Chapter 1.8

Coleco ColecoVision (1982)

History

In the midst of intense competition from Atari and Mattel, Coleco’s ColecoVision tried to distinguish itself with “arcade-quality” graphics and ports. This was 1982, and the arcade was the place to go if you wanted to play state-of-the-art-games. Conversions of hit arcade games like Pac-Man for home consoles usually meant a severe reduction in graphical detail and animation, especially in the case of the Atari 2600. Coleco realized a market existed for a higher-end console that could do a better job of bringing the arcade experience home, but the competition would be ferocious. The Atari 2600 had an all-you-care-to-play buffet of great games and accessories, and the Intellivision was the undisputed champion of sports games and had great marketing. For the ColecoVision to succeed, it really would need to stand head and shoulders above these giants.

“Graphic superiority, that’s the basis of our faith in Colecovision,” declared Arnold C. Greenberg, president of Coleco during this period.¹ Greenberg also stressed the system’s expandability—eventually into a full home computer—and his commitment to licensing hit arcade games. He was described as a serious, quiet man who “preaches toys as if they were a form of salvation.”² He was a graduate of Harvard Law School, a background that would serve him well in the years to come.

Greenberg’s ambition was admirable, but the ColecoVision wasn’t really the technological powerhouse the company promoted in its advertising. In reality, it had an anemic 1K of memory and no special hardware for scrolling—a vital aspect of arcade games like Zaxxon and Time Pilot. No doubt, both Atari and Mattel (as well as many gamers!) were rightly skeptical of Coleco’s promise to bring home the “arcade quality experience.” Despite the odds, however, the ColecoVision was a success, though it owes much of it to clever branding and Greenberg’s lucrative licensing deals.

Like Mattel, Coleco was an old, well-established company that was no stranger to competition. The company was founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg, a Russian immigrant. At that time, it was called the Connecticut Leather Company and sold leather for shoes. In the early 1950s, the company expanded into leather craft kits and plastic molding. By the end of the 1960s, having long since sold off their leather business and becoming a publicly traded company, Coleco became the premier manufacturer of above-ground swimming pools. After failed attempts to expand into other areas such as motorbikes and snowmobiles, Coleco ventured into consumer electronics in 1976 with one of the first Atari Pong clones, called the Telstar.

In 1975, chip-maker General Instrument was looking to develop a low-cost “Pong-on-a-chip” as an answer to Atari and Magnavox’s proprietary Pong and Pong-like systems. The result was the AY-3-8500 chip, which could play as many as six paddle and target games, depending on how vendors set it up. Industry pioneer Ralph Baer received early information on the chip’s development and contacted Coleco’s president, Arnold Greenberg, about the possibilities. This led to Coleco’s preferred vendor status for the first and largest supply of chips and to their success developing and marketing the Telstar. After supply caught up to demand, a wide range of companies produced hundreds of variant clone systems from the original General Instrument chip and future incarnations. Coleco, however, along with rivals such as Atari and APF, had the greatest success in the fixed-game videogame market. Coleco ended up producing many Pong-like games, but none more unusual than the Telstar Arcade, which accepted cartridges with custom microcontrollers.

Unfortunately, the Fairchild Video Entertainment System’s introduction in 1976, followed by Atari’s VCS in 1977, signaled the beginning of the end of the fixed-game era, and even though the Telstar Arcade was built for interchangeable cartridges, there were only four to choose from, and its technology was not competitive. Another issue was a second East Coast dock workers’ strike that caused them to miss the critical Christmas season. The system was a dismal failure, promptly making its way to retailers’ bargain bins and forcing Coleco to absorb $20 million in losses.⁵ It was a huge blow, but Arnold C. Greenberg, who had taken the reins of the company after his father’s departure, wasn’t ready to bow out of the videogames industry.

While the era of the Telstar was behind them, Coleco managed to establish a growing presence at retail with handheld and tabletop electronic games, board games, and other toys. These included the ever-popular Electronic Quarterback (1978) handheld and a series of arcade ports designed to look like miniature arcade cabinets, such as Coleco Pac Man (1981) and Coleco Frogger (1981). By 1982, Coleco was ready to re-enter the console videogame market with a powerful next generation system.

