, the 2,600 games, they started out in kind of the same format. And then they went to this very destructible, cheaper form where, you know, there's just a cardboard structure inside

holding the game and there's no point in preserving the box or, you know, so a lot of us thought because we tore the crap out of them just to get the game inside. But the Odyssey, too, you didn't do that. You know, this was like a little book with a secret compartment in it. But I used to tape index

cards into that well where you drop the cartridge and I would write my high scores. And at some point, I played a game with Pickax, Pete, that ran something like 949 points. I have no idea how on earth I did that. But apparently, it was a thing that happened. Keep in mind that a lot of these Odyssey 2 games are not high-scoring games. You know, you get maybe like 5, 10 points if you're lucky.

So that's extremely impressive. Wow. Way to go, young girl. Well, yeah, I assume that the low scores. I always assume that had to do with just saving a decimal. saving one of those precious bites, right? Probably. I think there's only, like, what, four character, like, digit slots for

the scores in Odyssey 2 games? Yeah, it's something ridiculously known like that. Yeah. Well, you said it had 64 bytes of Wren, correct? Yeah. Okay, well, you know, you can overload your registers really quickly if that's what you're working with. So I can see where, you know, and again, it's a metaphor from life you know, nothing really gets you a whole lot of points, and when you die, you're gone.

But you get to write your name down. But you get to write your name if you're lucky, if you're lucky, you know, or if your brother just leans on the space bar and then suddenly you can't write your name, that is a thing that can happen to, or so I have heard. I would be remiss, I think, if it didn't bring up the aforementioned Killer Bees! Yeah, talk about Killer Bees. With explanation points.

I have a lot of love for quite a few Odyssey games, but I do think Killer Bees is a standout game on the console. It's a shooter, sort of? It's a chase game. Sorta? You're playing as a swarm of bees. They make a cool buzzing sound. And there are a number of robots moving around a rectangular room,

different speeds and moving in different directions. You can predict the robot's behavior because robots of a certain color always turn one way when they had a barrier, and robots of a certain color always kind the other way. Think like Choo Choo Rocket. You have to run after these robots, chase them down, and sting them to death. First you sting them and it slows them. Then if you hover over them, they die. But your swarm is being pursued or being pursued by other swarms. And the longer those swarms are on screen, the more powerful they become.

They change color, and they become faster and more aggressive. So what you're doing is chasing one thing while being chased by another, very KC munchkin, you know, you after the dots, monsters after you kind of stuff. But you've got the added franchise of a zapper, the ability to clear a horizontal area of the screen when you're in absolute bona fide trouble. The problem is you have extremely limited ammunition that can only be recharged by killing robots. So you're trying And every time we kill a robot You create an obstruction on the screen, a tombstone The robots will bounce off of

Again, kind of like you chew rocket mice off a wall So you're not just catching them You're catching them and you're directing them So that you can catch more But keep them away from what's coming But you're doing all this at a furious pace I've never played another video game

That does what Killer Bees does And what it does it does well And it's an enormous amount of fun. And you can, don't forget, you can take out the, uh, the killer bees that are chasing you with the Rocha Ray. The Rocha Ray. That's the Zapper. It's right.

Rocha Ray, which is named for, uh, the, was it the developer? Robert S. Harris. Yeah. Who is a delightful man. It's really charming. You know what makes Killer Bees really fun playing it with the track ball? Oh, no kidding. Yes, talk about the Odyssey 2 trackball as, uh, one of the rare people who has one.

It's a, well, it's basically the same casing, more or less that Wicco used for the Atari 2,600 add-on trackball that they marketed. The only difference being that there is a port in the back to plug in a power adapter. And this was something that I used to be an exhibitor every year at the Oklahoma Video Game Exhibition in Tulsa. And one year I went and, you know, I always took. My Odyssey always took at least one Odyssey 2, and the other thing I was really big on at the time was importing completely obscure PlayStation 1 arcade compilations. I had this giant double joystick, and so really the great thing to do with that was either Robotron or Crazy Climer on the PS1.

