At a glance: Monkeyshines! · Odyssey 2 · Magnavox, 1981 · Platform action · Score: 7.5/10
The game is tag, formalised. Your character races around a three-level structure of platforms and ladders while monkeys scamper across every floor, and your job is to touch them — tag enough monkeys before the clock runs down and the round is yours. The twist that turns a playground rule into a video game: the monkeys’ behaviour changes as the round progresses, the tagged turn dangerous, and the hunter spends the late game as the hunted, dodging the very monkeys he was chasing while the last few tags dangle out of reach. That reversal, simple as it sounds, gives every round a built-in dramatic arc.
How it plays
The playfield design does a lot of quiet work. Three floors connected by ladders create constant route decisions — drop, climb, or hold your level and wait for a monkey to come to you — and the monkeys’ movement patterns are just readable enough to plan against and just erratic enough to ruin plans. Speed is the game’s other engine: everything moves briskly, rounds are short, and the cartridge has that one-more-go pull that the best early action games traded in.
Monkeyshines! arrived in 1981, the Odyssey 2’s strongest year, and it has the polish of that period: characterful sprites by the system’s standards — the monkeys genuinely read as monkeys — bright floor colours, and responsive controls that never fight the chase. It supports two players, and the competitive mode sharpens the tag concept into a score race that suits the machine’s living-room role perfectly.
Tag them all before the tables turn — Monkeyshines! builds a whole arcade round out of the oldest game on the playground.
The details that decide it
If there is a ceiling on the game, it is depth: the idea is one idea, developed well rather than endlessly. But that criticism applies to most of the era’s best cartridges, and Monkeyshines! develops its idea with more structural wit than most — the hunter-hunted reversal is a design flourish plenty of later games would have been proud of.
The longer game
The reversal at the game’s centre is worth one more examination, because it is doing narrative work most 1981 cartridges never attempted. A round of Monkeyshines! has a plot: confidence, pursuit, triumph curdling into flight. The monkeys you tagged becoming threats turns your own score into the danger — the better you played the first half, the more crowded the second half becomes — which is an elegant self-balancing difficulty system disguised as a joke. Designers now call that a catch-up mechanic or a rubber band; here it is simply the rules of tag, understood deeply: the game everyone already knew contained, inside it, a perfect arcade structure, waiting for somebody to notice.
Magnavox’s 1981 catalogue is the system at its most assured — K.C. Munchkin!, Quest for the Rings! and Monkeyshines! within a single year is a run any publisher would sign for — and this cartridge is that year’s friendliest artefact. It also travels well: the European release kept the name and the game intact, and copies on both sides of the Atlantic are common and inexpensive.
Playing it today
The two-player mode deserves its own recommendation, because competitive tag reorganises the game’s virtues: the monkeys become a shared resource, the reversal becomes a weapon — a player behind on tags may prefer the hunted phase’s chaos to the hunt’s order — and the three floors turn into territory. Households that keep running scores across an evening will find Monkeyshines! generating the kind of narrative a good party game should: comebacks, collapses, and at least one round decided by a ladder. For a cartridge from 1981 to sustain that without power-ups, items or modes is a lesson in how far one well-understood playground rule can be stretched by designers who trusted it.
There is also a small aesthetic pleasure to log: by the system’s standards the animation is characterful — the monkeys scamper rather than glide, the hero’s chase has urgency, and the whole production has the brightness of a game that knows it is a comedy. Beside the library’s fleets of identical spaceships, Monkeyshines! looks like a cartoon the console was delighted to be showing.
File it, finally, where it belongs: not in the library’s attic of curiosities but on its front shelf of multiplayer essentials, priced like the former and played like the latter. The Odyssey 2’s catalogue rewards exactly this kind of re-shelving, and no cartridge repays it faster than this one.
Verdict
It is also a useful corrective to the idea that the Odyssey 2 library is all spaceships and sports. This is a comedy game, a playground game, and one of the friendliest entry points into the system for new players — which is exactly what it was on shelves in 1981.
New owners sometimes skip it as a children’s title. That undersells a small masterclass in arcade structure, and it deprives the household of the cartridge most likely to be requested by name by the youngest and oldest players in the room simultaneously. Few games in this series can make that claim. Tag: you’re it.
Seven-and-a-half, and rising in this reviewer’s estimation every time it is used for its designed purpose — which is to say, with people. Monkeyshines! is the cartridge that exposes the limits of solo reviewing: judged alone it is a bright, brief tag game of unusual structural wit; judged in a room it is a championship, a comedy and a memory being made, and the Odyssey 2 was a machine built for rooms. Its accessibility is its genius — the youngest player in the house and the oldest can contest the same round honestly, because tag belongs to everyone — and its reversal is its literature, the small perfect plot of the hunter hunted that no amount of 1981 hardware could cheapen. Buy it early in a collection, while its price still reflects its modesty, and keep it near the console rather than the shelf. The monkeys have been scampering across those three floors since 1981, waiting for the next player to misunderstand the end of the round. Tag. You’re it. Again.
In this series: Monkeyshines! is one of eighteen Odyssey 2 cartridges reviewed in this build-up of the system’s shelf, alongside features on The Voice, the Master Strategy Series, the keyboard and the Videopac years, a hidden gems list and a full buying guide. Read it with the flagship history, Odyssey 2 Forever, for the whole story of the keyboard console — and if you are choosing a first cartridge from the set, the scores in this series are the shortlist, with the buying guide’s hedged price ranges as the shopping list.
In Europe it kept its name as Videopac 37. Our verdict: Bright, brisk and built on one great reversal. A joyful cartridge and a top two-player pick.