Hardware Review: Phillips Videopac G7000

So this is where it all began for me, and my dad.

Also known as the Magnavox Odyssey 2 in the US.

We'd both played on the Atari 2600, the iconic 2nd Gen console, but this was the first computer he brought home, and it was his toy, not mine.

The games were quite fun, there was a stupidly hard ship lander game, space invaders, and what was actually a very impressive snooker game, for the time. The whole system, and most of the games were geared to be two player.

But this was my favourite - laser war, which used the same gfx for the asteroids as the balls in the snooker game, I remember playing it with my sister for hours:

But this was not the interesting part of the journey.
It was one of the few early consoles that featured a programming module, and we ended up spending more time with that than we did with the actual games.

Just the idea that you could ask it to execute different commands that you could type in, rather than wiggling a joystick. It was magical, like your first google search or your first chatGPT session, only times a 1000

Here's a youtube clip of the computer programmer module in action.
I fondly remember my first command prompt, as it explicitly said 'command':

So this is where/when I wrote my first line of code. 1982 (ish)

Eventually, dad sold it and bought a ZX81.