But, you know, the Odyssey 2 I would always set up, the Odyssey I would always set up sometimes with a green screen monitor just to emphasize. how monochrome it was and I would run that through a VCR or something to get it to the, you know, to an old Apple 2 monitor. And a guy came up to me toward the end of the show, I think it was the second year of the show, and

he said, do you have an Odyssey 2 track ball? And I just kind of laughed. I was like, uh, no, I don't. He said, well, I have one. And so we exchanged information and kind of, you know, a little bit of horse trading ensued. And I,

I wound up with the trackball. At the time, I worked at a TV station, so I took it into the engineering department because my trackball was missing the AC adapter. So I got a Radio Shack Universal AC adapter, and so I took it into the engineers of the TV station. I said, okay, guys, find out, without frying it, please, which tip on this universal AC adapter I should use on this trackball, and they figured it out. And so, you know, it was now playable. And almost any game other than Killer Bees, it's completely useless.

You know, unless you're trying to play drunk goggles pickax Pete, it's great for that. You know, you cannot play Casey Munchkin with a trackball. You know, every other game, it's drunk goggles something. I never tried Quest for the Rings. Maybe I should have because there's some, you know, there's some large areas to move around in. it might actually work with that, and I need to try it sometime. But Killer Bees, man, it transforms it into, it's already a whole other game. The trackball turns it into a whole other game.

And it's almost gotten to where that is my preferred way to play it. I almost can't play it with a joystick anymore. Oh, man, I need a trackball. I'm sure there's like as many as five of those laying around the world. I think there may be, I mean, at the time that I got the one that I had, have. And I still have it. It was the third one known to exist. Now, I think they're up to something like a dozen now. And it's important to point out that this was not some prototype. It had a printed box that identified it as a trackball for the Odyssey II game console. So obviously,

there was a production run. Yeah. But it probably happened close enough to the crash that they just decided to, you know, take the tax right down, not put it on the market, bite it off as a loss. Makes sense. You know, it was the Batgirl of the Odyssey, too. Oh, that's depressing. Sorry, I'm still bitter. I can't let it go.

It would have been better than the Flash. Oh. I've had things come out of my body that were better than the Flash. I'm going to be able to be able to be. Yeah, Killer Bees, I agree. This is probably the best game on The Odyssey 2, and one of the best games of its day, period. This is, I think I'm comfortable saying this is probably one of the top three games of 1983 in general.

It's just a fantastic piece of work. Bob Harris really outdone himself. I know I went for the low-hanging fruit with this one, but I just love this game, and I do think it's, there's a lot of Odyssey games that haven't aged well. There's a number that have, and this is, but if I'm going to try to sell somebody on the console, this is the one I'm going to take them to first.

That's fair. And I did want to note some other games that didn't come out in the U.S. You know, you had these European Development Houses that started working on Odyssey II or Video Pack games in 1981. Intron and Sweden was one of them. Phillips had one at their headquarters in the Netherlands. They also had one set up at Cambridge in the U.K. And they produced a variety of games. Some of them didn't come out in the U.S. like Clay Pigeon or Labyrinth.

Some of them did, but they had to be reprogrammed for NTSC hardware. I interviewed Bob Cheezum a while ago about smithereens, and he told me that he got the European version of the game, Stone Sling, and he basically had to reprogram the game from the ground up because Stone Sling would not run on an NTSC machine, and that's why he was also able to add in voice synthesis support for the game. So some of these are pretty interesting. I don't think Clay Pigeon or Labyrinth are super interesting,

but there are a variety of games that didn't come out that have turned up in prototype form in Europe that are really cool. Robot City is one of my favorites on this hardware, and that never was published anywhere, but you could find the ROM online super easy. I also wanted to note that The Odyssey 2 was used as an education, tool in West Germany, where Intron was contracted to produce a couple traffic safety video games and the West German school system, I think 3,600 schools, got video pack units, or I think they called them G7,000s there.

And they got these traffic school carts, and they used them in classes, which is completely bonkers. Like, no one was using Atari 2,600s in classrooms or in televisions, but here we are with The Odyssey, too. Again, it looked like a computer, and people didn't know the difference. It sounds so absurd now, but back then, there was barely a functioning language for what a computer was beyond a certain boxy shape. Yeah, the keyboard opened doors that would not otherwise have been open. You know, again, because like Jared said earlier, you know, it creates the impression. that either this is a computer or, you know, the thing that

Atari and Mattel both got in trouble trying to make a marketing promise out of, it can be a computer. No, no, it can't. I mean, yes, it's a very simple computer already, but you know, something programmable, something you can do your taxes on. No, you are not doing your taxes

on the Intellivision. Granted, you're not doing them on the Odyssey, too, either. But, well, maybe if you got the calculator cartridge. You can help. I'm just like my inner trauma is screaming. My first home computer was a Colico Adam. Yeah.

