When we were 7 or 8, my best friend got a Philips Videopac G7000, otherwise known across the pond as the Magnavox Odyssey 2, although I didn’t make that mental connection until fairly recently. At the time it was the awesomest thing on the planet, with so many games all in decorative, oddly sequentially numbered boxes. Compared to the only-recently-colour TV games we’d survived on before, supplemented of course with expensive bouts of Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac Man in the arcades (this was pre-Gorf for goodness sakes!), this was a revelation. The home computer wouldn’t appear seriously for another year or two, so for a while, this was home gaming. There was one game that we probably played more than any other, and that was Monkeyshines (although I do remember Conquest of the World being popular too). Here’s what it looked like (if you’re sensitive, you might want to shield your eyes):
The basic idea was to direct your player (the cyan blocky thing, white when dead) around the platforms (black), gaining points by capturing monkeys (the beige blocky things, which to be honest ran, climbed and jumped pretty convincingly for 1980), then letting them go (you could throw them), which of course pissed them off and made them red ‘killer’ monkeys for a while. Obviously. The 2D platform arena, on the harder settings, would change leading to platforms disappearing from under you. It was only fun in 2 player mode, where of course despite it notionally being a co-op game, you would actually capture the monkeys and throw them at each other instead.
So why did I dredge up this old fossil today? Because it’s the first thing that occurred to me when I saw Sajiki in the Ogre forum today, a multiplayer 2D-in-3D survival platformer created with Ogre. It’s actually quite different but just the view, the changing arena and the multiplayer mode immediately brought this old game to mind. Bizarrely, I can still remember to this day the sequence of beeps that the game would play when you died, as clearly as if I was playing it right now - it’s burned into my brain at some deep level, in the same way that the opening sequences of Robotron 2084 still are.
I often wonder what it’s like for kids these days growing up with modern consoles. In my youth everything to do with games was so simple, so visceral, so iconic and so new and unexplored that it was a major defining element of my time, but games now are so complex and are an increasingly stable and mature medium. I guess kids growing up now will have the same nostalgia for the games they’re playing when they’re older, but I really wonder whether it will feel so distinct; I’m thinking of the difference between how I remember games and how I remember films from my youth - film was a much more mature medium already and as such the distinctions between then and now are more subtle and the events less defining, compared to games. Maybe it’s similar to how the Baby Boomers feel about growing up experiencing music in the 60’s - for later generations the magic isn’t quite the same because the revolution has given way to production. As kids in the late 70’s and early 80’s I think we had the equivalent experience of music in the 60’s with games, a sense of freshness and that anything was possible, before it became much more businesslike. I guess this generation’s frontier is the idea of fully connected, seamless worlds, virtual or otherwise. Maybe they’ll think of Facebook and Second Life in the same way I think of Monkeyshines. Who knows. 
December 12th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
LOL - that was my first cosnole system! Christmas 1979. I was 10-years old. Wowsers, haven’t thought of that in ages. We had the the plastic, transparent holding tray for it. Could put two controllers in it and the console. Besides monkeyshines and pac-man, we played a baseball game that I can’t recall the name.
A few years later my friend got colecovision and we couldn’t stop playing Donkey Kong. Bye, bye Odyssey. A few short years after that I got a Commodore-64 and my future career as a software developer was hatched. My interest in programmable electronics all started with the Odyssey. Thanks for posting this one Steve - great memories.
December 12th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Oh, and I think the pac-man game was called K.C. Munchkin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchkin_(Videopac_game)
December 12th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Correction, I think it was Christmas 1981. Man, feels like sooo long ago.
December 13th, 2007 at 8:39 am
My G7000 is downstairs in the garage - I saw it yesterday… dare I pull it out and see how easily amused I was?
[)amien
December 13th, 2007 at 9:31 am
@Dan: we went straight to the Spectrum after that and never looked back. True patriots of our country had Spectrums rather than the American C64s of course
@Damien: I think that would be a bad idea - it destroys the rose-tinted spectacles to play these things again. There aren’t that many games that still hold up today - Asteroids is still pretty good, and so is Robotron, but other favourites of mine didn’t hold up so well. I think I’ll just stick to remembering them…
December 13th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Besides, I think the G7000 might cause some serious burn-in on modern TVs
December 13th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
I’m glad that you also have fond memories of the G7000 and especially Monkeyshines.
I too can instantly remember the familiar beeping tune when you die, it too is burned deep into my memory. Maybe that tells us that we played it a little too often in our youth
I always remember it as a game which was more fun trying to do the absolute opposite of what the game intended. Namely, rather than working co-operatively, trying to get a high score and avoid the angry monkeys, it was more fun to catch the monkeys and fire them like a loaded simian of death at the other player… Ah, happy memories…
I would offer to get the old machine out to have another game someday, but I seem to remember that it has unfortunately gone the way of the scrap heap some years ago.
BTW do you remember that with Conquest of the World that you were meant to play a board game in conjunction with the G7000 games? Except we never bothered and instead engaged in frantic multivehicle battles!
December 13th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Yep, I remember CotW, I think we tried the board game once and never played it again. The tank battles were actually almost identical to the Tanks game on Wii Play, which is easily our most played game on there - shows that that type of gameplay doesn’t really age.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:18 am
I’ve never used a G7000, but I still have a working Intellivision (came out a year after the G7000) and TRS-80.
December 22nd, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Haha… 1980? I was -17 at that time.
February 1st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
There was a trick to getting the high score on Monkey Shines, get all the monkeys on you at the top platform and jump off into the side wall trying to throw them and watch the points rack up!! fond memories indeed with me and my brother playing……. do, do, do, do,do, …………..
February 1st, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I’d totally forgotten about that trick
April 5th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
There was a game-mode where you could design the level, most Odyessy games had that function - anyway - we’d build a square box in the middle of the screen - not connecting to anything. Then along the sides we built steps so you could climb up to the top - and hurl the monkeys at the box. In addition, you could also throw all the monkeys in the center square - they couldn’t escape - you’d jump down on the square, grab all the monkeys at once and send them flying - talk about pissed off monkeys!
Awesome game!
iq0