coleco Industries
and the Colecovision
History
Coleco Industries, Inc. started life in 1932 as The Connecticut Leather Company. Initially the business supplied leather and "shoe findings" to shoe repairers. Shoe findings are the supplies and paraphernalia of a shoe repair shop. The company later (1938) branched out into selling rubber footwear. With the advent of World War II the demand for the basic supplies that the company produced dramatically increased. By the end of the war the company was much bigger and on a stable financial ground and had branched out into new and used shoe machinery, hat cleaning equipment and even marble shoeshine stands.
By the early 1950s, and thanks to Maurice Greenberg's son, Leonard Greenberg, the company had diversified further and was making leather lacing and leathercraft kits. In 1954, at the New York Toy Fair, the leather moccasin kit was selected as a Child Guidance Prestige Toy, and Connecticut Leather Company decided to go wholeheartedly into the toy business. In 1956, Leonard read of an emerging technology, the vacuum forming of plastic, which led the company to become very successful, producing an enormous array of different plastic toys and wading pools.
In 1961 the leather and shoe findings portion of the business was sold, and Connecticut Leather Company became Coleco Industries, Inc. On January 9, 1962 Coleco went public, offering stock at $5.00 a share.
In 1963 the company acquired the Kestral Corporation of Springfield, Massachusetts, a manufacturer of inflatable vinyl pools and toys. This led to Coleco becoming the largest manufacturer of above ground swimming pools in the world.
By 1966, the company had grown massively so Leonard persuaded his brother Arnold Greenberg to join the company. Further acquisitions added to the company's growth, namely Playtime Products (1966) and Eagle Toys of Canada (1968). By the end of the 1960s, Coleco ran ten manufacturing facilities and had a new corporate headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Coleco and yet despite this sales crossed the $100 million mark. When Coleco became listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1971 sales had grown to $48.6 million. In 1972 Coleco entered the snowmobile market through acquisition, however poor snowfall and market conditions led to disappointing sales and profits.
Under CEO Arnold Greenberg, the company entered the video game console business with the Telstar in 1976. Dozens of companies were introducing game systems that year after Atari's successful Pong console. Nearly all of these new games were based on General Instrument's "Pong-on-a-chip". However, General Instrument had underestimated demand, and there were severe shortages. Coleco had been one of the first to place an order, and was one of the few companies to receive an order in full. Though dedicated game consoles did not last long on the market, their early order enabled Coleco to break even.
Coleco continued to do well in electronics. The company transitioned next into handheld electronic games, a market popularized by Mattel. An early hit was Electronic Quarterback. Coleco produced two very popular lines of games, the "head to head" series of two player sports games, (Football, Baseball, Basketball, Soccer, Hockey) and the Mini-Arcade series of licensed video arcade titles such as Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac-Man. A third line of educational handhelds was also produced and included the Electronic Learning Machine, Lil Genius, Digits, and a trivia game called Quiz Wiz. Launched in 1982, their first four tabletop Mini-Arcades, for Pac-Man, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, and Frogger, sold approximately three million units within a year. Among these, 1.5 million units were sold for Pac-Man alone. In 1983, it released three more Mini-Arcades: for Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Junior, and Zaxxon.
Coleco returned to the video game console market in 1982 with the launch of the ColecoVision. While the system was quite popular, selling 500,000 units over two years, Coleco hedged its bet on video games by introducing a line of ROM cartridges for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. It also introduced the Coleco Gemini, a clone of the popular Atari 2600.
When the video game business began to implode in 1983, it seemed clear that video game consoles were being supplanted by home computers. Coleco's strategy was to introduce the Coleco Adam home computer, both as a stand-alone system and as an expansion module to the ColecoVision. This effort failed, in part because Adams were often unreliable, and in part because the computer's release coincided with the home computer industry crashing. Coleco withdrew from electronics early in 1985.