To help make this re-entry a success, Coleco made a key strategic decision to negotiate exclusive licenses for new arcade games before Atari or Mattel got their hands on them. The most coveted of these deals was an agreement with Nintendo in late 1981 for the exclusive console rights to Donkey Kong. Coleco soon realized that Donkey Kong was the next big thing. Their tabletop version was met with enthusiasm, but they had bigger plans. Since they had the exclusive license, they could prevent Atari and Mattel from offering it on their systems, giving their upcoming ColecoVision a major advantage in the market. Donkey Kong would become the pack-in cartridge for the ColecoVision, and Coleco held off another six months before releasing mediocre ports for the Atari 2600 and Mattel Intellivision. Coleco also made profitable licensing deals with other popular arcade game makers, like Sega and Exidy, who contributed to the strong mix of a dozen titles available for the system’s launch.

When the system launched, the main competition was the Atari 2600 and the Mattel Intellivision. The ColecoVision was more than a match for these machines. However, Atari’s 5200, which launched three months later, was a much stronger competitor. Unfortunately for both companies, the Great Videogame Crash was just a year away.

It’s said that the Atari 5200 SuperSystem was developed mostly in response to the Intellivision. This seems plausible given the design of the 5200’s unusual analog joystick. Although its analog design trumped the Intellivision controller’s 16 digital directions, it also suffered its poor usability. However, Atari soon found it was the ColecoVision, not the Intellivision, which posed the gravest threat to its shiny new 5200. Compared to that system, the 5200’s advantages were far less obvious. In fact, Coleco’s masterful launch made Atari’s new system seem almost comically inept.

The ColecoVision launched in August 1982 at a retail price of just $199.99, while the 5200, despite its reliance on pre-existing Atari 400 technology, didn’t come out until November 1982. Worse, it was saddled with a retail price of $269.99, due in part to its reliance on that same expensive technology. The real clincher, though, was that the 5200 wasn’t backwards-compatible with the 2600. Until the release of an adapter cartridge and a two-slot revised design in 1983, the 5200 couldn’t play any of the 2600’s huge library of games, and games designed for the 5200 were far from plentiful. This was all made worse by the fact that both the ColecoVision and the Intellivision offered adapters that allowed gamers to play 2600 games in addition to their own libraries.

Of course, the real trump card in Coleco’s hand was that it came bundled with a colorful interpretation of Nintendo’s scalding hot 1981 arcade property Donkey Kong. Atari pathetically countered by bundling a colorful arcade interpretation of their Super Breakout, a title whose popularity had cooled since its debut in 1978. Furthermore, Super Breakout could easily be replicated by any number of other systems, including the Atari 2600. Indeed, it’s arguable that the Atari 2600 version was superior since it used paddle controllers instead of the 5200’s terrible joysticks. So far, the 5200’s response to the Coleco threat was about as sloppy and non-responsive as its controllers.

To add insult to injury, Coleco’s launch line-up was a sensational mix of fresh arcade conversions as well as some great originals: Carnival, Cosmic Avenger, Ken Uston’s Blackjack/Poker, Lady Bug, Mouse Trap, Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle, Space Fury, Space Panic, Venture, and Zaxxon. Atari 5200 owners did have Galaxian, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders, but these were all available elsewhere. The 800-pound gorilla was Donkey Kong, and he was sitting at Coleco’s table.

“Coleco strong in marketing,” ran as a headline in the August 1, 1983 edition of The New York Times. In the second quarter of the year, Coleco earned $9.1 million—and was the only one of the major console manufacturers to post a profit. The upstart videogame company had already sold 1.4 million units.⁶ While this figure still left them far behind the huge customer base of the Atari 2600, that wasn’t necessarily a problem for the ColecoVision’s momentum. In their early marketing materials, Coleco emphasized the expandability of their new console, and they delivered on this promise quickly and decisively.

First up was the aforementioned add-on unit to play Atari 2600 games: Expansion Module #1.⁷ Next, came Expansion Module #2, which was a new type of steering wheel controller, bundled with a superb conversion of Sega’s Turbo arcade game. Even though in the coming year Atari would eventually use Pac-Man as a pack-in, release a cost reduced Atari 5200 with an Atari 2600 add-on of their own, and demonstrate that they still had strong controller design skills with the release of the high quality Pro-Line Trak-Ball controller, the damage was already done. Heading into 1983, the ColecoVision was the hot property.

