Retro Saturday, April 12, 2008

I remember the very first game system I had way back when in the 1980's. No it wasn't an Atari. I bought the Magnavox Odyssey system. Mainly because it was the system that my brother, Lance bought. My wife and I lived in the Dallas area at the time and it seemed that the only place you could get games for this system was at a chain of local electronics stores that were in the malls. I can't even remember the name of the store anymore. In the 80's the Odyssey was great fun and the height of technology. I could sit forever, at least a couple of hours playing the silly game. I searched this AM for a commercial for the Odyssey game system. Here it is.This was not the exact system that I had. This was the first one that was released in the late 1970's. Mine came along later. Here is a Japanese commercial for the game system that was similar to mine.Interesting fact: Atari released the first arcade game, Pong, in 1972. Before Atari could copyright the game other companies rushed their versions to market under various iterations. Soon Magnavox noticed what was going on and got very interested in the game also. But for a different reason. It seems that Atari Pong was very, very, very similar to a new game that Magnavox had demonstrated a few months earlier, The Odyssey. The guys over in legal began doing some snooping. Guess what they found out? Yep. Right there in the guest book was the signature of Nolan Bushnell, the owner of Atari at the time. It was time to for someone to strike a deal and they did. The rest is history. I got this information from turbotommyturbinado on YouTube. Here is his video of the arcade game Pong.Wasn't that exciting?

I had that game system for a few years. Then when Woolcostarted closing stores in 1983 I bought the Atari system and started scouring the DFW area for Woolco's and closeout prices on games. I bought several. You know, it always seemed that Woolco marked up all their prices just so they could mark them down again during the closing process. Emphasis on "seemed". I don't really know. After all I was much younger and slightly less knowledgeable then.

I put the Odyssey up and I don't really remember that much about after that. I played the Atari for some time but the interest slowly waned. I eventually put it away only to take it out some time later and introducing it to my son and daughter. They thought it was great and have been playing games ever since in most of the game systems known to man. I know. I fell asleep last night watching Julie play Lego Star Wars on her Wii.

If you like to play the classic arcade games try Neaves Games and play online. You can play Space Invaders, N-Blox, Asteroids, Snake, Simon, Tic-Tac-Toe, Hexxagon, and Frogger.© 2008 Barry T Horst This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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