Also in 1983, Coleco released the Cabbage Patch Kids series of dolls which were wildly successful. Flush with success, Coleco purchased beleaguered Selchow and Righter in 1986, manufacturers of Scrabble, Parcheesi, and Trivial Pursuit, sales of which had plummeted, leaving Selchow & Righter with warehouses full of unsold games. The purchase price was $75 million. That same year, Coleco introduced an ALF plush based on the furry alien character who had his own television series at the time, as well as a talking version and a cassette-playing "Storytelling ALF" doll. The combination of the purchase of Selchow & Righter, the disastrous Adam computer, and the public's waning infatuation with Cabbage Patch dolls all contributed to Coleco's financial decline. In 1988, the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The reorganized Coleco sold off all of its North American assets and outsourced thousands of jobs to foreign countries, closing plants in Amsterdam, New York and other cities. In 1988, Canada based SLM Action Sports Inc. purchased Coleco's swimming pool and snow goods divisions. In 1989, Hasbro purchased most of Coleco's remaining product lines.
Brand
Coleco as a brand name has been owned by several entities since it was created in 1961 by Coleco Industries, Inc.
In 2005, River West Brands, now Dormitus Brands, a Chicago-based brand revitalization company, re-introduced the Coleco brand to the marketplace. In late 2006, the company introduced the Coleco Sonic, a handheld system containing twenty Sega Master System and Sega Game Gear games. In 2014, River West Brands established the subsidiary Coleco Holdings for their Coleco-branded projects.
In December 2015, Coleco Holdings announced the development of the Coleco Chameleon, a new cartridge-based video game system; in actuality, a re-branding of the controversial Retro VGS console, whose Indiegogo campaign failed to secure funding when it ended in early November 2015, with only $63,546 raised of its $1.95 million goal. In the press release, it was established that the system would be able to play new and classic games in the 8, 16, and 32-bit styles. The release for the system was announced to be sometime in early 2016, with a demonstration at Toy Fair New York in February. However, some critics suggested that the prototype fell short of its developmental goals and was nothing more than the motherboard of a Super NES model SNS-101 inside an Atari Jaguar case. Later mock images of a prototype posted by AtariAge showed the device utilizing a CCTV capture card in place of a motherboard. After Retro VGS failed to produce a fully working prototype, Coleco Holdings pulled out of involvement with Retro VGS, terminating the project.
ColecoVision
The ColecoVision is Coleco Industries' second-generation home video-game console that was released in August 1982. The ColecoVision offered a closer experience to more powerful arcade game systems compared to competitors such as the Atari 2600, along with the means to expand the system's basic hardware.
The initial catalog of twelve games included Nintendo's Donkey Kong as the pack-in cartridge, Sega's graphically impressive Zaxxon, and some lesser known arcade titles that found a larger audience on the console, such as Lady Bug, Cosmic Avenger, and Venture. Approximately 145 titles in total were published as ROM cartridges for the system between 1982 and 1984.
The ColecoVision was discontinued in 1985 when Coleco withdrew from the video game market.
History
By Christmas of 1982, Coleco had sold more than 500,000 units,in part on the strength of its bundled game. The ColecoVision's main competitor was the still less advanced and less commercially successful Atari 5200 which had been based on the older Atari 400/800 computer.
The ColecoVision was distributed by CBS Electronics outside of North America, and was branded the CBS ColecoVision. In Europe the console was released in July 1983, nearly one year after the North American release.
Sales quickly passed 1 million in early 1983, before the video game crash of 1983. By the beginning of 1984, quarterly sales of the ColecoVision had dramatically decreased.
Over the next 18 months, the Coleco company ramped down its video game division, ultimately withdrawing from the video game market by the end of the summer of 1985. The ColecoVision was officially discontinued by October 1985. Total sales of the ColecoVision are uncertain but were ultimately in excess of 2 million units, due to the console continuing to sell modestly up until its discontinuation the following year. The video game crash of 1983 has been cited as the main cause of the ColecoVision's being discontinued less than three years after its launch.
In 1983 Spectravideo announced the SV-603 ColecoVision Video Game Adapter for its SV-318 computer. The company stated that the $70 product allowed users to "enjoy the entire library of exciting ColecoVision video-game cartridges".
