ColecoVision

The president of Coleco – originally the Connecticut Leather Company! – had long aspired to create a machine that could produce arcade quality games, but was constrained by cost practicalities. But, by the early 80s the price of RAM had fallen and designs that were previously unaffordable were now within reach. Coleco had a machine design; they needed a killer app that would sell it.

Coleco had watched Atari sell the 2600 on the back of licenced conversions of arcade games, so they approached Nintendo. Nintendo had not yet released Donkey Kong in western markets, but Eric Bromley had played it while visiting Nintendo and knew it would likely be a hit.

Coleco sold 500,000 units between August and Christmas 1982, in part on the strength of Donkey Kong as the bundled game that came with the console. The ColecoVision version was an incredibly faithful version of the arcade machine, with very similar graphics, music and sound effect – although it did omit one of the four levels from the original.

The relationship between Nintendo and Coleco very nearly culminated with Nintendo marketing and selling the ColecoVision in Japan. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on which side of history you stand – the two companies couldn’t agree terms and as the Coleco representative left, the Nintendo president observed that they would just have to develop their own game console. That console was the Famicon – known in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES. The NES would go on to be one of the most successful games consoles of all time, selling nearly 62 million in its lifetime. The ColecoVision? A paltry 2 million, mostly sold in the US.

Eventually discontinued in mid-1985, the ColecoVision can be called the Betamax of the 80s home console market: technically superior, but ultimately defeated by market forces.