It's Critter Time!

The Videopac fandom is dying!

Before there was a Philips CDI ... Magnavox had an entry in the 8-bit era. Branded as "Odyssey²" in the US, for some reason, even though no one remembered their Odyssey Mark-I pong-machine from the 1960s. And as Videopac in Brazil in other countries.



The Videopac uses Intel chips exclusively. The core is an Intel 8048. The video and the audio are handled by custom-fabbed "Intel 8244". While the video is well-documented, if anyone has good specs on how the audio works, let me know.

Speaking of graphics, the Videopac supported four 8x8 single-color sprites in both x1 and x2 scale. It also supported 12 character objects from a limited set of 64 characters hard-wired into the system, as well as four 4-character sets (often used for scoring). The color palette was 16 colors chosen to be friendly to NTSC. Characters could only be full-bright colors, with 8 half-bright colors for the background. There was also a "playfield" which could be filled squares, drawn lines, or just dots. This unique hardware gives the Videopac games their distinctive appearance.

Most models have these hardwired controllers with distinctive joysticks, that make you think they're analog but they're really not. The single buttons are made of flimsy plastic that will eventually warp or break. There's a membrane keyboard with no travel, that only registers key-press events. While the advertising copy would lead you to believe that the Videopac is a "computer", the keyboard is irrelevant to most games, serving only to choose game mode. (If the game even has game modes.)

Slightly more powerful than the Atari 2600, but nowhere near the same level as the Intellivision, SG1000, or Colecovision, the Videopac had almost no support. Predictably, it lingered under Brazil's protectionism for its longest time, but it doesn't enjoy any of the nostalgia that Sega does.

Hands down, the most famous game for the Vidoepac is K.C. Munchkin. Released a year before Atari converted Pac-Man for the 2600, and two years before Intellivision's Lock and Chase, the Videopac had an early start on the maze-chase genre. And a strong opening it was.



Videopac games are known for their wonderful and bizarre packaging. WTF is a "Challenger Series"? This game is single-player only. Look at those wonderful colors! The manuals had a glossy production value that no other 8-bit games could match.

The game's name is a play on the CEO of Philips Consumer Electronics at the time, Kenneth C. Menkin. The game-division people were apparently a bit salty at the lack of support from higher management, so they named the game after the big boss. It doesn't come up in the inevitable court-case.

A joy of this early 8-bit era is when games had their play dictated by the restrictions of the hardware. K.C. Munchkin has a simple blocky maze. Unable to render a playfield of dots, the programmers compromise by having only 12 but they move around the maze. And sure, some of the walls rotate, why not. Some of the dots ("munchies") flash and change color — these are the power pellets that allow our hero to eat the ghost-monsters, who must return to home base and then regenerate.



The game includes pre-fab mazes, one of which requires you to use the rotating box to access blocked areas. There's also a maze editor that lets you make your own playfields, but there's no way to save it. An advanced difficulty mode makes the maze invisible while you move.

The game has some unique challenges, especially as more dots are eaten, the fewer that remain move faster. One problem is that the final dot can move so quickly that it passes right through your munchkin's hit box, uneaten.

Naturally, Atari sued Philips/Magnavox, claiming that this game was too similar to Pac-Man. They lost their case, however, so K.C. Munchkin remained freely available throughout the game's lifespan.

Whether they were spooked by the lawsuit, or just out of ideas, PCE made a sequel, "K.C.'s Krazy Chase", where you now eat trees while a caterpillar makes creepy faces at you, as you attempt to eat its body parts. The game play is slow, confusing, and not very fun.

Another "Challenger Series" game, also single player. UFO was Videopac's best game before K.C.Munchkin game along.



When Nintendo marketed their games in the U.S., they chose a style that showed the actual chunky pixels, because consumers were often confused that they would buy a game box with this sweet UFO picture on it and then take it home and get ... this.



So this is Videopac's attempt to clone Asteroids. They only have four sprites to use, everything else must be tiles from the hardwired set of 64, and only 12 at a time, 8x8px rectangles that can't overlap. Now, the Atari 2600 only had two sprites; their game uses sprite-flicker to simulate multiple objects on screen. The Videopac coders had other ideas.

Your avatar is the UFO. (Why you refuse to identify yourself is anyone's guess.) You move with perfect inertia in 8 directions. Press the single button to shoot a single projectile. Unique is your force field, created by sprite flicker. If that field strikes an enemy, it will destroy it. Your projectile is your force field, so after you fire, you are briefly unprotected.

You don't necessarily shoot in the direction you're moving; instead, your force-field's reticle drifts slowly to point in the direction you're moving. This targeting is either an interesting challenge or a deal-breaker, depending on who you ask.

The common enemy are "satellites", colored circles that drift into the playfield from out-of-bounds. They move in random directions, and they sometimes bounce off each other. Randomly, two can collide, fusing into a "hunter killer" that tracks the player, smashing all in its path. Similar to Asteroids, a deadly saucer sometimes enters the field and shoots at you.

When an enemy is destroyed, it sends out three new projectiles in a fixed Y shape. If one of those projectiles hit something, it will explode and then generate its own projectiles. You score more points for chain reactions. Also, the exploding projectiles are harmless to you, but you can't shoot or use your force field until the reaction stops.

UFO is everything great and terrible about the Videopac. It's a game, and it has some strategy to it. But after about five minutes, you've seen everything. And many people will bounce off the strange game-play, hard. UFO is a fascinating curiosity, an exploration of what "state of the art" was in 1980.