Hardware
The main console unit consists of a 14×8×2-inch rectangular plastic case that houses the motherboard, with a cartridge slot on the right side and connectors for the external power supply and RF jack at the rear. The controllers connect into plugs in a recessed area on the top of the unit.
The design of the controllers is similar to that of Mattel's Intellivision—the controller is rectangular and consists of a numeric keypad and a set of side buttons. In place of the circular control disc below the keypad, the Coleco controller has a short, 1.5-inch joystick. The keypad is designed to accept a thin plastic overlay that maps the keys for a particular game. Each ColecoVision console shipped with two controllers.
All first-party cartridges and most third-party software titles feature a 12-second pause before presenting the game select screen. This delay results from an intentional loop in the console's BIOS to enable on-screen display of the ColecoVision brand. Companies like Parker Brothers, Activision, and Micro Fun bypassed this loop, which necessitated embedding portions of the BIOS outside the delay loop, further reducing storage available to actual game programming.
Expansion Modules and accessories
Released
Expansion Module #1 makes the ColecoVision compatible with the industry-leading Atari 2600, with some exceptions. Functionally, this gave the ColecoVision the largest software library of any console of its day. The expansion module prompted legal action from Atari. Coleco and Atari settled out of court with Coleco becoming licensed under Atari's patents. The royalty based license also applied to Coleco's Gemini game system, which was a clone of the 2600, but with combined joystick/paddle controllers.
Expansion Module #2 is a driving controller (steering wheel / gas pedal) that came packaged with a port of the arcade game Turbo. The gas pedal is merely a simple on/off switch, so many gamers used the second ColecoVision controller as a gear shift for more precise speed control. Although Coleco called the driving controller an expansion module, it actually plugs into the controller port, not the Expansion Module Interface. The driving controller is also compatible with the games Destructor, Bump 'n' Jump, Pitstop, and The Dukes of Hazzard.
Expansion Module #3 converts the ColecoVision into a full-fledged computer known as the Adam, complete with keyboard, digital data pack (DDP) cassette drives and printer.
The Roller Controller is a trackball that came packaged with a conversion of the arcade game Slither, a Centipede clone. The roller controller uses a special power connector that is not compatible with Expansion Module #3 (the Adam computer). Coleco mailed an adapter to owners of both units who complained. The other cartridge programmed to use the roller controller is Victory. A joystick mode switch on the roller controller allows it to be used with all cartridges including WarGames, Omega Race, and Atarisoft's Centipede.
The Super Action Controller Set is a set of two joysticks (each resembling a boxing glove) that came packaged with the game Super Action Baseball. Each joystick has four action buttons, a 12-button numeric keypad, and a "speed roller". The Super Action Controllers are also compatible with the games Super Action Football, Rocky Super Action Boxing, and a port of the arcade game Front Line.
Not released
Expansion Module #3 was originally the Super Game Module. It was advertised for an August 1983 release but was ultimately cancelled and replaced with the Adam computer expansion. The Super Game Module added a tape drive known as the Exatron Stringy Floppy with 128KB capacity, and the additional RAM, said to be 30KB, to load and execute programs from tape. Games could be distributed on tiny tapes, called wafers, and be much larger than the 16KB or 32KB ROM cartridges of the day. Super Donkey Kong, with all screens and animations, Super Donkey Kong Jr, and Super Smurf Rescue were demonstrated with the Super Game Module. The Adam computer expansion with its 256KB tape drive and 64KB RAM fulfilled the specifications promised by the Super Game Module.
Legacy
In 1986, Bit Corporation produced a ColecoVision clone called the Dina, which was sold in the United States by Telegames as the Telegames Personal Arcade.
In 2009, IGN named the ColecoVision their 12th-best video-game console out of their list of 25, citing "its incredible accuracy in bringing current-generation arcade hits home."
In 1996, programmer Kevin Horton released the first homebrew game for the ColecoVision, a Tetris clone entitled Kevtris.
In 1997, Telegames released Personal Arcade Vol. 1, a collection of ColecoVision games for Microsoft Windows, and a 1998 follow-up, Colecovision Hits Volume One.
In 2014, AtGames began producing the ColecoVision Flashback console which includes 60 games, but not the original pack-in game, Donkey Kong.
