Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 23:49:04 -0200
X-Sender: rtietz@vital.cesup.ufrgs.br
To: brownde@cs.unc.edu
Subject: Odyssey2 in Brazil

Hello, Dennis!

I was thrilled to see your site on video game history. As I grew up during
the late seventies and the eighties, those storys were my daily experience,
and I would like to add some more. Perhaps you'll find them interesting.

I live in Brazil. The first videogame console came out around 1978 and it
was a crude version of "pong" and some sort of "soccer", in fact a modified
pong.

Cartridge-based games did not appear officially until 1983. Altough some
Atari 2600 consoles had already been sneaked through the borders, the first
cartridge videogame to be sold nationwide was the Odyssey 2, in Brazil named
"Odyssey", since there had never been a previous "odyssey '1'".

It was an instant hit. I was one of the early adopters, a young kid dying to
play games at home, far from - or so they were believed at the time-
"vicious" coin-based arcades.

All games had the boxes, manuals and names translated to POrtuguese,
Brazil's language. The code itself was not translated, what brought the
gamers most of the times to that message "select game" when booting the  
system.

Odyssey in a short time became a minority in the Brazilian market, when it
became filled with atari 2600 clones. Philips was the only maker of Odyssey
consoles, and the system died a quiet death around 1987.

The voice module was promised, and never released. The rumors of the odyssey
'3' did reach Brazil through some sales vaporware, but were soon forgotten.

By that time, I had switched systems to a MSX computer.

---

Well, that's a brief story of that platform's market life in Brazil. I guess
I still have the console and some carts somewhere.

Bye!