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Inside the Magnavox Odyssey2

Let’s take an in-depth look at the Magnavox Odyssey2 video game console and see the way we played in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Home » Inside the Magnavox Odyssey2

The Games

Contents

  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The Hardware
  • 3. The Hardware (Cont’d)
  • 4. The Voice
  • 5. The Games
  • 6. The Strategy Games
  • 7. Playing with the Odyssey2
  • 8. How to Connect the Odyssey2 to a Modern TV Set

Games were available in cartridges with a ROM chip containing the code (program) for the game. In total, around 70 games were officially released, and there are some “new” games that were developed by hobbyists that can be bought online. Virtually all games developed by Magnavox/Philips have an exclamation mark at the end of their names.

There were two kinds of packaging for the cartridges: cardpaper, used only in the United States; and plastic with an acrylic lid, used in Europe and Brazil. For each game there were two sets of artwork for the cartridges: the “American,” used in the U.S. and Brazil; and the European. In Figures 15 and 16, you can compare the two styles of boxes for the cartridges.

Magnavox Odyssey2Figure 15: An American cartridge (left) and a Brazilian cartridge (right)

Magnavox Odyssey2Figure 16: An American cartridge (left) and a Brazilian cartridge (right)

The first cartridges used a 2 kB ROM, but later games used bigger ROMs. (The system supported up to 8 kB ROMs.)

Magnavox Odyssey2Figure 17: Inside the first cartridge released for the Odyssey2, with only 2 kB of ROM

One of the main problems with the Odyssey2 was that Magnavox/Philips decided that it would be a closed system and wouldn’t allow other vendors to develop games for it. Therefore, most of the games were developed by only a handful of people. When the company decided to change this rule and allow other vendors to port their games to the Odyssey2 (in particular Parker Brothers with Frogger, Popeye, Q*bert, and Super Cobra; and Imagic with Atlantis and Demon Attack), it was too little too late, and the Odyssey2 was hit hard by the Video Game Crash of 1983. (In Europe and Brazil the crash occurred later than in the United States.)

Continue: The Strategy Games

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