The Magnavox Odyssey 2, known in Europe as the Philips Videopac G7000, in Brazil as the Philips Odyssey, in the United States as the Magnavox Odyssey 2 and the Philips Odyssey 2, and also by many other names, is a video game console released in 1978.
In the early 1970s, Magnavox was an innovator in the home video game industry. They succeeded in bringing the first home video game system to market, the Odyssey,
which was quickly followed by a number of later models, each with a few
technological improvements. In 1978, Magnavox, now a subsidiary of North American Philips, released the Odyssey 2, their new second-generation video game console.
The original Odyssey had a number of removable circuit cards
that switched between the built-in games, of which there were ten in
Europe and Asia, and twelve in America. The Odyssey˛ followed in the
steps of the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 by being designed to play programmable ROM cartridges.
With this improvement, each game could be a completely unique
experience, with its own background graphics, foreground graphics,
gameplay, scoring, and music.
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 his or her own interest. Unlike any other system at
that time, the Odyssey˛ 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 Odyssey˛ 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. Later releases had a similar black controller, with an
8-pointed star-shaped housing for its eight-direction joystick. In the
upper corner of the joystick was a single 'Action' button, silver on
the original controllers and red on the black controllers. The games,
graphics and packaging were designed by Ron Bradford and Steve Lehner.
One other difference in these controllers is that the earliest
releases of the silver joystick were removable. They could be plugged
and unplugged from the back of the unit, while all later silver and all
black controllers were hardwired into the rear of the unit itself.
One of the strongest points of the system was its excellent speech synthesis
unit, which was released as an add-on for speech, music, and sound
effects enhancement. The area that the Odyssey 2 may be best remembered
for was its pioneering fusion of board and video games: The Master Strategy Series. The first game released was Quest for the Rings!, with gameplay somewhat similar to Dungeons & Dragons, and a storyline reminiscent of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 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.
Its graphics, and few color choices compared to its biggest competitors at the time, the Atari 2600, Intellivision and the Bally Astrocade, were its "weakest point", however the game characters would often have "added personality" programmed into them. Of these systems it was listed by Jeff Rovin as being the third in total of sales, and one of the seven major video game suppliers.