Flashback– ColecoVision
What is this strange thing you speak of .. ColecoVision? The year was 1982. We had an actor for a president (Ronald Reagan), an alien that would steal our hearts (E.T), a new way to listen to music (compact discs) and a game system that played cool games and had a controller that looked like a telephone/calculator with a knob. Feast your eyes on this mastery of videogame machinery…
Yes this thing played games
Game On
Made by the the company whose name sounded ridiculous, Coleco Industries (Vandalay anyone?), this was a second generation machine designed to play Atari 2600 games with arcade quality graphics (remember this is 1982) and the machine also boasted it’s own library of stellar titles on what was then called ROM cartridges. ROM you ask?
Read Only Memory cartridges or carts were basically what Nintendo was using pre-discs and you could also find them used in places like broadcast radio. The big seller for Coleco right off the bat though was Donkey Kong which they licensed from Nintendo and had what was considered to be a close to perfect arcade port. The game came with the system and so by Christmas of that year the company had already sold 50,000 units. Their strategy was simple, offer games the 2600 didn’t have which meant partnering with developers like Sega and Knonami and delivering into the hands of gamers titles like Donkey Kong Junior, Carnival, Lady Bug, Mouse Trap, Zaxxon, Time Pilot and Frenzy. They were also still porting Atari 2600 games as well as Intellivision games to broaden their library.
What the *&^% is that?
1 plus 9 = jump? Witness the majesty of the Coleco controller
Looking at this contraption on you have to wonder how the heck you played a game with this thing. Well you used that joystick in the middle and then the buttons on the side which basically were the same button. The keypad’s numbers corresponded to plastic overlays that came with some games that allowed the use of the number pad. While it mirrored Intellivision’s controller in many ways it was sturdier and had the joystick rather than a control disc. It sounds confusing but at the time it was the bomb.
Instant Success Followed by Crash and Burn
Unfortunately the ColecoVision’s instant success was followed by terrible failure. By 1985 production was shut down after it had only managed to sell 2 million units over all. A few things contributed to it’s demise including the fact that the company scaled back on video game production. There was also a bit of an overall decline in videogame sales in 1983 that really put a kink in their production.
At the time, there was an overproduction of consoles and games because everyone wanted to cash in on this “videogame fad.” ColecoVision became a casualty of this “crash” and never got back on the gaming horse. Keep in mind this was the like the Mesozoic period of home consoles and in reality there were just too many of them even when you had a standout system like the ColecoVision. Big props though, go out to the company for an innovation that would be picked up by future developers — expansion kits of their system like one with a steering wheel and even a weird looking controller they called the Super Action controller. Showing the power of third party licensing and successful game ports ColecoVision was a worthy entry into the early arena of gaming that got knocked out too soon.
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