Retrospelsmässan 2013 – Sweden’s yearly retro gaming exhibition

Yesterday I went to Gothenburg with my friend NinjaBrite to attend Sweden’s yearly retro gaming exhibition ‘Retrospelsmässan‘. This is the 4th year in a row that they’re hosting this exhibition and I think it’s a GREAT initiative! I was there 2 years ago as well, last year I missed though since I was in Japan. It has grown immensely in these past years, and it will probably be even bigger next year. The amount of people who came was way more than they had anticipated, even though they had hired larger facilities people were still quieing for hours to get in! I myself had to que about 4 hours (arriving at 12, two hours after they opened). It was ok though, since Nintendo was hosting a Streetpass competition everybody had brought their 3DS and so did we, so we kept busy ^_^ And also met some awesome cosplayers, like Pixelninja dressed up as Megaman :)

megaman

que
This year on the exhibition they had all the old consoles displayed and connected to TVs so you could try everything out, everything from old Pong consoles and Odyssey 2001 to the Atari Jaguar and everything Nintendo and Sega of course. They also had a corner for speedruns where you could watch some of Sweden’s fastest gamers ;D They had a Doom LAN, Cosplay competitions, arcade and pinball corner, game competitions and stands with companies and people selling retro gaming stuff and of course games! :D

Videopac Computer displayed at Retrospelsmässan 2013 Pong
pinball
smb competition
arcade

Of course I had to pick up some games ^_^ I was looking for one game in particular, which was Starship Hector, but I’ll write more about that in a later post, that’s a looong story ^^ But I found it at this exhibition! And I also found Ninja Kid, Power Blade, Castle of Dragon, The Krion Conquest and James Bond JR. All were NTSC NES and I didn’t previously have them! (I am proud of myself that I brought a PDF of my collection in my phone, because I always tend to buy doubles unintentionally when attending places like this)… ;D
So here’s a little photo shoot I had of my latest pickups ^_^
Ninja Kid_800
Power blade_800
Castle of Dragon_800
The Krion Conquest_800
Starship Hector_800
James Bond JR_800

The Odyssey 2001

So here’s a little something from my collection:

ODYSSEY 2001: SPORTS FIELD THRILLS ON YOUR TV SCREEN!

Sounds exciting doesn’t it? ;D Well it wasn’t, I couldn’t get it working since the power adaptor is broken :( I’ve been searching and googling for a replacement, but it’s a really odd and rare one..

Anyway, it’s still a nice edition to the collection and really fun to look at ^^

It comes with the original manuals and papers. There’s a double sided manual, or 10 of them actually, in different languages (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, Finnish, German and English) so I guess this is the version that was released all over Europe. There is also a typewritten letter from Philips in Swedish which states “Corrections to the user manual” so I guess it had some typos to begin with ;D It’s dated from 03.11.1977.

Btw Philips released the Odyseey 2001 in Europe, in the rest of the world it’s known as Magnavox Odyssey.

The Odyssey 2001 has 3 games built in to it, there are no cartridges of games for this one. The games are Tennis, Hockey and Squash.

They’re all basically the same, just different versions of Pong. They have different colors on the screen, the Hockey game has some lines resembling the goals and the Tennis has a “net” in the middle. You really had to use your imagination back then ;D

By the way, if anybody has any clue on where I can find an old (European!) power adaptor for a Philips Odyssey 2001, I would much appreciate it ^_^