RSS | News Archives »

Manual Transmission!

 

Thanks almost entirely to the tireless efforts of StarControl, the manual for every original U.S. Odyssey² release has been added to the Library section. This includes the 100+ page Computer Intro programming guide as well as the booklets packed into Nimble Numbers Ned and Sid the Spellbinder! Read the manuals!

Odyssey Arcade Center - Win One for the Turtle!

Hey, finally some new content on the site! This article has been a long time in the works, but I hope you find it worth the wait.

In 1983, Odyssey promoted the release of Turtles with the "Win One for the Turtle" contest. It was advertised in magazines by an illustration of turtles exploding from an Odyssey Arcade Center – 50 of which were awarded as grand prizes. Forty years later, I tracked down the artist who created the illustration, the lithographers who printed it... and one of the grand prize packages! Check out my Win One for the Turtle article to read some interviews and see some very rare material!

I started working on this piece after obtaining one of the grand prize packages from the family of one of the original winners some time ago. But it seemed like every time I got close to finishing it, I'd find something new to add! First, a few original pieces of Odyssey² artwork were sold on eBay. This led me to contact Tim Chaney, who worked at the lithography company that produced almost all Odyssey² marketing material. Then I noticed, after scanning my Odyssey Adventure magazines for the Library, that I could see the signature of artist Ken Graning, who drew the Turtles contest illustration. I searched and contacted him through his Flickr gallery. And then purely coincidentally, a reader named Tim Cotter sent me some pics of a rare brochure marketing to the contest promotion to Odyssey² dealers! This provided a lot of background on the contest and finally explained the purpose of a "Win One for the Turtle" pinback that I had in my possession.

So this turned into a lengthy research project that pretty much consumed whatever limited time I've had recently to work on the site. I'm happy to have learned so much, and to have been able to speak to yet more folks who helped make Odyssey² a reality "back in the day". But I'm also happy this is finally published – maybe now I can find the chance to add some more stuff I've been sitting on! Stay tuned and thanks for your patience.

The Fantastic World of Bob Harris!

Experiencia Odyssey has published their interview with Killer Bees creator Bob Harris, and you should go read it right now!

Hm, if you're still reading this announcement, then I guess you need a little more convincing. In this interview, Bob shares never-before-heard background on the development of his iconic game, and on how Odyssey² development was handled in general at the time. We get to see pics of rare and one-of-a-kind memorabilia, including Bob's Odyssey businesses card! Plus, not only do we learn the food-pun-inspired name Bob wanted to give Nimble Numbers NED, we finally get to learn what N.E.D. and S.I.D. stand for!

Still need more convincing? Bob also provides background on planned games that never made it to production, some of which he even found and shared in prototype form! The interview links to videos of Alphabet Soup, Risk Dice, a sprite tool, and a demo screen for an Odyssey3 game that depicts the interior of a house! Want even more? Read the interview to learn how the man who programmed your favorite childhood game went on to become a doctor who contributed to the field of bioinformatics (in this case, DNA sequencing).

This is truly a treasure trove of information for Odyssey fans – and the "to be continued" at the bottom promises we haven't seen it all yet! Thanks to Mr. Harris, to author, Rafael Cardoso and to Experiencia Odyssey editor Ricardo Silva for sharing all this!

Clean Up Yer Act!

Prepare to be swept away by some amazing new discoveries! Homebrew programmer and Odyssey historian Rafael Cardoso has been holding conversations and conducting interviews with Bob Harris, who is best known to Odyssey fans as the designer of Killer Bees. Mr. Harris provided Rafael with a lot of material about some unreleased (and heretofore unknown) games, including ones with the working titles Alphabet Soup and Risk Dice. But perhaps most interestingly, the long-rumored title Clean Up Yer Act has finally come to light!

Clean Up Yer Act was Harris's planned follow-up to Killer Bees, but it was never completed. The plans for the game have been known to Odyssey fans since at least May 1999, when Bob Harris was interviewed by Dieter Koenig of Classic Consoles Center. At the time, Harris stated that he believed an early prototype still existed, but that's about all we heard of it for some 25 years.