Oh, I forgot. Magnavox marketing insisted on putting an exclamation point in every game title.



Speaking of the weird ideas that Videopac had... Okay, so now it's time to clone Breakout. Every console needs a bounce-ball-off-paddle game. But we don't have paddles. Also, we can only render about 36 bricks in huge 16x10 pixel blocks. How do we make a game out of that?



The gimmick for this game is the tiny little men. The manual calls them "demons". It's the Videopac men! Their graphics are hardwired into the game, and their blocky little adorableness is another unique feature of the system. So this is Breakout, you hit the ball with your paddle, and the ball destroys blocks when it hits them … but oh no, the little demon men will replace the blocks! A demon-man can run to extreme left or right, where it picks up a block. (More correctly, it flashes, because this is early 8-bit, we can barely show just these pixels, here.) It will then run through the bricks and when it gets to a gap, it replaces the brick. Difficulty modes change how fast the men move, up to and including ludicrous speeds.

If you destroy a brick that a demon-man is inside, the poor man slowly falls to the void below, presumably forced to live among all the stray balls down there. Eventually a new demon-man will spawn to take their place, but on harder difficulty modes, the only way to be able to progress to clearing the board is to send these demon-men to the pit.

This game includes a unique two-player mode! One of you controls the paddle while the other controls the brick-laying men! There's four rows, so four little mans, how do you control all of them? The answer is "not well". To move the man in row two, you push left and right. For row 1, it's up-left and up-right. For row 3, it's down-left and down-right. And for row 4, it's hold-the-button and left & right. Got that? (No, I don't know why they didn't just go with up-down to choose row and then left-right, either. I did start this thread by mentioning that Videopac is adorably idiosyncratic.)

The game has two titles because there's two modes: in Blockout mode, the ball destroys bricks one at a time, bouncing off; in Breakdown mode, the ball powerfully plows through entire lines.

Another paradox from Magnavox. If the unique hardware of the Videopac didn't impose such challenges, we wouldn't have gotten such a unique game. But then the hardware is still so limited that the game-play still doesn't quite gel.

Okay, the video game crash is coming, sales are low, and this console can't compete with Intellivision, Colecovision, or SG1000, let alone the gorilla that is Atari. Sure, we can cram more memory into the cartridge, but the Videopac hardware doesn't allow for more expansion than that. What if we raised the production-value of the packaging itself?



The Videopac "Master Strategy" line was an attempt to fuse high-end board games with the television game. What if you put pieces on a board and moved them around, then communicated with the console using that keyboard we said was so important? Instead of rolling dice or flipping cards, we could resolve tactical challenges using the 8-bit video game!



Kudos to Philips here: the production value of these games is amazing. The boxes are sturdy, with a hinged cover and plastic inlays. The manuals are full-color glossy paper with painted artwork and embossed-gold covers. Playing pieces were high-end plastic, magnetic backings, or even die-cast metal. And there was a custom overlay for the membrane keyboard. Classy.



And, as usual, the worst part about the game is the game.

"Quest for the Rings" includes a fantasy map with locations to search. In theory, each location is supposed to have unique environments (deadly walls, invisible walls, shifting walls) and/or monsters (either one big dragon or four tiny monsters, all invincible). A unique character-class feature is undermined by the uselessness of two choices. (The chameleon can turn invisible but then you can't see yourself so good luck avoiding danger. The phantom can walk through walls at half speed; that would be pretty weak given that there's always a path to the goal, but while you do this, you provoke aggro, and environmental hazards like fire still kill you!) The only thing you do in each location is move down and touch the goal object. The game is too basic for experienced players, it's too confusing for little kids, and too expensive for everyone.



"Conquest for the World" asks, "What if you fought Risk's battles in Atari's Combat?" There's a world map and you want to gain territory, which gets you more army points. When you and a foe contest a territory, you each enter your troop strengths as your hit points and then fight it out. This one has the strongest game-play of the whole series. Each player can field an airplane, submarine, or tank, with unique strengths and weaknesses, over a unique playfield. Also the game can handle multiple players. The biggest problem is the strategy part, which requires a fair amount of overhead and math. Most gamer nerds would have prefered the crunchiness of Panzer General.



And now, the obligatory stock simulation, "Wall Street Fortune Hunt". This is the first stock-trader game for a second-generation console, so that's nice. The production design is clearly on display, too. The Videopac's hardware was tailor-made to simulate 1970s day-trading, with its slow chyron feeds and pure colors. Then again, is this a game or a job? Seasoned gamers would be able to play a board game faster and quicker.


If the Master Strategy games had dipped into an existing board game market, or if they had hired actual designers, then maybe this concept could have had legs. "Quest for the Rings" would have benefited from the arena-style play of "Conquest"; the game could have been made much better with a choose-your-own-adventure journal in the style of Lone Wolf, with an exciting story to read. If only they could have hired Ozark Software and made a game more similar to MULE, with a physical board for the colony and the Videopac playing out the mini-games. Today, many boxed games have cell-phone apps to assist gameplay, and some even require them, so this concept of mixed-media computer-gaming had some legs.

The Master Strategy remain as a legacy of that wildcatting era of console games, where there were no rules and no one was sure what to do. Another baffling and fascinating legacy from Philips.

A+ thread. Very educational.

I had no idea there were hybrid board/video games so early. I would have loved something like Quest For The Rings as a kid, even if it didn't play well.