My father wrote his doctoral dissertation on that thing. It's still unfathomobile to me. Mine was a Ti-99-4-A, so... Oh, that word processor was not good. It was a machine. I'll put it to you this way. I'm the only person in my family who ever used it, and the rest of my family doesn't remember that we ever owe.

owned it. Wow. I remember, we had it for like six months, and then they threw it out for a Commodore 64. Good. Did you have the sidecar, or, I mean... No, we just had the base unit. Oh, Lord, you couldn't do anything with that, but play it pretty good... It had a good Kubert.

Didn't have Kubert, only had educational games, because we got it from an elementary school. Oh, that's the worst. Yeah. I still played it because, you know, video game's a video game, but... What's some of their weird beast, the Scratch Ram and that weird design? That's a strange computer at the Internet 94A. There's a future episode for us. I also wanted to touch on the chess module because we talked about it a little bit earlier.

So the Odyssey II does not have the hardware to be able to process chess moves. So in Europe, they produced a chess module that plugged into the machine and had a Z80 microprocessor to actually run the calculations for its moves. which, you know, reminds me a lot of how the Channel F also has a Europe-exclusive chess game that had extra hardware on the cartridge just to make it run. You know, clearly the Europeans just really into chess games and really pushing these consoles to run them when they really were not equipped to do so. Well, that was another sign, I think. I don't want to draw a narrative out of too much extrapolation,

but that's another indicator back in the day that something was a real computer, was it could have played chess. That was an old line thinking that goes all the way to, you know, it literally predates Alan Turing. I mean, he built a chess engine that he couldn't run because he didn't have a computer to use it on. But even things going as far back as, you know, the automaton chess player hoax of the 1700s, people are trying to get computers to play chess as long as they've been imagining computers. I think that's somewhere that comes from.

Yeah, and this was the time frame when you'd see computer chess tournaments at the West Coast Computer Fair. They'd get a whole bunch of different computer chess programs and have them play each other and see who won. So it was definitely in the zeitgeist at the time. My money's on Sargonne 2. I'm pretty sure Sargon 2 was the reigning champion for a while. All right. I also want to talk a little bit of I also want to talk a little bit about, you know, Phillips's attempts at a follow-up to the Odyssey 2,

They had a couple None of these Oh man One day One day I'll get to the CDI on here None of these really ended that well But they're interesting So you had the Odyssey 3

Which they announced at the January 1983 CS Consumer Electronics show This was sort of a half-step improvement Over the Odyssey 2 It had a built-in voice unit It was backwards compatible with the Odyssey 2 had a better keyboard, like the Odyssey 2 keyboard, sort of this membrane thing. And this, based on the photos I've seen of the prototype units, is a full-on keyboard.

And it's capable of putting out high-resolution graphical backgrounds, primarily. This was after the Colico Vision and the 5200 had come out, so they kind of ate its lunch. The reception of the Odyssey 3 was not super hot. and they ended up shelving the machine outside of France, which received it as the G7400 plus, and it got a handful of games out there. Some units actually have SCART RGB out through like a little din port. I guess those cables are a massive pain to try and find nowadays.

So it's possible if you even get one of these things, you'll have to build your own. But it's there if you really want RGB out. Odyssey 2 games and I know Earl you've played some of the Odyssey 3 games in emulation at least did you want to touch on any of those

they're really it's really kind of an interesting look at what they considered to be an improvement you know I I think we've agreed that pick XP is you know one of the highlights

of the Odyssey 2 it turns out that if you jam a bunch of tile-based background graphics behind it where you can't see anything, it suddenly sucks. Imagine that. The, I mean, really the most tantalizing thing about the Odyssey 3