That has changed now, because Mr. Harris found the prototype and sent it to Rafael to be archived! Rafael dumped the ROM and has uploaded a short video to YouTube. This early build doesn't have any gameplay, but reveals a few things. First, Clean Up Yer Act was developed for the never-released Odyssey3 Command Center. Mr. Harris revealed back in 1999 that in the game, you controlled a sweeper picking up trash while being chased by broomsticks. The prototype shows us what the sweeper and trash looked like, and demonstrates how the enemy broomsticks chased you. Even in this early form, you can spot some similarities to how the BeeBots chase you in Killer Bees.

Rafael is preparing an interview with Bob Harris that will reveal even more about Clean Up Yer Act and the other planned games. It will be published to Experiencia Odyssey. I'll share an announcement linking to it here when it's published.

One other unrelated topic that Rafael shared: some footage from Brazilian the program FM TV, which was sponsored by Odyssey, has been published on YouTube. The video quality is less than stellar, but it is some rare material that's worth checking out!

Welcome to Odyssey2.info!

Hello, and welcome to The Odyssey² Homepage's new URL: https://odyssey2.info! While I'd like to thank my previous host (the-nextlevel.com) for several years of support, I felt the time had come to move the site to its own domain. Also, for some time I had been having some difficulty receiving messages submitted through the contact forms on the old site. If you attempted to contact me via my website forms at any time over say, the past year, and I didn't respond, it's probably because I didn't receive your message or it got improperly labeled as spam. I believe I have remedied this problem with the Contact Page here at the new URL. Please feel free to contact me again if I didn't reply to an earlier message, or just to say hello.

At the moment, there is no content here that didn't already exist at the previous location. The old site has simply been moved over, with some small fixes and improvements here and there. The better tooling at my new web host should make it easier to post updates in the future. That said, I'm reconsidering my approach to the site.

For most of its existence, the front page has been dominated by a news stream. This was originally a place for me to post site updates, but gradually it expanded toward reporting on developments happening in the larger Odyssey world – particularly new homebrew announcements. I still want to cover those; I think the homebrew scene is amazing and I never expected it to become as robust as it has. I want to encourage it, but it's not where my passion lies.

I'm an archivist at heart, and the reason I launched this site nearly 27 years ago was to celebrate and document as much as I could about Odyssey²'s original commercial lifetime. I'm from the United States so it's easier for me to dig up information on its North American history, but I also want this site to cover as much info about European Videopac and Brazilian Odyssey history as it can. But again, the "history" part is what interests me most. I've never been that good at keeping tabs on social media or online forums, so I'm frequently out of touch with the latest happenings. And it bugs me to promote news so prominently when I know the content is lacking. So, in the near-ish future I expect to redesign the front page to de-prioritize the news stream and emphasize content updates. It's not that I won't post any news though. Some news will still be on the front page and I will continue to welcome any reports of new happenings in the Odyssey/Videopac world – be they homebrew releases or something else. It just won't take up the entire front page like it does now.

But those changes are for the future. In the meantime I think the new URL should be fully functional... at least I hope it is! If you notice any problems while browsing, please contact me about them. Thanks so much!

TRENCH RUNNER Has Launched! We're Goin' In!

The newest game from Odyssey Brasil is out! Trench Runner (Portuguese title: Corredor Estelar) is the debut game for Odyssey Brasil from Jason Gohlke, who longtime readers may recognize as the creator of the first Odyssey² Cartridge Reader. Jason's new game is inspired by Star Strike on the Intellivision, which in turn was inspired by the famous Death Star trench scene from Star Wars – so it has a classic lineage. Trench Runner even comes with a custom keyboard overlay! Learn all about Trench Runner on the official web page.

Odyssey Brasil's Vault section, which allows you to play emulated Odyssey games directly in your browser, now features two exclusive homebrew titles: Copa 82 (Cup '82) and Salve os Humanos! (Save the Humans!). Check out these and other Vault games, and participate in the Challenge of the Month to get your name on the leaderboards!