1002 Games that made me what I am
Early days
By 1980, on Saturday mornings my father used to take me with him to the Coffeehouse where he was reading the newspaper and drinking his coffee (some things never change). One of the places where he used to go was “O Nosso Café “ in Senhora da Hora next to the petrol station “Foll Pneus” and the old factory EFANOR.
This place was huge, it had two large floors. On the ground floor spartanly were scattered tables and chairs, where the drinks were served. But what I liked most was the possibility to go to the 1st floor. Here were two pool tables, a carom billiard table and on a corner one arcade machine…
It was the second time I had the opportunity to appreciate what was this new form of entertainment video games. Once again seeing this strange things on a TV screen, carried me away to another world where everything were fantastic, colorful, noisy and fast. Suddenly being able to control a racing car or a spaceship seemed that was available to anyone. To me it felt like magic.
The machines that I remember having been on display were: Monaco GP, Rally-X and Galaxian.
It was in 1982 that I could play at home for the first time a video game, apart from the brief experience with the pong machines. My parents, sister and I had been invited for a snack at a friend’s house. He had three children, Camané, Tone and Sónia. To my surprise, instead of going out to play traditional games such as hide and seek or football, they went to the room of the oldest, Camané, were he connected a console named Videopac to the TV. He and his brother each held a command that controlled a gunman and were firing wildly. Of course I loved it and keeped the memories of those cactus until today.
After the relative success of its first platform, Magnavox decided to continue to invest in its Odyssey series. These developments led to the emergence of the new Odyssey² its new second-generation video game console (1978) that followed the Fairchild Channel F (1976) and Atari 2600 (1977).
The console sold moderately well in the US . It did not sell as much as the Atari 2600 or the Intellivision, because both had more elaborate marketing and had better support from third party than the Odyssey².
In Europe and Brazil, the Odyssey² did very well on the market being most widely known as the Philips Videopac G7000, or just Videopac.
Video gaming lost one of its luminaries recently when Ralph H. Baer passed away on Saturday, Dec. 6, 2014, at age 92. Ralph was the inventor of the first home video game system — the Magnavox Odyssey — forerunner of the Odyssey². He came up with the idea of using a television set to play games all the way back in 1966. This was before Pong, before Atari, before just about everything. His early efforts directly led to the multi-billion-dollar industry we all take for granted these days.
