Like, retro, man.


Don't ask why, but when I was minding my own business in the men's room today I suddenly remembered an old videogame console we used to own when I was 8. In 1978 we bought a Philips Videopac G7000 game. It was the dogs bollocks, I can tell you. It plugged into the TV through the UHF aerial cable, had two controllers and a keyboard built in to the console itself. It ran cartridge-based games. I can also for some bizarre reason remember the names of some of the games we had. They were all numbered and came in cardboard fold-open boxes.
Jumping Acrobats (33) was the predecessor to knockout where you jumped these 16-pixel blokes on a see-saw to knock blocks out from above them. Munchkin (38) was a PacMan clone. Golf (10) was the be-all and end-all of electronic golf games in 1978. Satellite Attack (34) was an asteroids knock-off. And Electronic Billiards (35) pulled off a piece of mastery; because the game only had 16 colours, none of which were brown, it used red for the brown ball but winked it on and off so it looked brown-ish. Damn it was high-tech!
But by far the killer app was box 1 - it had 3 games on one cartridge. Race was a vertical scrolling racer. Spin-out was the predecessor to Super Sprint complete with oil slicks and spanners for power-ups. And Cryptogram was basically where you typed in a word and it jumbled the letter. The other player had to un-jumble them.

The great thing was the box-art was so over-the-top compared to what you actually got on-screen. It was ace at the time but you look at it now and think "what the fuh.....?"
Long live the Videopac.

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