K.C. Munchkin!# 9435

K.C. Munchkin! is possibly the most famous Odyssey² game of them all, but not always for good reasons. Philips released the game to cash in on the Pac-Man craze, but tried to change the gameplay enough to avoid legal action. Atari, who owned the home rights to Pac-Man, did not oblige, and sued Philips for copyright infringement. By the end of the months-long trial, two out of three circuit judges ruled against Philips, ordering that K.C. Munchkin! could no longer be sold after stores cleared out whatever inventory was already on their shelves.¹ K.C. sold quite strongly before the legal challenge, so today copies are easy to find despite the ruling. The verdict of Atari, Inc. v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp., 672 F.2d 607 (7th Cir. 1982), became an important precedent in software copyright law; unfortunately, it cost Odyssey² its best-selling game.

K.C. Munchkin! is reportedly Ed Averett's favorite Odyssey² game. The main character was named after Kenneth C. Meinken, who was president of North American Philips at the time.²

This game is unusual in that there are TWO released versions of it floating around. One version has white copyright text on the cartridge label; the other has yellow copyright text. In the yellow-text version, one of the enemy Munchers is orange. In the more difficult to find white-text version, that Muncher is blue. There are apparently no other differences between the versions, and nobody seems to know why Philips bothered to create two different versions of the game in the first place.