was the Flashpoint game that I believe was going to be the pack-in at one point, which was kind of a robotron style thing and, you know, again, an attempt at a, you know, a twin stick shooter. But that really, it really kind of upped the ante on the graphics. They were of a much finer grain than you got with the Odyssey 2. However, it was kind of like Petsky graphics. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't one of those evolutionary steps

in graphics like Xaxon, where you look at it and like, whoa, everything just changed. Yeah. You know, this was like, oh, they invented Petsky. It's kind of like I, you know, I saw some article earlier today about, you know, oh, cargo ships, you know, trying out cargo ships that or wind powered. It's like, oh, good. You guys invented sailboats. About time. Oceans are now battlefields. Oh, wow. Oh, now I'm just going to go watch that now. Lessor two weevils. Let's go. The other interesting Odyssey 3 thing was that they were actively marketing that it would have a modem. And that, you know, and they were saying you would be able to get on CompuServe or something like that.

So obviously they had they had some sort of terminal. program in mind for this, but it just, it wasn't enough of an evolutionary step. You know, like you said, it was, uh, it was just dressing up old games or otherwise the best they could do, or, you know, at least from the outset, was something that looked like Petsky. Now, you get over to Europe with it, with the 7,400 plus games, and then you have things like trans-American rally, which is, I'm not, it's, it's not pole position. It's more like night driver, with a finer grain of graphics on it. And, you know, that, that would have been, that would have looked more like a step up

that would have gotten it sold in the U.S. But obviously coming out of the gate with nothing but Flashpoint and, you know, Pickax, Pete, UFO, and some other games with background graphics all of a sudden, that wasn't enough of a selling point. And it was not suddenly, it was not going to detect your old Odyssey to pickax Pete cartridge and say, oh, I need to put background graphics on this. No, you would have to buy a pickaxe Pete a second time. And I think that was also not a good look. I think there are lots of reasons why the Odyssey 3 did not come out. And I think it was probably a good decision. I would agree. It would

not have done well that had, even if the market wasn't collapsing under its own weight. It just got blown out of the water by what other companies were selling at that point. I mean, the Intellivision objectively has very nice graphics, and it's got very complex games, and it was getting blown out of the water by the Colico Vision and the 5200, so I don't think this would have gone anywhere. I also wanted to talk about the Odyssey 4, which nobody had heard about until some years ago when Dr. David Chandler, who designed the Intellivision Hardware for Mattel Electronics,

when he passed away, his family posted all of his documents that he kept on the Internet. And among those were memos from a meeting between Phillips, I guess, and Mattel Electronics. They had one in February and one in March of 1983, and they were discussing their next-gen plan. and how they could see about collaborating. So Mattel presented their ideas for the Intellivision 4,

and Magdavox, Phillips, presented their ideas for the Odyssey 4. And based on these design docs, the Odyssey 4 was really going to lean more into this sort of computer potential. Like, he was going to be able to play games in the base unit, but also they planned on having interfaces for, like, a printer and a disk drive, having the network modem capabilities. I think they even had high hopes for like a laser disc player for this thing, which they weren't the only company who was talking about having a laser disk on their computer at the time,

but they were in there. You know, these didn't seem to go anywhere. Mattel Electronics was hemorrhaging money. They ended up playing off a ton of people by mid-years, so I don't think this was ever going to happen. But it's an interesting what could have been. And probably also a reason why they, dropped the Odyssey 3 if they were already

thinking about a real next-gen follow-up. And also they started making games for other platforms under the Probe 2000 imprint line. I believe they put one of them out that actually came out and that was War Room

on the Colico Vision. They had a few others in development like Pink Panther for the 2600, which is a very cool game. You can find the ROM for it online. finally. It's a surprisingly good game. I was not expecting that to be as good as it was when it finally surfaced, which that's one thing I kind of want to circle back to. Some systems, you go collecting

the top-level rarities, you know, which the, in Atari 2,600 speak, that used to be Chase the Chuck Wagon. Now it's something like Air Raid. Okay, Air Raid is not a good game. Chase the Chuck Wagon is not a good game. But on the Odyssey, your rarer titles, like the magic games, the Parker games, well, okay,

not you, Super Cobra. Power Lords. Power Lords is a really cool game. It is. Seeking out the rarities on the Odyssey 2 actually does reward you

with fun and not just bragging whites. The gameplay is there. It's just the stuff didn't make it onto market. in any great numbers because it was at the end of the product lifecycle. Yeah, PowerLords has some really interesting animation and gameplay elements. Obviously being tied to a toy line that was not super popular, probably didn't help it.

