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The console sold moderately well in the U.S. Of these systems, the Odyssey 2 was listed by Jeff Rovin as being the third in total of sales, and one of the seven major video game suppliers. Its graphics and few color choices, compared to its biggest competitors at the time-the Atari 2600, Mattel's Intellivision and the Bally Astrocade-were its "weakest point". Later, two other games were released in this series, Conquest of the World and The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt, each with its own gameboard. The first game released was Quest for the Rings!, with gameplay somewhat similar to Dungeons & Dragons, and a storyline reminiscent of J. The area that the Odyssey 2 may be best remembered for was its pioneering fusion of board and video games: The Master Strategy Series. One of the strongest points of the system was its speech synthesis unit, which was released as an add-on for speech, music, and sound effects enhancement. ĭuring the time of Odyssey 2's manufacturing, some came with controllers that could be plugged and unplugged from the back of the unit via their DB9 connector, while others had their controllers hardwired into the rear of the base unit itself. The games, graphics and packaging were designed by Ron Bradford and Steve Lehner. In the upper corner of the joystick was a single 'Action' button, silver on the original controllers and red on the black controllers. Later releases had a similar black controller, with an 8-pointed star-shaped housing for its eight-direction joystick. The Odyssey 2 used the standard joystick design of the 1970s and early 1980s: the original console had a moderately sized silver controller, held in one hand, with a square housing for its eight-direction stick that was manipulated with the other hand.
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Unlike any other system at that time, the Odyssey 2 included a full alphanumeric membrane keyboard, which was to be used for educational games, selecting options, or programming (Magnavox released a cartridge called Computer Intro! with the intent of teaching simple computer programming). The potential was enormous, as an unlimited number of games could be individually purchased a game player could purchase a library of video games tailored to their own interest.
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With the Odyssey 2, each game could be a unique experience, with its own background graphics, foreground graphics, gameplay, scoring, and music. The original Odyssey had a number of removable circuit cards that switched between the built-in games. The Videopac G7200, unlike Videopac G7000, had a 9" (23 cm) black & white display built in. In 2009, the video game website IGN named the Odyssey 2 the 21st greatest video game console, out of its list of 25. In 1978, Magnavox, now a subsidiary of North American Philips, decided to release an all-new successor, Odyssey 2. In the early 1970s, Magnavox pioneered the home video game industry by successfully bringing the first home console to market, the Odyssey, which was quickly followed by a number of later models, each with a few technological improvements ( see Magnavox Odyssey series). The Odyssey 2 was one of the four major home consoles prior to the 1983 video game market crash, along with Atari 2600, Intellivision and ColecoVision. It was sold in Europe as the Philips Videopac G7000, in Brazil and Peru as the Philips Odyssey and in Japan as Odyssey2 (オデッセイ2 odessei2). The Magnavox Odyssey 2 (stylized as Magnavox Odyssey²), also known as Philips Odyssey 2, is a second generation home video game console that was released in 1978.
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