This is The Voice of Odyssey²

Magnavox is quick out of the gate with their speech-synthesizer, set to be released in the 4th quarter of 1982 with the name Voice of Odyssey. Eventually shortened to just The Voice, it is a large $99.95 add-on that fits over the top panel and cartridge slot of the O², with its own slot to accept game carts. Containing the same General Instruments speech chip as Mattel’s Intellivoice for their Intellivision console, Magnavox’s version holds a vocabulary of over 100 word spoken with a male voice, along with various sound effects and musical cues.  Audio is produced through its own speaker and volume control, so users can adjust the loudness of voices independently of the game audio emitting from the TV. Outside of the canned expressions contained in The Voice, additional words can be formed by the device through the use of vocal sounds pieced together to produce human speech, although such assembled speech sounds much more mechanical. It is due to this process that it has the unique ability to  speak out words typed using the O² keyboard.

For the O² and its voice add-on to accomplish this task, one has to purchase the first cartridge available for the unit, Type and Tell! Running this cartridge will put a 12×6 matrix of blocks on the TV screen. When a letter is pushed on the keyboard, it will appear in the next block and a cursor advances to the right. The space bar can be used to separate words, and once the user has constructed a word or sentence, they can hit the Enter key to have the console speak it back. While this is the only function of the cartridge, the manual helpfully suggest four games that people can play while making their O² talk. At a retail price of $39.95 for Type and Tell!, the novelty of having your console attempt to speak seems a bit pricey. Other games like K.C.’s Krazy Chase also utilize The Voice in their gameplay, but the voice unit isn’t mandatory for the game to operate; only if the user wants the simple voice prompts that spur the game on, such as “Watch Out” or “Incredible”, along with an appropriately krazy laugh from K.C. as he finishes a maze . 

Reaching for the Rings on the Odyssey²

The Odyssey² is named Official Video Game of the 1982 World’s Fair. No doubt this choice is facilitated by the fact that the 1982 World’s Fair is held in Knoxville, Tennessee… which also serves as the HQ for Magnavox. Fifteen Odyssey² displays, complete with Magnavox TV, console and a selection of around six games each, can be found at the America’s Electrical Energy exhibit. Events include the Pick Axe Pete Pick-Off tournament, which results in one pound of gold (then worth around $6,000, as of this writing currently $16,372) awarded to contest winner 10-year old Tony Scardigno, hailing from Weehawken, NJ..

Neither this hoopla, nor The Voice, nor the Computer Intro cartridge (a program designed to teach assembler and machine language) help to jump-start the Odyssey²‘s dwindling market share. The Master Strategy series of games are a grand hope of redemption for the console, produced by Stephen Lehner and Ronald Bradford of Wilmette, Illinois. Operating a design firm called Lehner Bradford and Cout, they are pretty familiar with Magnavox video game systems; they had done graphic design work for the original Odyssey, including advertising material, all of the game box art, and even the infamous mylar TV screen overlays. The firm had also designed the “vanishing point” O² logo and did nearly all of the package graphics work for the newer system. Programming for the Master Series is done by the prolific Ed and Linda Averett. It is the opinion of Lehner and Bradford that Magnavox is underutilizing the key feature of the O² that separates it from the competition, its keyboard. Little has been done with the keyboard innovation, aside from input in some educational games and the video game console first of being able to input your name with a high score, introduced in 1981’s UFO!. The Master Strategy games aim to correct that oversight.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy Lord of the Rings books inspire the first entry, titled The Quest for the Rings, with a suggested price by the manufacturer of $49.95. The player has a choice of four characters to play: A wizard, warrior, changeling or phantom….along with the possibility of another player acting as the Ringmaster. Adventuring gamers are tasked with finding 10 magical rings hidden within the 23 castles located on a physical game board included in the box… a feature common to the Master Strategy series. Battles in the game, against creatures like dragons, orcs and the Spydroth Tyrantulus, are played out on the TV screen. The Quest for the Rings goes on to win a 1982 Arcade Award for Most Innovative Game from Electronic Games, the premiere videogame magazine of the time.

Another title available in the Master Strategy game series is military strategy game Conquest of the World, tasking users to take over the globe. The game utilizes an accurate weighting system for each country that is claimed by Magnavox to have been developed from a formula created by the deputy director of the CIA. Also included in the series is high-stakes financial simulation The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt… itself a winner of the Most Innovative Videogame ‘Arkie’ award from Electronic Games in 1983. Appearing between 1981 and 1982, each of the three games have extended memory, complex packaging and include plastic and metal game pieces used on a highly detailed game board packed with the game which players use as a supplement to the onscreen action. A lot of interaction with the keyboard is also required. Keeping in the spirit of the Wall Street game, it is debuted at the 1981 Winter CES in Las Vegas accompanied by a heavily guarded 15′ high display featuring a stack of one million 1 dollar bills. A fourth Master Strategy game, called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with gameplay based on the famous board game Clue, begins development for the Odyssey³ /Command Center (see below) but is never completed. The popularity of the Master Strategy series is enough to entice Magnavox to commission a full-colour magazine dedicated to the console and its games. Odyssey Adventure is a quarterly magazine that runs from Winter 1982 to Winter 1983.