Coleco Industries, Inc. started life in 1932 as The Connecticut Leather Company. Initially the business supplied leather and "shoe findings" to shoe repairers. Shoe findings are the supplies and paraphernalia of a shoe repair shop. The company later (1938) branched out into selling rubber footwear. With the advent of World War II the demand for the basic supplies that the company produced dramatically increased. By the end of the war the company was much bigger and on a stable financial ground and had branched out into new and used shoe machinery, hat cleaning equipment and even marble shoeshine stands.
By the early 1950s, and thanks to Maurice Greenberg's son, Leonard Greenberg, the company had diversified further and was making leather lacing and leathercraft kits. In 1954, at the New York Toy Fair, the leather moccasin kit was selected as a Child Guidance Prestige Toy, and Connecticut Leather Company decided to go wholeheartedly into the toy business. In 1956, Leonard read of an emerging technology, the vacuum forming of plastic, which led the company to become very successful, producing an enormous array of different plastic toys and wading pools.
In 1961 the leather and shoe findings portion of the business was sold, and Connecticut Leather Company became Coleco Industries, Inc. On January 9, 1962 Coleco went public, offering stock at $5.00 a share.
In 1963 the company acquired the Kestral Corporation of Springfield, Massachusetts, a manufacturer of inflatable vinyl pools and toys. This led to Coleco becoming the largest manufacturer of above ground swimming pools in the world.
By 1966, the company had grown massively so Leonard persuaded his brother Arnold Greenberg to join the company. Further acquisitions added to the company's growth, namely Playtime Products (1966) and Eagle Toys of Canada (1968). By the end of the 1960s, Coleco ran ten manufacturing facilities and had a new corporate headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Coleco and yet despite this sales crossed the $100 million mark. When Coleco became listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1971 sales had grown to $48.6 million. In 1972 Coleco entered the snowmobile market through acquisition, however poor snowfall and market conditions led to disappointing sales and profits.
Under CEO Arnold Greenberg, the company entered the video game console business with the Telstar in 1976. Dozens of companies were introducing game systems that year after Atari's successful Pong console. Nearly all of these new games were based on General Instrument's "Pong-on-a-chip". However, General Instrument had underestimated demand, and there were severe shortages. Coleco had been one of the first to place an order, and was one of the few companies to receive an order in full. Though dedicated game consoles did not last long on the market, their early order enabled Coleco to break even.
Coleco continued to do well in electronics. The company transitioned next into handheld electronic games, a market popularized by Mattel. An early hit was Electronic Quarterback. Coleco produced two very popular lines of games, the "head to head" series of two player sports games, (Football, Baseball, Basketball, Soccer, Hockey) and the Mini-Arcade series of licensed video arcade titles such as Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac-Man. A third line of educational handhelds was also produced and included the Electronic Learning Machine, Lil Genius, Digits, and a trivia game called Quiz Wiz. Launched in 1982, their first four tabletop Mini-Arcades, for Pac-Man, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, and Frogger, sold approximately three million units within a year. Among these, 1.5 million units were sold for Pac-Man alone. In 1983, it released three more Mini-Arcades: for Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Junior, and Zaxxon.
Coleco returned to the video game console market in 1982 with the launch of the ColecoVision. While the system was quite popular, selling 500,000 units over two years, Coleco hedged its bet on video games by introducing a line of ROM cartridges for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. It also introduced the Coleco Gemini, a clone of the popular Atari 2600.
When the video game business began to implode in 1983, it seemed clear that video game consoles were being supplanted by home computers. Coleco's strategy was to introduce the Coleco Adam home computer, both as a stand-alone system and as an expansion module to the ColecoVision. This effort failed, in part because Adams were often unreliable, and in part because the computer's release coincided with the home computer industry crashing. Coleco withdrew from electronics early in 1985.