Compared to the other successful consoles, which were released in the late 1970s, the ColecoVision was clearly a product of the early 1980s. Its black and silver styling was in stark contrast to the Intellivision, with its faux woodgrain plastic panels and brown accents. There wasn’t really a huge technological divide between the capabilities of the Intellivision and ColecoVision, but the latter’s brighter in-game colors and better ports of arcade games made it seem like a quantum leap. This attention to design extended to packaging. Game boxes sported vibrant colors, screenshots, and photos of arcade machines, whereas the 5200 boxes were mostly gray, sporting painted covers similar to those found on the 2600. All this came together to form the message to gamers that a ColecoVision-powered home was the place to be when the lights were off at the arcade.

Technical Specifications

For many gamers of the era, the ColecoVision represented the best of what a console could be. It had the bright colors and speed of an Atari 2600, with the increased graphical and audio fidelity of an Intellivision. This was thanks to Coleco’s use of a Zilog Z80A microprocessor, which clocked at 3.58 MHz, and Texas Instruments TMS9928A video processor that allowed for an impressive 256x192 display resolution with 16 colors and 32 simultaneous sprites. The SN76489A sound chip, also designed by Texas Instruments, had three tone and one noise generators.⁸

As with the Intellivision and the Atari 5200, the ColecoVision’s controllers were the source of much consternation. For the most part, players took little issue with the two side-mounted action buttons and bottom mounted numeric keypad, which could hold useful overlays to help players remember what button did what. Once players got to the joystick, however, there was plenty to complain about, from its cramp inducing stubbiness, to its tendency to make creaking noises. The latter issue was one of many indicators of Coleco’s toy company roots and cost-cutting practices that would come to tarnish the company’s reputation.

The ColecoVision console itself was not without its own flaws and compromises, either, not the least of which was the poor scrolling capability of the TMS9928A, and the miniscule main 1KB of system RAM. Coleco planned to address the memory limitation with the unreleased Super Game Module (SGM) and, later, the Adam computer. Another issue with the ColecoVision was an intentional 12-second delay as the cartridges displayed the Coleco branding before going to the startup or menu screen. Some third-party titles avoided this intentional delay by bypassing the system’s normal startup routine, but at the expense of available program space. In any case, most gamers forgot their annoyance once they started playing.

Originally intended as Expansion Module #3, the heavily advertised SGM went through various iterations before Coleco finally gave up and pulled the plug on the idea in late 1983. The core concept of the SGM was to provide extra system RAM, utilize a less expensive but higher capacity storage format, and save high scores. Unfortunately, Coleco could never settle on a reliable storage format and finally gave the Expansion Module #3 designation to the add-on version of the Adam computer, which duplicated and surpassed the SGM’s intended functionality anyway. In fact, many of the games featured in SGM advertisements would be repurposed and released as “Super” games for the Adam.

Coleco, not one to shy away from hyperbole, also used the “Super” designation for its Super Action Controllers, which were sold in the fall of 1983 as a pair bundled with Super Action Baseball. Thoughtfully, the controllers included two snap-on pistol grips to accommodate larger hands. The oversized controller was compatible with any game that supported the regular controller, though there were select games expressly designed for its extra features, which included two extra action buttons and a “Speed Roller.” Because of its unique design, its higher quality keypad required a different type of overlay.

Around the same time, Coleco released their best designed add-on, the Roller Controller, which came bundled with Slither. This trackball controller allowed for high-speed movement and featured four action buttons. The standard player one and two controllers would plug into the side cradles to the left and right of the unit for joystick and keypad access, offering even more in-game options, while the Roller Controller itself would plug into both of the console’s controller ports, as well as piggyback onto its power supply socket. This latter requirement meant that the stand-alone Adam computer, which had a different power connector, needed an adapter.

Although it never actually released one, Coleco stirred rumors about a laserdisc, CED video disc, or equivalent add-on for the ColecoVision. These rumors gained credence when Coleco acquired the rights to make a home version of the hit laserdisc arcade game Dragon’s Lair for $2 million. The add-on was technically possible because the console’s graphics chip could accept external composite video input and overlay it with its own text or graphics. Sadly, the high costs of such technology at the time made it commercially impractical.¹⁰

In the 1980s, gamers would carefully analyze every difference between an arcade version and its home ports, considering any deviation a fault of the game, system, or both. Today, however, arcade fidelity is of less concern than whether variations enhance or modify the original in interesting or innovative ways. Indeed, fans may well prefer a ColecoVision port to a more technically accurate MAME installation or even an actual arcade machine! In short, the ColecoVision’s library, while never truly bringing the arcade experience home, did live up to its promise to deliver great fun.

