The Excitement of a Game. The Mind of a Computer. The Soul of an Edsel.

The Odyssey 2, released in 1978, ranks among the most misunderstood video game consoles. It boasted more CPU intelligence than the Atari 2600, but it lacked the licensed arcade titles and third-party developers to make it competitive over the long run. While its games were mostly clones of popular games on other systems, the console played host to a few interesting curiosities like The Voice, a speech synthesis module, and The Quest for the Rings, a beautiful board game that tied into the Odyssey 2 console.

The Odyssey 2 also included a built-in keyboard (a very poor membrane model), which I believe might be the only time such a thing has happened — unless you count certain home PCs as video game consoles.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite Odyssey 2 game? If you have one, that is.

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If you liked this, check out these related Retro Scans:

• The Voice — Odyssey 2 Speech Synthesizer (2007)
• 46 Odyssey² Games (2007)
• “So You Want to Be a Video Games Inventor” (2006)

HERE THEY ARE! Your HOT Game Genie CODES for MORTAL KOMBAT!

I picked up this 5-inch by 2-inch Game Genie flyer/note at a local store (probably Toys’R’Us or K-Mart) in the early 1990s. Back then, Galoob printed up pads of these miniature flyers that would then be attached to retailer shelves near new games for sale. The pads looked much like office note blocks; a hard dry layer of glue covered the top side of the stack, allowing people to pull the flyers off one at a time.

I presume that Galoob distributed these flyers to stores as marketing tools. Since newly released games did not appear in Game Genie code books printed years before (such was the case with Mortal Kombat, seen here), these flyers provided an opportunity to both prove that the Game Genie was still relevant and to also to suggest the benefits of owning a Game Genie (“wow, infinite lives!”) to people buying the game.

While I owned a Game Genie when I acquired this historical morsel, I’m pretty sure I didn’t own Mortal Kombat at the time. I grabbed the flyer because I saved anything and everything video game related that I could get my hands on, which is why I still have it today.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you remember seeing flyers like this in stores? Tell us about your experience.

The Visual 102 Graphics Terminal

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used a serial terminal with graphics capabilities (and actually used it with graphics)? Tell us about it.

Ouch. Get off my hand, you tiny mounted knight.

Few magazine covers represent the playful optimism of the early Internet craze years like this cover of PopSci for Kids from 1995. Before the public understood what the Internet really meant, it was up to journalists (who usually didn’t know either) to tell them. This resulted in lots of visual hyperbole (see children happily trapped inside a computer above) and colorful metaphors like “surfin’ the net” to convey the energy and potential of something that, in reality, looked rather mundane on the screen.

Did these whimsical and exaggerated media tactics succeed? I think so, because that little thing called The Internet became much more popular than even journalists in 1995 could imagine. There is no doubt that the media played a large part in popularizing the global computer network in its early public years.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When was the first time you surfed the ‘Net? Did you feel like you were actually surfing on a digital surf board made of ones and zeros?

1980s breakthroughs in workplace ergonomics led to this optimal seating position.

Long before the gaming public considered Electronic Arts the worst company in America, EA made its name as a creative haven that valued its talent.

No, really.

EA went out of its way to convey a developer-friendly image in its early years, prominently featuring designers’ names in the company’s box art and marketing materials. Gamers bought into it, in large part, because EA developed and published some of the most advanced and highly regarded early home computer games of their time (think Archon, M.U.L.E., The Seven Cities of Gold, etc.). EA must have been doing something right.

Of course, things changed over the years. From a personal standpoint, I remember when public sentiment seemed to turn against Electronic Arts in the mid-1990s after it acquired legendary development house Origin (most famous for the Ultima series) and proceeded to drive it directly into the ground. Origin would not be the last highly regarded game development firm to suffer this fate at the hands of EA.

[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan of the Week ] When EA Wasn’t Evil » ]

This makes me want to watch Top Gun for some reason.

This magazine ad for Accolade’s Grand Prix Circuit (1988) reminds us of a time when folks were less kind to their hair — and when sunglasses engulfed half of your face.

It also reminds me of how wonderful it was when racing games switched to polygon-based graphics. If any video game genre benefited most from the shift from sprites to 3D polygons, it was racing. I mourned the loss of 2D pixel art in just about every game style except racing games, where the freedom of movement afforded by 3D environments heralded a new dawn for the genre.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What did your hair look like in the 1980s? Bonus points if you can link to a 1980s photo of yourself!

You can’t tell from the photo, but this table is actually 200 feet wide.

Since I bought my first Model 100 over a decade ago, I’ve always wanted the TRS-80 Model 100 Disk/Video Interface (a device we see here in this 1984 advertisement) to go with it. The interface not only allows you to hook your Model 100 to a TV set or monitor (80 x 25 text display!) but it also provides two floppy disk drives on which you can store your data.

In other words, that’s quite an expansion for a computer with an 8 x 40 character display and minimal RAM-based user storage that loses its contents with battery failure. It essentially converts the Model 100 — which is a light, portable machine — into a desktop PC.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever set up a desktop computer on your kitchen table? Tell us about it.

Tiger Game.com Internet Module Box

Two years ago, I posted a scan of the Tiger Game.com instruction manual. Today, I bring you the box for that console’s little-understood Internet cartridge, released in 1997.

The box you see above included a Game.com serial cable (which allowed the console to be hooked up to an external RS-232 Hayes compatible PC modem) and a cartridge with the “Internet” software on it. In truth, the cartridge contained little more than ASCII text-based terminal emulator software.

In my previous Game.com Retro Scan, I described the Game.com’s Internet connectivity, which I will quote below:

The Internet on the Game.com wasn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds. Sure, it supported “checking your email” and uploading high scores to the Tiger website, but a user had to access the ‘Net through a text-only terminal emulator cartridge — and then only via a serial cable that linked to a stand-alone dial-up modem.

It was a messy business. Being text-only, the user had to type in commands to whatever ISP the user chose (assuming they provided shell access) with the stylus on a tiny on-screen keyboard. Tiger did provide its own ISP that made the process slightly more user friendly. While far from practical, having a terminal emulator was an amusing capability. I used the Game.com call some BBSes around in 1997 for a chuckle.

As you can see, the Game.com’s Internet feature wasn’t very practical or useful, but it certainly serves as an amusing footnote in game console history.

By the way, Tiger once offered (or planned to offer) its own Tiger brand external modem for use with the Game.com. I’m not sure if it ever made it intro full production, but it is extremely rare either way. If anyone out there has seen one, please let me know.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the first video game console you bought that could communicate with the Internet?

That must be one heck of a spreadsheet you’re working on.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you prefer playing classic PC games (say, pre-Doom) using a keyboard, a mouse, or a joystick?

It’s the MICRO EXECUTIVE WORKSTATION, people!

iPad, schmyepad. In the 1980s, we had hair on our chests, far fewer seat belts, and we walked backwards downhill halfway from school every day in the monsoon season. AND WE LIKED IT. We also used the TRS-80 Model 100 — a sleek 3.9-pound, 2-inch thick machine that could run 20 hours on a single set of four AA batteries — for all of our mobile computing needs.

Imagine 8 kilobytes of RAM. Imagine a full travel keyboard and a 240×64 display that could fit in your lap. Imagine downloading stock prices at $12/hour from CompuServe at 300 bits per second over two acoustic couplers. It’s not a fantasy — it’s life in 1983.

Below, I present for your perusal a stat-by-stat comparison between the mighty Radio Shack wonder and today’s iPad, then I ask you: which is truly superior?

[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan of the Week ] The iPad of the 1980s » ]