Neither did coming out towards the end of 83, but it's a really cool little game. And I think it speaks to the quality of the people that Phillips had making games for their hardware. other people's hardware, that they were able to come up with these, like, really clever concepts for their games. Like, Pink Panther, not only is it gorgeous, but it has some really, like, interesting platforming ideas in there. And, yeah, they ended up halting all game development internally in about November 83. And the next year in March, they announced that they were phasing out the Odyssey 2 entirely,

which, you know, sort of was the end of the line for, you know, the oldest name brand in video games. Odyssey started in 72, and this was the end of the line for it, and hasn't really been revived, which is interesting because I think there was a

merchandising poll. Merchandising is an industry trade magazine from that era. And they had a poll in, I believe it was 79, or October 78. They polled consumers

on what what came to mind first when they thought about video games. And Odyssey and Magnavox combined made up 38% of the responses to it. Atari was second at 15%. So, like, Odyssey had a lot of mindshare for the people who heard of video games early on there. And, yeah, it's just very interesting that they just let that fade out. And, yeah, because the U.S. was the big market for, you know, video game consoles in Europe, was more of a more computer-based, even though the video pack did all right there.

Phillips decided to just end the whole platform at that point. Knowing what they is to be you Oh, no, no I want to find a big face in my board who And that was sort of it They went on to develop the CDI Which is not quite a video game console It's like its own weird beast

That I'm really excited to talk about at some point on this podcast So look for that But I wanted to talk with you guys a bit about to what you see is the legacy of the Odyssey 2 and the, I guess, any of the Odyssey 3 stuff that made it out as well. It's, I think one of the sad things about the late 70s is that there were enough people then writing from a informed contextual standpoint to give us a clear vision and that only now is that really started to happen. And so there's this kind of skewed history we have at that period. time. Kevin, you know, just to brag on you for a minute, but you wrote an Atari book that's very good at presenting the context of the time and revisiting the preconceptions that we have

coming in to the late 70s. We think of that time and we think of Atari, and as you pointed out earlier, that's not what the people then were thinking. That's a post-space invaders reality. So when I say something like legacy, I think that the real active world legacy is largely lost. I think it's barely an afterthought in most people's minds. I think it's a blip on the radar. But if we endeavor to contextualize it with its own place in time, it's an extremely important step in the development of what video games would become. It's a brave bridging of a computer and a video game into a hybrid, Beast that was a pretty shitty computer and a pretty shitty video game machine, but you put

them together and somehow it still kind of worked. I think it's a Frankensteinian nightmare and a precursor to the Sega Saturn, and it's bizarreness of construction, and I love it for that. I think it's a place where a lot of very smart experimental game design got done. You were talking about computer golf earlier, and again, things like Killer Bees or Casey Munchin and the love of the signing. I think its legacy is waiting. That would be

my answer. Its legacy is lost but waiting to be rediscovered. Which I guess is what this show is kind of about, right? It's very kind. Earl, is there anything you'd like to add talking about the Odyssey 2 legacy,

Odyssey 2 today? What makes it interesting and why it's worth people visiting it? I think I think we hit it kind of at the top of the show. It was like something that dropped in from the future. Some of the games were way ahead of their time. The industrial design of the console was way ahead of its time.

Even once you took this big slab of silver plastic and then jammed another slab of silver plastic on top of it so it could talk to you, it still looked cool. You know, it was a very nice, integrated piece of industrial design. The games, you can't really, you can't really sleep on them. I mean, the golf game obviously was the leader of the pack at the time because even Atari was just like, okay, copy their homework. I think that they may have missed a step as much as I love the voice.

I think maybe if they had rolled out the Odyssey 3 in 82, You know, maybe with the voice as an integrated feature, rolled it out then instead of doing the voice. We might still be talking more about a legacy for the Odyssey line today. As it is, I think it's a testament to the fact that, you know, one good lawsuit made them a bit timid, and they just decided, Bob Harris told me once that the day that they closed down the internal

game development operation at the Magnavox, what had been the MagnaVox offices in Tennessee in Knoxville. They shunted everyone over to a word processor project. I don't, Magnovox seemed to have some vision.