The Adam and the Eve of the End

Today, console-makers like Microsoft and Sony work hard to distinguish their consoles from home computers, even if there are no real technical barriers separating them. By contrast, in the early 1980s, a console that could fully function as a computer was a marketer’s dream. From the beginning, Greenberg had promised that the ColecoVision would eventually be expandable into a full home computer. That promise turned out to be much more difficult, and costly, than Greenberg thought, however. Indeed, the company was forced to temporarily suspend production of its hot-selling ColecoVision consoles to dedicate more resources for producing the expansion.

By October 1983, ColecoVision owners could finally bridge the gap with Expansion Module #3, which upgraded their console into a home computer. The Adam had 64K RAM, a high-speed proprietary tape drive (Digital Data Pack), a well-built 75-key keyboard, daisy-wheel printer, and built-in typewriter application and SmartWriter word processor. Also included were two data packs, SmartBASIC and Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom Super Game (aka Super Buck Rogers). SmartBASIC was based on the Apple II’s Applesoft BASIC and mostly source compatible. Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom Super Game featured extra scenes and high score saves versus the standard cartridge version. It seemed as though Adam owners had a lot to look forward to!

Coleco also offered the Adam as a stand-alone unit. Naturally, it had full ColecoVision compatibility. It also had additional video output options for connection to higher quality displays. Sadly, both the add-on and the stand-alone unit were simply too expensive to represent a good value. Production problems and quality control issues made the average price for the standalone unit hit $700, while the add-on retailed for around $500. At these prices, it just made more sense to buy a Commodore 64 or Atari 800XL, each of which offered larger software libraries. There was also a great buzz around IBM’s upcoming “Peanut,” a cheaper, more games-friendly home computer called the PCjr, which would finally launch in March 1984 (see Chapter 1.6). Asked about the high price of his system, Greenberg was undeterred. “Anything under $1,000 that is a complete computer system like Adam is an easy value,” he boldly declared.¹¹

Perhaps if the Adam had lived up to the hype, Greenberg may have had a point. But the Adam had more problems than a high sticker price. In addition to a standard cartridge input, the Adam came with the aforementioned internal high-speed digital “data pack” tape cassette drive with 256K capacity (another could be added internally for around $150). A low-density 160K 5.25-inch external floppy disk drive was not available until later in the Adam’s life. Both options had drawbacks. The tapes were noisy and highly unreliable, and even if you added the second drive, the lack of a copy command prevented making backups. This “feature” might have been less irritating if the tapes weren’t so prone to corruption by exposure to pretty much any magnetic field, including the ones generated by televisions. The disk drive, on the other hand, was remarkably quiet, but the disks had a lower capacity than the tapes, which made some software impractical for the format. The printer was loud, slow (ten characters per second), and limited to the characters on its interchangeable wheels. It did, however, provide true typewriter quality output, something that the graphics-friendly dot matrix printers of the day were unable to achieve. A 300-baud internal modem named ADAMLink was also released, as well as a 128K memory expansion option.

Coleco’s advertising campaign for the Adam took a rather dull and unimaginative educational approach, stressing the machine’s alleged ability to prepare children for jobs in an increasingly computerized world. A later, rather desperate sales strategy involved offering a voucher for a future $500 college scholarship with every purchase. While we can’t really judge the effectiveness of these ads for good or ill, they definitely did little to actually demonstrate the system’s full potential—or to distinguish it from the competition. Still, by most accounts, early sales were brisk.

Unfortunately, poor quality control at the factory led to a plethora of technical problems and production delays, and Coleco’s tech support hotlines were soon buzzing with irritated Adam owners. Some figures cite that nearly 60 percent of Adam systems were returned as defective. An unusual design decision to daisy-chain the system’s components meant that a problem with the printer—where the power supply resided—could prevent the entire system from working. Furthermore, the Adam emitted a powerful magnetic pulse when powering up, which could erase the magnetic information stored on a tape left in a drive. It’s almost as if the Adam were designed to fail.