A New Path for Odyssey²

By the end of 1981 the Odyssey² no longer falls under the Magnavox brand, having been given its own division under NAP. This move is a bid to expand distribution of the console outside of authorized Magnavox dealers, including a deal with Sears to stock the console and its games on their shelves. A new in-house development team titled the Game Group, headed by original O² game programmer Sam Overton, has also been set up to provide new games for the system. Through 1982 and into 1983, the console also starts getting some third-party software support, including two cartridges by game maker Imagic… one of them of course being their powerhouse hit Demon Attack, released in March of 1983. Four arcade translations from Parker Brothers also help the console’s cause.

The next generation Odyssey³ is previewed at the 1983 January CES, with 16K of RAM, Z80B CPU, a chiclet-style keyboard, new voice-synthesizer and optional 300 baud modem, along with a later announced laserdisc module to play games such as arcade sensation Dragon’s Lair. The improved keyboard (at least, over the original membrane one) also features three user-definable keys. Display resolution comes in at 320×210 pixels, even better than Mattel’s planned next-gen console powerhouse Intellivision III. Expected to launch in the summer of the next year, to play on this souped up system N.A.P. promises 12 new games alongside the console, a combo of both new titles and improved Odyssey² games. The O³ is subsequently re-tooled as the Odyssey Command Center, with an expected release in the 3rd quarter of 1983 and a listed price of $199. The most far-reaching aspect of the Command Center is probably the expansion port at the back of the device, which allows for a range of plug-ins for added features, such as voice synthesis, modem to connect with online communication services like CompuServe and a computer programming module with a Z80B CPU and 16K of RAM. The rear of the device also has spots where the redesigned joysticks for the system can be stored.

Command Center announcement video shown by Philips at 1983 Summer CES
By the time of the CES reveal, the Averetts have stepped off the video game merry-go-round, so a software development team for Command Center games led by Sam Overton is set up in the hills of Tennessee called The Odyssey Software Development Group, or Odyssey West. Larger games with advanced graphics are developed, such as an adaptation of Stern Electronics’ arcade game Turtles, by Jim Butler. The Command Center is fully backwards compatible with O² games, although things get a tad complicated in this regard. Popular titles for the O² are to be enhanced with colourful and detailed backgrounds for the newer unit, although the main forefront gameplay elements would still appear the same as the original game. 

These new enhanced versions can be played on the original O²  as well, although the backgrounds would revert back to as before, such as the black limbo of Pick Axe Pete. NAP announces that around twelve games will be available exclusively for the Command Center and which will take full advantage of its advanced capabilities. These include even more deluxe versions of the Master Strategy Series, including a planned Master Strategy football game that would sport multiple teams, tradeable players, and would offer gameplay over an entire football season. Turtles and Killer Bees, by Bob Harris, do make it to market as new games for the original O² , but the Odyssey Command Center is eventually canned by NAP towards the end of 1983. The company is afraid that the console would be obsolete by the time it was released, although it does see some limited release in Europe, as the Phillips G7400.

The Odyssey² Ends

With about one million units sold by 1983, the Odyssey² does beat out every other fringe system like the Channel F, Vectrex and the Bally Professional Arcade, but it only wins five percent of the home video game market, compared to the commanding eighty percent held by the Atari 2600. Talk of a new laserdisc game system, marrying the O² with Magnavox’s Laservision videodisc technology comes to naught, and work on the fourth Master Strategy game, announced in 1982 and called Sherlock Holmes, is begun by Lehner and Bradford but is not to be. In a strong signal that NAP has lost hope for a revival of their console, the company announces plans in 1982 to publish games for competing systems, under the Probe 2000 label. Titles such as Pursuit of the Pink Panther (né The Adventures of the Pink Panther), Lords of the Dungeon (né Caverns and Creatures) and Power Lords: Quest for Volcan are queued up, but only War Room for ColecoVision ends up getting released; NAP claims a chronic microchip shortage and technical problems with the expanded chips that were to be included in the new cartridges has put a kibosh on the whole endeavour. Power Lords does wind up doing battle on the O², though.  When the videogame market crashes in 1983 – 84, so does Probe 2000 and the O² itself. The old war horse reaches the end of the road in March of 1984 when NAP announces the dissolution of the Odyssey division.