???? – 1984retired
Arcadia 2001
“35 games, 18 months, endless clones — the Arcadia lived on in everyone else's living room.”
“First family of home gaming, bowing out with dignity while the party crashed around it.”
The Magnavox Odyssey 2 arrived in 1978 from the company that started it all — Magnavox had brought the very first home console to market in the early 1970s, and the Odyssey 2 was its all-new successor under North American Philips. Known abroad as the Philips Videopac G7000, the Philips Odyssey, or simply Odyssey2 in Japan, it spent six years sharing living rooms with rivals like the Atari 2600, Intivision, and Coleco
Its run ended in 1984, when it was discontinued in the aftermath of the video game crash of 1983 — less a defeat than a casualty of an industry-wide collapse. History has been kind: IGN ranked it the 21st greatest console of all time in 2009, a small but fond nod to a pioneer's descendants.
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“35 games, 18 months, endless clones — the Arcadia lived on in everyone else's living room.”
“Four knobs, two buttons, one nation hooked before Nintendo showed up.”
“Sega's first swing, and every game it loved still runs on its children.”