24k #12 — ColecoVision

This was going to be a blog-by-reference, where I just redirected you to a vintage AtariAge post about the differences between the 24k and 16k versions of the Donkey Kong cartridge for the ColecoVision console.

Instead, let‘s talk about the ColecoVision itself, our twelfth installment in 24 x 24k for 2024. Let’s talk about Coleco!

I love companies whose names end in ‘co’ — Nabisco, the National Biscuit Company; Norelco, the North American Philips Electrical Company ; Philco, Philadelphia Battery Company ; PEPCO, Potomac Electric Power Company ; ARCO, Atlantic Richfield Company.

What I like especially is that the contraction of the name and erasure of the original brand often happens around the time the company forgets what it was founded to do and starts using the corporate version of hallucinogens. Speaking of hallucinogens, well ... of mushrooms, well, Cream of Mushroom anyway, I heard today that Campbell Soup Company is passing straight through ‘co’ and is now simply Campbell's.

Next up in 'C' is Coleco. Coleco, the Connecticut Leather Company, was at one time the nation’s largest vendor of … above-ground swimming pools? That’s true, but Connecticut Leather‘s original business was leather and tools for the shoemaking trade. Way leads into way, way leads into war, and Connecticut Leather is making boots for the Army. As they began selling their sole, leather boots became rubber boots. Along their path into becoming a diversified Consolidated Amalgam sort of company, they returned to their roots and sold a leather moccasin kit as an educational toy and it was an unexpected success. This is really how Connecticut Leather becomes the toy manufacturer Coleco.

How toy manufacturer Coleco becomes video game maker Coleco, then computer manufacturer Coleco is the next matter. The late 70’s saw a wave of what we would today call Systems-on-a-Chip but our ambitions for what a system might be were more modest. Watches, calculators, hand-held video games with a few red LEDs for output surrounded by a plastic illustration of cheering fans in a football stadium or zooming asteroids. Probably one where the football player LEDs have to dodge the asteroid LEDs. A toy manufacturer could bring one of these to market with a bigger investment in art and packaging than in technology.

General Instrument, electronics supplier to the TV and off-track betting industries, introduced a SoC for a TV-based version of some of these kinds of games in 1976. There was more resolution, in the sense that a television has more resolution than a dozen LEDs, but there was little more detail. The game chip was not really capable of storing much more information. There isn’t a ‘pong‘ frame buffer per se, it‘s time-domain multiplexing two paddles and a ball into a video signal. Coleco was a launch customer of the first GI game chip and sold millions of these units into American homes in just a few years.

The world changed in those few years. A year later, Atari introduced the Atari Video Computer System. This machine had a hundred and twenty eight bytes of RAM and ran games from ROM cartridges of a few kilobytes. A few dozen bytes of memory was all it took to obsolete pong. In 1983, Coleco responded with a much more powerful system. The ColecoVision system had the same z80 as some actual computers but a game-sized serving of memory – a kilobyte for program, 16 kilobytes for a real frame buffer, and 8 kilobytes of built-in ROM. You might call that a one kilobyte machine. A 1983 toy marketer might call it a 25 kilobyte machine! Who's right? It doesn't really matter so long as the machine does what you want to do. If what you had wanted was to play Donkey Kong at home, the ColecoVision was a top option.

If what you wanted was a family computer, Coleco didn’t have anything ready. If want you wanted was a video game machine today with the lure that this was a Sound Investment in your Child’s Future through a forthcoming expansion module, then the ColecoVision was perfect.

Coleco pulled this trick off with the help of some marketing language and also a giant expansion connector that dumped the entire bus out the front of the console. Weirdly, this is also what sea cucumbers do when threatened. Rather than dump several dollars of components into a console for which no application existed, they promised instead an upgrade that would ultimately arrive late, ship in limited quantity, and cost less to produce in the future than it would cost in the present.

That was the plan, anyway. The upgrade that turned a ColecoVision into a computer was called “Adam (Expansion Module #3) The ColecoVision Family Computer Module”. It promised “Everything You Need to Convert Your ColecoVision into a Complete Family Computer System”. The Adam was also available as a standalone computer, though this amounted to a computer that had an internal ColecoVision.

Back at Connecticut Leather, this should have been whatever the leather goods version of a slam dunk is. A nominally credible home computer that showed up with a game library on day one and that took advantage of a captive pool of upgrade-hungry users. Coleco had really diversified by this point, though. The rubber boot business turned into a sprawling plastic goods business. The Adam was more like a belly flop into a Coleco above-ground swimming pool.

Coleco had distributed review units pretty widely and these turned into generally not unfavorable reviews in the kinds of magazines buyers were likely to read. Reviewers noted the high-quality feel of the keyboard and the uncommonness of the included daisy-wheel printer. It was advertised as an 80 kilobyte machine (64 in the Adam, 16 in the ColecoVision for video) but these claims were taken about as seriously as claims the original machine had 25k.

The claims that did in the Adam were the warranty claims. Nobody returned the machine after a month and said ‘this BASIC is not so compatible with AppleSoft as I was led to believe by the salesman”. These were bought directly off a toy store shelf and left to sell themselves. They were returned because they simply did not work. Consumer Reports reviewed the Adam once they were finally available for sale and reported that all four units purchased by the magazine were non-functional.

The few units that did function generated such a power surge on startup that they wiped the contents of data cassettes left in the drives.

Coleco originally had commitments from retail channel partners for around half a million Adam units. Napoleon mustered an army of about the same size to invade Russia. Coleco was only ever able to make a hundred thousand. Of those hundred thousand, so many were dead out-of-the-box that Coleco had to open retail stores around the country just to accept the returns. Less than six months after it was introduced, it was clear that Adam had suffered a spectacular defeat. By the time Coleco pulled the plug in January ‘85 there may have been only ten thousand units in active use. The home computer wars were over. Coleco nearly shattered like vinyl in a Russian winter. Just as Russian peasants turned to cabbage in the disafter of their victory over Napoleon, so too did Coleco. Coleco brought the Cabbage Patch Kids line to market around the same time as the Adam. A couple of bumper Christmas crops with that line postponed Coleco’s reckoning. They declared bankruptcy in ‘88. Nobody had ever clamored for an Adam the way crowds clamored for those dolls.