The Story of the Colecovision, What Could Have Been! - Video Game Retrospective

the colecovision many of you love it unfortunately many more of you don't know just how awesome it is let's fix that [Music] hi i'm jacob with video game retrospective and it's time for us to tell the story of the colecovision before we talk about the colecovision we have to discuss calico itself coleco or the connecticut leather company is one of those companies that came out of nowhere to fundamentally change the tech industry forever with a name like the connecticut leather company it's pretty clear that cleco wasn't intended to be a video game company it sort of just happened coleco was founded in 1932 as a small company selling leather goods for shoemakers business was slow during the depression but kaliko's business exploded thanks to lucrative government contracts making rubber souls for the boots of hundreds of thousands of soldiers in world war ii by the end of the war in 1945 calico was a major regional player in the leather business with multiple branches in the northeastern united states the 1950s saw a major transition for coleco starting with a kit for kids to make their own moccasins coleco jumped headfirst into the toy business they were one of the first companies to invest heavily in the new process of vacuum forming plastic which made them one of the country's leading toy companies by the end of the decade the next big transition for coleco came in 1976 at that time pong was all the rage many companies wanted to get in the business of making pong clones almost all pong clones of the time would be using the general instruments pong on a chip which was in such massive demand that gi couldn't keep up and there was a major shortage by chance kaliko was one of the first companies to place an order meaning they were one of the only companies to receive a full shipment of chips the console those chips would be put in was the cleco telestar which sold really well after that kaliko would fully embrace the video game market selling more pong consoles and carving out a niche as a leading player in both the handheld gaming market and the tabletop arcade market kaliko saw the success of the atari 2600 released in 1977 and mattel's in television released in 1980 and wanted a piece of that action they would release their own cartridge based video game console with a goal of being better than the competition in every single way in august 1982. that system would be the coleco vision when the clico vision launched in 1982 it had a lot going for it the four major selling points were price performance expansion and exclusives let's go over each of those in more detail first up price the colecovision launched at a price of 175 that's just under 500 in today's money in comparison the prices for mattel's intellivision and the atari 2600 fluctuated wildly between 100 and 200 with various packages and sales that meant that the clico vision was a pretty tempting offer since for not much more money you could get a much more advanced system with a very important pack in game we'll get to later the only system that really competed with the colecovision for the high-end gaming market was the atari 5200 which was based on atari's computer line from three years earlier not only did it cost considerably more at a starting price of 269.99 but was also the atari 5200 one of the worst consoles ever made next performance when it came to comparing the compatibilities of the system to the competition there's no contest the colecovision wins in every single category both the intellivision and atari vcs were designed in the 70s with both companies having to forge ahead with radical new ideas and new technologies in comparison when coleco started designing their system the market was much more established this meant coleco had a much wider selection of components to choose from that were both more powerful and cheaper cleco would use the zylog z80 processor which would prove to be one of the most popular processors of all time this would be paired with the most ram yet included on a console with 1k of general ram and 16k of video ram with an 8k rom for pixel pushing the clicovision would use the tms-9918 graphics chip which for the clickovision's release was very impressive supporting multiple graphics modes a multitude of colors and full sprite control for sound they would use the texas instruments 89 sn76489 very popular sound chip that would later be used for the texas instruments ti-994a and the ibm pc junior among many other devices you may have noticed a pattern here all of the components selected for the clicovision would become staple electronics components the clicovision was very forward-looking several companies would even directly build new and more powerful systems off of the roadmap coleco started sega's first system the sg-1000 would be a near-direct clone which would eventually lead to the sega master system the popular japanese computer platform msx where series like metal gear started would also be very close to what a next-gen colecovision would have looked like in fact a modern expanded colecovision can play msx games with only a small amount of porting needed altogether the power of the cleco vision would make it the most powerful console on the market with coleco in particular pushing the fact that its arcade conversions would be much closer to the arcade originals than the competition's offerings next expansion this is an area that the clicovision was really unique in for the time in advertisements one of the primary highlights kaliko made was their expansion module interface a slot boldly placed directly on the front of the console that could be used to offer different expansions to the console some of these expansions would be novel but pretty basic like the expansion module 2 driving controller others would be pretty odd these include the atom expansion which turned the colecovision into a full computer and the expansion module 1 which let the colecovision play atari 2600 games you may be wondering why atari would license their most popular hardware to their primary competition well they didn't