Coleco tried to address these issues through an agonizing and costly series of hardware and software revisions that, combined with the effects of the Great Videogame Crash, cost the company $258 million dollars.¹² Even after a price cut brought the price of a stand-alone Adam down to $300, little hope remained for the future of the platform.

Indeed, Coleco was having unbelievable success with its popular Cabbage Patch Kids toys and had little incentive to continue promoting the Adam in the face of such devastating losses. Ultimately, the “byte” that Coleco thought its Adam would take out of Apple turned out to be little more than a “nybble.”¹³ Coleco officially discontinued its computer in January 1985, with the ColecoVision following in its wake in October.

Given the short life of the system, several unfinished or unreleased Adam games were later made available in the public domain. These titles included unreleased Super Games like Super Subroc, as well as quality game show translations like Jeopardy and Family Feud. These game show translations, along with other games, like Dragon’s Lair, were quite successful when ported to the Commodore 64 and other platforms, making the Adam’s quick demise all the more unfortunate.

While the Adam’s public domain library was bolstered by many unreleased commercial titles, independent authors and small companies also took up the development cause to help fill the need for new software. Much of these consisted of relatively unpolished BASIC software and lots of text adventures. Over time, however, the sophistication of Adam’s independent titles grew, with many of the new programming languages, operating systems, utilities, and games equal in quality to commercial releases, like Digital Adventures’ Temple of the Snow Dragon (1988) or Steve Pitman’s ADAM Bomb II (1996), and often taking advantage of add-ons like the expanded memory adapters. Despite these labors of love, in total, the Adam’s software library remains quite small, only hinting at what might have been possible with greater success.

After abandoning the Adam and then the ColecoVision, Greenberg turned his back on high risk electronic devices and focused on the company’s toy line, especially the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls that had sold so far beyond anyone’s expectations. It must have seemed like a sensible move now that the videogame “fad” was over. Of course, the real fad turned out to be the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. In 1985, the frenzy over the dolls allowed Coleco to post record sales of $600 million. Unfortunately, the craze was short-lived, and in 1986, sales were down to $250 million, and the following year to $125 million, with no bottom in sight as supply far outstripped ever weakening demand for the dolls. To add insult to injury, the company also lost the rights to make Trivial Pursuit board games, which were another big profit center. Coleco was doomed.

It’s always fun to think about what might have been. If Coleco had toughed it out with the ColecoVision, it would have had a better balanced portfolio of products when the Cabbage Patch Kids died on the vine. Even though the videogame business was shrinking, at less than 10 percent of sales in 1985,¹⁴ it was still a viable source of income. Coleco could then have been a small part of the industry recovery in 1986, along with Nintendo, Sega, Atari, and even INTV, which provided an example of a lean, but sustainable business operation. Instead, with declining interest in its toys, huge amounts of debt, and nothing else to fall back on, Coleco filed for bankruptcy in 1988.

Even the ColecoVision’s core technology, despite inadequate amounts of RAM and limited scrolling capabilities, would have been competitive through at least the mid-1980s, particularly with increased cartridge ROM sizes. In fact, using nothing more than intelligent programming techniques and higher capacity cartridges, today’s homebrew programmers have fulfilled Coleco’s “arcade at home” promise in ways previously thought impossible. Thanks to its expansion port, modern add-ons like the officially licensed Super Game Module from Opcode Games point to one possible avenue that Coleco could have pursued to keep the ColecoVision competitive even long-term, perhaps then selling a combined unit as a ColecoVision II. Unfortunately, the ColecoVision’s history played out far differently.

The ColecoVision Community Then and Now

The ColecoVision’s post-Crash fate was far more tragic than the Intellivision’s. By 1986, Texas-based Telegames picked up most of the remaining Coleco and CBS Electronics (distributors of the system and its games outside of the US) stock, as well as the rights to reproduce a selection of third-party software from companies like Activision, Imagic, and Xonox. Like INTV, some of this third party software was stripped of any licensing, e.g., Chuck Norris Superkicks¹⁵ (1983, Xonox) becoming Kung Fu Superkicks, and placed in budget packaging.