I'm not sure Phillips did. Phillips was sort of an electronics generalist. Still is. I don't. And they continue to be. And really, I mean, you talk about the CDI, Phillips does not have a good track record of getting behind a game console and staying behind it.

I think if Magnavox had continued under its own steam, different decisions might have been made. But, you know, that takes us into an alternate timeline. Well, we'll never know. But, you know, I think there is a, there is a legacy. I know my personal legacy with The Odyssey 2 is that it, really, really, really confirmed me as a lifer as far as second bananas because, you know, I had the Odyssey 2 instead of the 2,600, at least initially. You know, I later had both.

But when I got a home computer, it wasn't even a proper Apple 2. It was a Franklin Ace 1,000, which was a clone of the Apple 2 Plus or the Apple 2E. And, you know, so many consumer decisions that have been made down the road from that have have always been second banana stuff. You know, tablet computers started happening. Did I get an iPad? No, I got some cheesy little Android tablet that I think I got from Hastings for 98 bucks as a Christmas special. And I thought that was the coolest thing ever until I realized, okay, this really isn't capable of much.

But I am sticking to my second banana ethos that started all the way back with The Odyssey 2. and, you know, I'm not stopping now. As for me, I think you've all said it very elegantly, eloquently, even what makes it such a fascinating piece of hardware. I also wanted to note that, you know, it does have some really cool homebrew games. People have been making for it in the years since it left the commercial realm. And for me, that is a big part of its legacy, too.

There's games like Kill the Attacking Aliens, which is like a multi-screen shoot-em-up game. That's super cool. Like a Moonlander game, there's a Pong game, which weirdly the Odyssey 2 never had back in the day. There's clearly love for this machine, even if it didn't come from Phillips. It's got its fans, and they're doing cool stuff with it, which I really appreciate. And Phillips, I guess, they've realized there's some money to be made with it. They've started putting out some of their old game projects on Steam. A lot of them are, like, CDI, FMV games.

But last year, about the time Digital Eclipse put out Atari 50, they put out a video pack collection, which is very bare bones and the emulations kind of hit or miss. But, you know, it's the first attempt to commercialize Odyssey 2 games in, what, 35 years or so? So that's something... In another 35, we'll have a digital eclipse collection of Odyssey 2 games with the same treatment.

Yeah, there we go. Sure, there'd be dozens of dollars in that for them. It deserves that kind of deep dive, though. You know, the thing about the video pack collection on Steam, some of the games, you know, I actually quite liked how they emulated some of them. I didn't, but that's just my feelings toward Odyssey II emulation in general. It's like, you know, we got that Dan Boris core and everyone decided, okay, you know what, that's good enough. Don't mess with it. You know, don't try to bring it up to the level of Stella or

maim. You just leave it alone. You know, we don't actually want people to remember how awesome KC. Munchkin actually was. You know, if it looks and sounds and is at the correct speed that you actually got out of a cartridge. Not knocking Dan Boris's work on the original O2EM, but no one's improved on it. You know, it's like there's been a committee decision to just, yeah, it's just the Odyssey, too. The thing that made the video pack collection on Steam painful was that it was out there at the same time as Atari 50. And we know, and Kevin and I know this because, you know, we've talked to people like Bob Harris and Kevin's talk to Robert Chisholm, there are stories around this console.

And I also know this from talking to Bill Kunkle, who, you know, the electronic game editors were very, very chummy with the Odyssey 2 gang in Knoxville. There are lots of stories. And with stuff like the KC. Munchkin lawsuit and whatever happened to the Odyssey three, four, whatever, these stories are waiting to be told. by someone and I would love to have any part in that that I can but at the same time part of me just wants

I would love for even something like the art of Atari book like the art of Odyssey you know I would like for Tim Lapitino to love all that old Bradford and Koot artwork for the Odyssey 2 as much as he likes the artwork for the Atari games for my money it was a much more cohesive style on the

Odyssey 2, because everything had that, you know, kind of 70s retrofuturist, plus it all zooms down to a vanishing point, aesthetic. Yeah, it's gorgeous. All of that Odyssey 2 art is just lovely to look at. I'm blanking on the artist's name. What was it? It was an ad agency, Bradford and Coot. Oh, that's right. Yes.