Also in 1983, Coleco released the Cabbage Patch Kids series of dolls which were wildly successful. Flush with success, Coleco purchased beleaguered Selchow and Righter in 1986, manufacturers of Scrabble, Parcheesi, and Trivial Pursuit, sales of which had plummeted, leaving Selchow & Righter with warehouses full of unsold games. The purchase price was $75 million. That same year, Coleco introduced an ALF plush based on the furry alien character who had his own television series at the time, as well as a talking version and a cassette-playing "Storytelling ALF" doll. The combination of the purchase of Selchow & Righter, the disastrous Adam computer, and the public's waning infatuation with Cabbage Patch dolls all contributed to Coleco's financial decline. In 1988, the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The reorganized Coleco sold off all of its North American assets and outsourced thousands of jobs to foreign countries, closing plants in Amsterdam, New York and other cities. In 1988, Canada based SLM Action Sports Inc. purchased Coleco's swimming pool and snow goods divisions. In 1989, Hasbro purchased most of Coleco's remaining product lines.
Brand
Coleco as a brand name has been owned by several entities since it was created in 1961 by Coleco Industries, Inc.
In 2005, River West Brands, now Dormitus Brands, a Chicago-based brand revitalization company, re-introduced the Coleco brand to the marketplace. In late 2006, the company introduced the Coleco Sonic, a handheld system containing twenty Sega Master System and Sega Game Gear games. In 2014, River West Brands established the subsidiary Coleco Holdings for their Coleco-branded projects.
In December 2015, Coleco Holdings announced the development of the Coleco Chameleon, a new cartridge-based video game system; in actuality, a re-branding of the controversial Retro VGS console, whose Indiegogo campaign failed to secure funding when it ended in early November 2015, with only $63,546 raised of its $1.95 million goal. In the press release, it was established that the system would be able to play new and classic games in the 8, 16, and 32-bit styles. The release for the system was announced to be sometime in early 2016, with a demonstration at Toy Fair New York in February. However, some critics suggested that the prototype fell short of its developmental goals and was nothing more than the motherboard of a Super NES model SNS-101 inside an Atari Jaguar case. Later mock images of a prototype posted by AtariAge showed the device utilizing a CCTV capture card in place of a motherboard. After Retro VGS failed to produce a fully working prototype, Coleco Holdings pulled out of involvement with Retro VGS, terminating the project.
ColecoVision
The ColecoVision is Coleco Industries' second-generation home video-game console that was released in August 1982. The ColecoVision offered a closer experience to more powerful arcade game systems compared to competitors such as the Atari 2600, along with the means to expand the system's basic hardware.
The initial catalog of twelve games included Nintendo's Donkey Kong as the pack-in cartridge, Sega's graphically impressive Zaxxon, and some lesser known arcade titles that found a larger audience on the console, such as Lady Bug, Cosmic Avenger, and Venture. Approximately 145 titles in total were published as ROM cartridges for the system between 1982 and 1984.
The ColecoVision was discontinued in 1985 when Coleco withdrew from the video game market.
History
By Christmas of 1982, Coleco had sold more than 500,000 units,in part on the strength of its bundled game. The ColecoVision's main competitor was the still less advanced and less commercially successful Atari 5200 which had been based on the older Atari 400/800 computer.
The ColecoVision was distributed by CBS Electronics outside of North America, and was branded the CBS ColecoVision. In Europe the console was released in July 1983, nearly one year after the North American release.
Sales quickly passed 1 million in early 1983, before the video game crash of 1983. By the beginning of 1984, quarterly sales of the ColecoVision had dramatically decreased.
Over the next 18 months, the Coleco company ramped down its video game division, ultimately withdrawing from the video game market by the end of the summer of 1985. The ColecoVision was officially discontinued by October 1985. Total sales of the ColecoVision are uncertain but were ultimately in excess of 2 million units, due to the console continuing to sell modestly up until its discontinuation the following year. The video game crash of 1983 has been cited as the main cause of the ColecoVision's being discontinued less than three years after its launch.
In 1983 Spectravideo announced the SV-603 ColecoVision Video Game Adapter for its SV-318 computer. The company stated that the $70 product allowed users to "enjoy the entire library of exciting ColecoVision video-game cartridges".
Hardware
The main console unit consists of a 14×8×2-inch rectangular plastic case that houses the motherboard, with a cartridge slot on the right side and connectors for the external power supply and RF jack at the rear. The controllers connect into plugs in a recessed area on the top of the unit.
