Philips Videopac G7000

The original Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial video game console, released in 1972. Internally, it was comprised of individually electronic components rather than using a central processing unit. It was capable of displaying three square dots and a vertical line on the screen, no more. It could not keep score and each game came with various props such as plastic overlays that stuck to the screen to add some colour, chips and cards for keeping score and so on.

The Odyssey was superseded by the plethora of Pong consoles and when Atari released the wildly successful 2600, Magnavox released a successor machine, the Odyssey 2. This was released in the UK and Europe by Philips and called the Videopac G7000.

Unlike its contemporaries such as the Atari 2600, Intellivision and, later, the Colecovision, the Odyssey 2 came with a full membrane keyboard and Philips marketed the machine as a “computer” rather than a games console. However, for the most part this keyboard was largely unused in titles released for the system.

In Europe, in its Videopac guise, it was a little more successful. Having bought Magnavox, Philips had hoped that they could make the Videopac range a standard in its own right, similar to what was later attempted with the MSX. In France in particular, the Atari 2600 had been somewhat handicapped by its poor support for the SECAM TV system used there – a 128 colour machine became an 8 colour machine. The Videopac suffered from no such limitations.

However, in most territories, including in the all-important US, the Odyssey 2 was a distant third to the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision. Technologically speaking, it was somewhat limited as a hardware platform compared to its direct competitors, and lacked a killer app such as Atari’s Space Invaders or Pac-Man or Coleco’s Donkey Kong. Lack of third-party support meant a relatively limited games library compared to its competitors, which further limited its reach.