In that same year, the DINA two-in-one from Taiwan-based Bit Corporation was released, which was rebranded in the US by Telegames as the Personal Arcade. Besides its streamlined appearance and Nintendo Entertainment System-like gamepad, the Personal Arcade contained two cartridge ports, one for the ColecoVision, and another for the Sega SG-1000. This latter fact was downplayed since the SG-1000, the predecessor of the Sega Master System, was never released in the US. The simple Galaga-like shooting game Meteoric Shower was built-in, rounding out the basic feature set of this reasonably compatible, though mostly mediocre, clone system.¹⁶ No attempt was made to clone the Adam, of course, although Telegames did carry some of the software.

Unfortunately, the Telegames warehouse was in the middle of tornado country, and much of its inventory was damaged or destroyed in 1994. After that tragic event, Telegames focused mostly on developing software for newer systems, though they did go on to produce ColecoVision emulation-based game packages for Windows-based PCs, like the Personal Arcade (1997) and Classic Gamer: ColecoVision Hits Volume I (1998). Since 2005, brand acquisition and enterprise development company River West Brands has had the rights to the Coleco toys and games branding, and continues to work with interested companies in producing products related to the ColecoVision.

As for the Adam, most of its post-Crash support was limited to newsletters. Two of the most popular of these publications were ECN (Expandable Computer News), which ran from 1984 to 1988, and NIAD (Northern Illiana ADAM Users), which ran from 1985 to 1994. Newsletters like those provided an important lifeline for the thousands of Adam loyalists and handful of pro and semi-pro developers still creating new hardware and software for the platform in earnest.

While outside of annual ADAMCON and other conventions, the Adam is mostly ignored today, the ColecoVision is among the best supported of the classic consoles in terms of new cartridge game releases. These releases include the usual assortment of prototypes and hacks, but also a large number of new creations. Opcode Games (Pac-Man Collection, Space Invaders Collection), Team Pixelboy (Girl’s Garden, Golgo 13), CollectorVision (Armageddon, Burn Rubber), Good Deal Games (Monster Masher, Schlange CV), AtariAge (Spectar, Astro Invader), and others regularly publish these great titles from this small, but dedicated population of developers.

This abundance of homebrew games is thanks in part to the ColecoVision’s shared CPU and graphics chip with MSX computers, which were primarily found in Japan and parts of Europe, as well as Sega’s SG-1000 console and SG-3000 computer series, which were primarily found in Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and parts of Europe. Similarly, the Sega Master System shared the same CPU, and (unlike the MSX) sound chip of the ColecoVision, but not its graphics hardware.¹⁷ Not only did the longer commercial life of these architecturally similar systems point the way to how the ColecoVision and Adam platforms might have evolved had Coleco lasted through the Crash, but also provide a ready source of pre-existing software for today’s homebrew programmers to leverage for relatively straightforward ports.

In terms of new hardware, there are two recent items of particular interest. The first of these is the Atarimax ColecoVision Ultimate SD Multi-Cart, which, among its other features, runs all standard 32K or smaller ROM images, as well as the new MEGA-CART bank-switch ROM images up to 512K, making it a simple way to experience a huge variety of games from one cartridge. The second of these is the aforementioned Super Game Module from Opcode Games, which plugs into the ColecoVision’s or Adam’s expansion port to finally enable the platform to truly mirror the technical capabilities of the era’s arcade machines. As with the creation of new games for the base consoles, new games for the Super Game Module, like a nearly arcade perfect recreation of Donkey Kong, are being regularly produced.

Collecting for and Emulating the ColecoVision

Thanks to the ColecoVision’s popularity, original consoles are still readily available today from various auction sites for reasonable prices. Popular tweaks from skilled modders include audio-video modifications for easier and cleaner connections to modern displays, as well as controller knob replacements and cord straightening, which make for more precise control. Further, most Atari or Sega Master System/Genesis controllers can also be substituted for those games that don’t make use of the second action button or keypad.

Adam computers are also readily available, though the stand-alone form is more common than the expansion module, which also critically forgoes the upgraded video output. If you don’t want to use the Adam’s enormous printer, you can remove its power supply and place it into a case, or get a somewhat hard-to-find pre-modded stand-alone power supply.

Cartridge software is easy to find loose, while boxed games command more of a price premium. Third-party ColecoVision titles are the most valuable. Due to its rarity, most boxed Adam software is usually a great collector’s item.