You mentioned. And it's just a shame that the Odyssey 2 could have such a legacy. and could have a larger nostalgic footprint in collective memory, but no one has given it that attention. I know I've tried

with what resources I have. I know William Cassidy did a lot of heavy lifting with his site and, you know, there's just not as many enthusiasts for this system. We're a smaller club,

but I think we're much more passionate about this machine than, you know, frankly, a lot of Atari fans were. Oh, I hope that helps sell people listening to this on why they should check out the Odyssey, too.

You know, the emulators for it's okay. There's a Mr. Core, if I remember right. I don't remember how well it runs, but it exists. And yeah, it, the actual hardware is not that hard to come by

or that expensive if you really have the equipment to try and run it as well. It's definitely worth checking out. It's not quite like anything else from that time period or much else since, frankly. Hold on to the streetlight people Well, this has been a Retronauts podcast. Thank you very much for listening. You can find us on the web at www. www.retronauts.com.

You can also find us on social media at Retronauts on Twitter and Blue Sky. So take a look for us. on those websites as well. We also have a Patreon that helps support this show. For $3 a month, you can get early access to each weekly Monday episode at a higher bit rate. At $5 a month, you can get exclusive episodes on Fridays as well as access to the Retronauts Discord and Diamond fights this week in retro columns and podcasts on Sundays. So it's a pretty good deal.

But Earl, where can we find you on the internet? I'm everywhere for your convenience like ATMs. My home base is thelogbook.com, which is a site I have been running since the dawn of the internet, basically. Actually, it stems from a project that started up in the dial-up BBS days, and I just can't let stuff go. It's like The Odyssey, too, in that respect. covers everything from sci-fi to soundtracks to video games, and yes, there's a lot of Odyssey coverage on there, multiple YouTube shows and podcasts that come out of it

that also dwell in those areas. I also am a former voice writer and co-producer on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast from Roddenberry Entertainment, which you can find at Podcast.roddenberry.com. and I am co-host and producer of an upcoming show that will be starting in early September as part of the Roddenberry Network, where we are going through the archives of Gene Roddenberry's old scripts, both stuff that did sell and did air, as well as stuff that didn't. We're going to be going through those one-by-one kind of exploring the evolution of his style of storytelling and messaging prior to stuff. Star Trek and afterward, and there's some, there is some really mind-blowing stuff in those archives, and we can't wait to get started on that.

I'm really excited to listen to that myself. And Jared, where can we find you? Yeah, I'm Jared. I work at Limited Run Games, particularly at Press Run, where we make books about video games, very good books about video games, including Atari Archives, Volume 1, by your host, Kevin bunch. In addition to that, we have All Games Are Good by Stuart Kipp. We have N.S. Endings 1985 to 90, various and sundry other books. The upcoming SG-1000 works. If you're looking for Jeremy Parrish's best book, that's probably it. He poured his heart and soul into the

most obscure and nerdiastic pursuits. I think for American readers, the SG-1000 makes the Odyssey two seem positively relevant. So I recommend you read it because it's an amazing work. I've read it. It's beautiful and lovely. All of these are available at Limited RunGames.com. We also sell video games.

And occasionally I host the Top 100 Games podcast and I hope you listen to it. That's a silly, silly show where people come on and wax poetic about the games they love. And as for me, you can find my YouTube series, Atari

Archive, where I am going through and contextualizing the history of the Atari VCS Library, one game at a time. It's ostensibly about Atari games, but really it's about, you know, home video games and arcade games and computer games as a whole. I have a Patreon to support that effort under patreon.com slash Atari Archive. And I'm on Twitter for whatever that's left. this point, and on blue sky at Ubersaurus.

So you can find me on the web there. And like you, oh, go ahead. And like Jared said, buy my book. Yeah, I'm glad to buy his book. And I completely forgot about the social threads. Sorry. Yeah. I'm Petty comma Jared, C-O-M-M-A, P-T-T-Y-O-M-A, J-A-R-E-D, at everywhere but the artist formally noticed Twitter. So threads, blue sky, etc.

Find me there. Thanks. Thank you for listening and have a good rest of your day, folks. I'm going to be able to be. You know,