this would lead to a fascinating legal battle between atari and coleco that we intend to cover in a future video and finally exclusives and by exclusives we are really talking about one thing donkey kong released in 1981 donkey kong was a sensation in arcades rivaling even pac-man's iconicness fans were eagerly awaiting the release of home versions of the game the creators of donkey kong nintendo entered into tense negotiations with three separate companies taito kaliko and atari in the end kaliko would secure the exclusive rights to publish donkey kong on any home video game console atari however would win the consolation prize of rights to publishing the game to computers with exclusive rights to all the home console versions of donkey kong you would think that clica would publish it only on their new console but no they had something much smarter and much more sinister in mind kaliko would release donkey kong on all major consoles with the very notable exception of the atari 5200 but every version on a competitor's machine would intentionally be made as bad as possible what better way to demonstrate that your console is the best than to make awful ports of the hottest game on the market on every other system with every other console version being awful and donkey kong being included as a pack-in title on the clicovision for its launch in august 1982 the coligo vision would fly off shelves as the hottest tech device to find under the christmas tree coleco sold well over 500 000 consoles in that first holiday season which was a record up to that point it was easily set up to overtake even atari in overall sales and become the leading video game platform of the next decade and one of the best selling consoles of all time except [Music] well the colecovision only sold around 6 million systems worldwide in its entire lifespan that's not a horrible number but it's really not reflective of the massive start the system had what happened a lesser channel would shock the clicovision failure as a direct result of the infamous video game crash of 1983. while that's not really the case kaliko was actually in much better shape than either atari or mattel going into the crash and in fact 1983 would see an overall increase in colecovision sales and those sales would continue to be strong even into 1984. no the clicovision's downfall as well as the downfall of the entire company of cleco would come from something else the atom the atom was clico's next big thing essentially it was a clico vision expanded into a full computer the home computer market was something coleco was really interested in entering due to their success with video games and the computer market becoming mature and mainstream compared to the other computers of the time the atom would be cheaper more powerful easy to use come with a printer and would even be able to play all of your colecovision games as well as new even more advanced tape based games if excitement for the launch of the clicovision was a 10 out of 10 then the height for the atom would be a 20 out of 10. surely the atom would launch coleco to new heights except for one problem the atom turned out to be the worst computer ever released it had so many problems it's ridiculous i made a video over on our tech channel talking about the atom in more detail where i listed out everything that went wrong with the atom it's not a short list the failure of the atom would lose calico millions upon millions of dollars even worse the coleco brand was seriously tarnished when you heard the name kaliko you'd no longer thought about your fun times playing donkey kong or about cabbage patch dolls no instead you think about that hunk of junk computer you bought that you had to get replaced eight times before they sent you a working model glico would be the butt of jokes for years even long after they discontinued the colecovision and left the tech market entirely in 1985 and those jokes would even continue long after the company's bankruptcy in 1988. even though its story ends in quite the bummer i cannot stress enough just how good of a console the colecovision is if you've never played one before it's definitely worth it to try some games in an emulator or pick up one of many flashback consoles filling store shelves today our colecovision was purchased on ebay for 150 dollars coming with joysticks a small stack of games and the steering wheel expansion and now for the ratings rarity gets a two out of five the clicovision sold fairly well and demand is relatively low for the original console so it's fairly easy to pick one up price gets a four out of five colecovisions are cheap and colecovision games are even cheaper aesthetics get a four out of five the clicovision has a very nice look for it especially considering the time period it's from the early 80s had some ugly consoles this is not one of them it looks great the game library gets a four out of five as well the clego vision has some really good games on it despite not having as many titles as the atari 2600 the quality overall is much higher and finally convenience convenience gets a 3 out of 5. you're still going to have some issues connecting your colecovision to a modern tv but you can simply resolve that by buying a nice flashback console just don't cheap out well that's all i have for you guys today i hope you enjoyed this look at the coleco vision what console would you like to see us cover next time let me know in the comments down below and of course subscribe and i'll see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Newsmakers Games

Views: 1,218,607

Keywords: Video game Retrospective, colecovision, coleco, donkey kong, colecovision collection, colecovision games, colecovision donkey kong, retro gaming, video game console, colecovision review, retrogaming, coleco history, Coleco Vision, coleco adam, colecovision reviews, colecovision original, video game history, coleco adam retrospective, retro video games, history of video games, video game years history, Underated Game system, coleco adam computer, system review, gaming history

Id: pkKKBgBXYSI

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020