The design of the controllers is similar to that of Mattel's Intellivision—the controller is rectangular and consists of a numeric keypad and a set of side buttons. In place of the circular control disc below the keypad, the Coleco controller has a short, 1.5-inch joystick. The keypad is designed to accept a thin plastic overlay that maps the keys for a particular game. Each ColecoVision console shipped with two controllers.
All first-party cartridges and most third-party software titles feature a 12-second pause before presenting the game select screen. This delay results from an intentional loop in the console's BIOS to enable on-screen display of the ColecoVision brand. Companies like Parker Brothers, Activision, and Micro Fun bypassed this loop, which necessitated embedding portions of the BIOS outside the delay loop, further reducing storage available to actual game programming.
Expansion Modules and accessories
Released
Expansion Module #1 makes the ColecoVision compatible with the industry-leading Atari 2600, with some exceptions. Functionally, this gave the ColecoVision the largest software library of any console of its day. The expansion module prompted legal action from Atari. Coleco and Atari settled out of court with Coleco becoming licensed under Atari's patents. The royalty based license also applied to Coleco's Gemini game system, which was a clone of the 2600, but with combined joystick/paddle controllers.
Expansion Module #2 is a driving controller (steering wheel / gas pedal) that came packaged with a port of the arcade game Turbo. The gas pedal is merely a simple on/off switch, so many gamers used the second ColecoVision controller as a gear shift for more precise speed control. Although Coleco called the driving controller an expansion module, it actually plugs into the controller port, not the Expansion Module Interface. The driving controller is also compatible with the games Destructor, Bump 'n' Jump, Pitstop, and The Dukes of Hazzard.
Expansion Module #3 converts the ColecoVision into a full-fledged computer known as the Adam, complete with keyboard, digital data pack (DDP) cassette drives and printer.
The Roller Controller is a trackball that came packaged with a conversion of the arcade game Slither, a Centipede clone. The roller controller uses a special power connector that is not compatible with Expansion Module #3 (the Adam computer). Coleco mailed an adapter to owners of both units who complained. The other cartridge programmed to use the roller controller is Victory. A joystick mode switch on the roller controller allows it to be used with all cartridges including WarGames, Omega Race, and Atarisoft's Centipede.
The Super Action Controller Set is a set of two joysticks (each resembling a boxing glove) that came packaged with the game Super Action Baseball. Each joystick has four action buttons, a 12-button numeric keypad, and a "speed roller". The Super Action Controllers are also compatible with the games Super Action Football, Rocky Super Action Boxing, and a port of the arcade game Front Line.
Not released
Expansion Module #3 was originally the Super Game Module. It was advertised for an August 1983 release but was ultimately cancelled and replaced with the Adam computer expansion. The Super Game Module added a tape drive known as the Exatron Stringy Floppy with 128KB capacity, and the additional RAM, said to be 30KB, to load and execute programs from tape. Games could be distributed on tiny tapes, called wafers, and be much larger than the 16KB or 32KB ROM cartridges of the day. Super Donkey Kong, with all screens and animations, Super Donkey Kong Jr, and Super Smurf Rescue were demonstrated with the Super Game Module. The Adam computer expansion with its 256KB tape drive and 64KB RAM fulfilled the specifications promised by the Super Game Module.
Legacy
In 1986, Bit Corporation produced a ColecoVision clone called the Dina, which was sold in the United States by Telegames as the Telegames Personal Arcade.
In 2009, IGN named the ColecoVision their 12th-best video-game console out of their list of 25, citing "its incredible accuracy in bringing current-generation arcade hits home."
In 1996, programmer Kevin Horton released the first homebrew game for the ColecoVision, a Tetris clone entitled Kevtris.
In 1997, Telegames released Personal Arcade Vol. 1, a collection of ColecoVision games for Microsoft Windows, and a 1998 follow-up, Colecovision Hits Volume One.
In 2014, AtGames began producing the ColecoVision Flashback console which includes 60 games, but not the original pack-in game, Donkey Kong.