The Odyssey odyssey

With the success of Atari and the arcade wars, Magnavox and its little Odyssey, the odd looking "brown box", piddled along and got forgotten, victims of poor marketing, clunky hardware, and a good dose of weird. Not to say that Atari / Kee games didn't have their fair share of oddities.

But Magnavox gave it a go and had a slew of Odysseys, no less than 10 different ones and a wacky Magnavox TV that came with a built in PONG game. The first Odyssey I've covered in earlier posts, the brown box, the one with the plastic overlays for the screen . . . .hmmmm. Their next machine, the 100 came out in 1975 and was a very basic machine that played 2 games: Tennis and Hockey. Controls were super simple and score was kept with plastic sliders on the console top. Wow. Cheap. Soon after came the 200 with one more game and partial on screen scoring ( so basic that you might be better to use chalk). But it one upped PONG with its 2 or 4 player option.

Models 300 and 400 came out in 1976 featuring single game chips and advanced onscreen scoring. Seems all the dough was going into displaying the scores. They had the same games as the 200. Each subsequent model was the same machine with one thing added. The 500 was a 400 with one more game, the 2000 the same as 300 and so on. I'm lost.

Only when the 3000 and 4000 came out did things get cool again. They had detachable paddles and true joysticks. Not bad for 1978. In the early 80's, one of the final versions came out: the Odyssey 2, or Videopac G7000 in Europe, a substantial system that verged on "home computer". It sold OK in North America, but took of in Europe and South America, then flamed in Japan. Maybe the cheap Japanese language stickers right over the English writing and photocopied manuals didn't help.