There were a handful of ColecoVision compatibles released, as well. One example was for an optional add-on for use of ColecoVision cartridges on Spectravideo’s SV-318/328 computers, which were the prototypes for the MSX computer standard. Unfortunately, ColecoVision compatibles such as this are quite rare, and add-ons for Spectravideo’s computers are seldom available for any price. Other options like the Bit Corporation systems suffer from frustrating design quirks and low reliability.

ColecoVision emulation is fairly mature, with software like ColEM, KOLEKO, MESS, and blueMSX (which, as the name implies also emulates the MSX platform) available for a variety of computers and mobile platforms. Some of these programs also emulate the Adam, but it’s generally not a priority. Most new commercial homebrew software and add-ons predominantly target the ColecoVision rather than the Adam.

As with the Intellivision, for a nice compromise between the authenticity of the actual Coleco console and emulation, fans would do well to check out AtGames’ ColecoVision Flashback TV Game system, which was released in 2014 and officially licensed from River West Brands. The two companies also worked together on a similarly official digital collection of ColecoVision games for Android, iOS, and PC platforms.

¹  “Coleco’s New Video Challenge,” New York Times, November 11, 1982.

²  N.R. Kleinfield, “Coleco Moves out of the Cabbage Patch,” New York Times, July 21, 1985.

³  A play on Thor’s main mode of transportation in the game, as well as the title of the popular 1981 film Quest for Fire, which itself was based on the classic 1911 Belgian novel of the same name.

⁴  In another example of the era’s “spokesperson wars,” Hart’s comic creation was also used extensively in the print advertising for the failed Timex Sinclair 2068 computer, a modified version of the UK’s popular ZX Spectrum.

⁵  R.P. Carlisle (ed.), Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society, SAGE Publications, 2009.

⁶  K.J., “Coleco Strong in Marketing,” New York Times, August 1, 1983.

⁷  Coleco would also release a stand-alone Atari 2600 compatible console, the Gemini. Atari would sue Coleco over both the add-on and the console. The two companies eventually settled, with Coleco paying Atari royalties on each compatible unit sold. Litigation was not Coleco’s strong suit, as they also agreed to pay Universal 3 percent royalties from Donkey Kong’s net sale price for alleged infringement of the King Kong character. When Universal eventually went after Nintendo, all judgments eventually fell in the Donkey Kong creator’s favor.

⁸  The same or similar sound chips were also used in arcade machines and other platforms, like the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a, IBM PCjr, and Acorn BBC Master computers.

⁹  Two of the more unlikely of the many official Frogger home ports were the relatively excellent conversions for the TRS-80 and Timex Sinclair 1000, both black and white computer platforms with extremely blocky graphics. Like the version for the colorful, but similarly low resolution Magnavox Odyssey2 console, the playfields for those ports were split between the highway and the pond, creating two distinct play screens. Was this the possible inspiration for Frogger II: Threeedeep!? The world may never know.

¹⁰  There were, however, three major attempts at laserdisc-based home systems: RDI Video Systems Halcyon (1985) console, the Pioneer Palcom PX-7 (1985) MSX computer, and the Pioneer LaserActive (1993) media center, whose optional add-on modules could play native or enhanced Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 titles. All three attempts were doomed to failure due to exorbitant pricing and many of the same limitations that plagued laserdisc games in the arcade.

¹¹  Eric N. Berg, Special to The New York Times, September 7, 1983.

¹²  R.P. Carlisle (ed.), Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society, SAGE Publications, 2009.

¹³  A “nybble” is a spelling variant of “nibble,” an information storage unit. It takes two nybbles to make a byte.

¹⁴  “Coleco Moves Out of the Cabbage Patch,” The New York Times, July 21, 1985.

¹⁵  Chuck Norris fact: The release of Chuck Norris Superkicks immediately made all other videogames irrelevant, leading to the Great Videogame Crash.

¹⁶  Fun fact: Unlike most RF-based systems, instead of tuning to VHF channels 3 or 4, Bit Corporation’s system needed to be on channel 13 to see its picture!

¹⁷  Another similar platform and source of new homebrew ports was Memotech’s MTX computer series, first released in 1983. Likewise, Texas Instruments’ TI-99/4 and 4a computers, as well as the Tomy Pyuuta/Tutor computers, shared many of the same audiovisual traits. Only those computers’ radically different 16-bit TMS 999x series microprocessors impede the cross-porting process.