ColecoVision

The ColecoVision is a second-generation home video game console developed by Coleco Industries and released in North America in the summer of 1982, distinguished by graphics and sound that approached arcade quality and bundled with a home conversion of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong.¹¹¹³ It debuted in the United States on July 28, 1982, and reached the market with an initial catalog of twelve games.¹⁶¹¹

Coleco Industries began as the Connecticut Leather Company, selling leather goods, swimming pools, and snowmobiles through the 1960s before entering video games.¹³¹⁴ In 1976 it introduced the Telstar, a dedicated console built around the General Instruments AY-3-8500 “Ball & Paddle” chip that played Pong variants; a last-minute FCC violation required the intervention of Ralph Baer, Magnavox, and a ferrite toroid, and Coleco lost $22 million on the line.¹³¹⁴ The company’s later fortunes rested heavily on its Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, which accounted for more than $500 million of an estimated $800 million in revenue in 1984.³

The console’s hardware was designed by engineer Eric Bromley, who had headed research-and-development divisions at coin-op firms including Midway.⁴ Bromley and Coleco chief executive Arnold Greenberg wanted an arcade-quality, cartridge-programmable machine, but a design built around a Texas Instruments video chip and a General Instruments sound chip was too RAM-intensive to hit the target retail price.⁴ The project stalled until 1981, when Bromley read a Wall Street Journal article on falling RAM prices, resubstituted the new figures into his cost analysis, and found the machine came close to its price point; the working title “ColecoVision” stuck when marketing never proposed a better name.⁴

Internally the ColecoVision used off-the-shelf components rather than the custom silicon of the Atari 2600: a Zilog Z80A CPU running at 3.58 MHz, a Texas Instruments TMS9928A video display controller, and a Texas Instruments SN76489A sound chip capable of three simultaneous square-wave tones.¹³ It carried 16 KB of video RAM, 1 KB of general-purpose RAM, and an 8 KB BIOS ROM, with cartridges holding between 8 and 32 KB of ROM.¹³ The video chip generated a 256×192 image at 60 frames per second (50 in PAL regions), drew from a fixed palette of sixteen colors, and could display up to thirty-two 16×16 sprites, though only four could coexist on a single scanline.¹³

Each console shipped with two rectangular controllers modeled after those of Mattel’s Intellivision, combining a numeric keypad — into which thin plastic overlays could be slipped to map keys for a given game — with a short 1.5-inch joystick and side buttons.¹¹¹³ The BIOS displayed the ColecoVision copyright notice for twelve seconds before handing control to the cartridge, an intentional loop that some publishers such as Parker Brothers and Activision bypassed to reclaim storage.¹¹

Donkey Kong and the arcade strategy

Because the machine was built to deliver arcade experiences at home, a smash arcade hit was essential to its success.¹³ Seeking licenses, Bromley traveled to Kyoto to meet Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, whom he described as a canny and often underhanded negotiator who feigned ignorance of English and withheld key concessions until departure time was near.⁴ While searching for a bathroom on the floor above the meeting, Bromley passed an open door and discovered an upright Donkey Kong cabinet — a game not yet well known in the West and not yet noticed by rival Atari.⁴¹³ Coleco negotiated a deal for a $200,000 advance and a $2-per-unit royalty, reportedly drafted on a cocktail napkin, and bundled a faithful home conversion of Donkey Kong with each console.¹³¹⁴ At the time Atari and Mattel had been in a bidding war for the game’s home rights, and Coleco’s pack-in of the arcade hit drove sales of the console to major success.¹⁴

The initial catalog included Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, Sega’s Zaxxon, and lesser-known arcade titles that found a wider audience on the console, such as Lady Bug, Cosmic Avenger, and Venture.¹¹ Around 145 cartridge titles were published for the system over three years, among them Gorf and BurgerTime.¹³¹¹ One retrospective count identified 131 games released in the United States between 1982 and 1985.¹²

Expansion modules and add-ons

The console carried an Expansion Module Interface at the front of the unit that accepted plug-in modules.¹³ Expansion Module No. 1, launched alongside the console, contained an emulator built from off-the-shelf parts that let the ColecoVision play Atari 2600 cartridges.¹⁴ Atari sued Coleco for infringing its 2600 patent, but the courts held that because none of the emulator’s individual components were owned by Atari it was not a patent violation; Coleco went on to sell a standalone 2600 clone, the Coleco Gemini.¹⁴

Expansion Module No. 2, sold packed with the game Turbo, was a driving controller with a steering wheel and a separate gas pedal that plugged into game-pad port one.¹ The wheel turned a slotted disc through a photo-sensitive switch that counted breaks in the light, working much like a traditional ball mouse, while the pedal was a simple on/off switch rather than an analog potentiometer.¹ It functioned identically to the wheel on the Roller Controller and Super Action Controller and was compatible with such titles as Dukes of Hazzard and Destructor.¹ A third module turned the console into the Adam home computer.¹³

Commercial rise and collapse

The ColecoVision sold roughly two million units.⁴¹³ By Christmas 1982 Coleco had sold more than 500,000, and sales passed one million in early 1983.¹¹ Coleco reported that video-game revenue — including cartridges for Atari and Mattel machines as well as the new ColecoVision — would raise the company’s overall revenue to $500 million in 1982, up from $178 million the year before, at a time when Atari’s share of the cartridge business had fallen from 75 percent to under 40 percent amid competition from Coleco, Parker Brothers, Activision, and Imagic.⁶

The video game crash of 1983? and a costly detour into home computing reversed Coleco’s fortunes.¹³³ In June 1983, the same month it introduced the Cabbage Patch Kids, Coleco announced the Adam home computer; the machines it began shipping that October had major technical problems and a much higher return rate than normal, and in 1983 it shipped only about 20 percent of the predicted 500,000 units.³ On January 2, 1985, Coleco announced it was discontinuing the Adam and selling its entire inventory at a loss, expecting substantial fourth-quarter and full-year losses for 1984.³ The company ramped down its video-game division and withdrew from the market by the end of summer 1985, with the ColecoVision officially discontinued by October 1985.¹¹

Outside North America the console was distributed by CBS Electronics and branded the CBS ColecoVision.¹¹⁸ Clones and adapters followed: Spectravideo announced an SV-603 ColecoVision adapter for its SV-318 computer in 1983, and in 1986 Bit Corporation produced a ColecoVision clone, the Dina, sold in the United States by Telegames as the Telegames Personal Arcade.¹¹ The ColecoVision’s off-the-shelf, TMS9918-based design was echoed in Japanese hardware of the period, with enthusiasts noting the influence of the console on Sega’s SG-1000 and the MSX computer standard.²⁰¹³ As of 2026, the ColecoVision brand name was held by River West Brands.¹¹