Downland1983

I really enjoyed playing "Infernax", which took inspiration from Zelda II and Simon's Quest. Specifically, there are a lot of Castlevania references/homages in the game. I liked it so much that after first completing the game, I went back for the "Ultimate Good" ending. Shovel Knight, as Punisher5.0 mentioned is another great game that I would recommend as well. I've played and completed "Shovel of Hope", "Plague of Shadows", and "Specter of Torment". Reminds me that I need to get back to "King of Cards".

COLECO ADAM 5 1/4” Disk Drive ColecoVision COMPUTER RARE NOT COMPLETE CIB RARE VINTAGE COLECO ADAM 5 1/4” Disk Drive ColecoVision COMPUTER RARE. Not complete. Only what is pictured is included. Condition is "Acceptable". Shipped with USPS Priority Mail. This has not been tested but was purchased in working condition. Only the box, foam, and disk drive unit, no additional parts pieces included. Only what is pictured. See pictures for condition. Due to shipping I cannot guarantee that the item will still work upon arrival so assume it is not working. It's "NOT COMPLETE", but it's "CIB" at the same time... ?

The other thing is, the purchase orders to retailers aren't guaranteed sales in and of themselves either. If the Amico does release and flop, those retailers are going to have to clearance their purchased inventory to get rid of the undesired/unsold stock. Retailers typically have an agreement in place with their vendors (in this case, Intellivision Entertainment), where the vendor has to eat, in most cases, the majority of that loss. And since IE is a startup, as you say, they would have almost no leverage with Best Buy or Gamestop to establish terms that would favor IE in that situation. Take the PlayStation Classic for example. Sony released it in December 2018 at $99. Before the end of even that first month, retailers like Best Buy found themselves already slashing the price almost in half to $59. By March of 2019, the price was slashed again to $40. By July, they were practically trying to give away still unsold units at $20. That's why most people don't consider those Best Buy and Gamestop purchase orders of the Amico to be profit-sold units until they are actually seen being sold off the shelf in quantity. The fact that IE hasn't shown the capability to even fulfill those purchase orders doesn't help matters. They are like the entrepenuers you see on Shark Tank in search of a large cash infusion because of how many purchase orders they claim to have had to pass up due to not having the funds for production. "Retail buyers will always push to have brands cover 100% of the markdown liability. That is, 100% of what the retailer would have made had the item not been discounted. You can negotiate that down to half or less than half of 100%, depending on how creative and knowledgeable you are about how retail works." Markdowns. What they are, why you need to consider them, and strategies for minimizing your risk.

Yeah, that's true. I included it because it appeared in a list of Biggest marketing research fails of all time, and because of how memorable Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" campaign was that appeared all over television networks lampooning Vista at the time.

You can spend a ton of money doing "market research" and still be wildly wrong regarding your assumptions/conclusions of what the buying public truly wants. It doesn't mean that market actually exists no matter what your data extrapolations tell you at the time.

No, the misspellings are to set the box apart as the rare variant edition for collectors!

It seems to me they are absolutely paying for parts twice, considering the $1.35 million paid to Ark Electronics for components that IE admitted they have not and may never receive or the cash back that was used to purchase them. Since they have or will have to repurchase those components from someone else, the components themselves are being paid for twice. I made sure to mention that in the tail end of my post, which you edited out in your reply.

The boxes came out, yes. The games themselves I would perceive as still being in the "hopes and dreams" category, considering the fact that two of them were being worked on a developer that went out of business and was liquidated last year.

Taking a loan and using it to buy parts doesn't make the parts free. Taking out an $810,000 loan and buying $810,000 worth of parts doesn't equal an $810,000 spend for Intellivision. Paying back the loan absolutely is a loss. They have to pay someone for the parts, and they also have to pay back Sudesh Aggarwal for the loan. So, they are paying twice for the same thing. To correct your logic, Intellivision essentially spent $1,620,000 on $810,000 worth of parts. Since we're talking about parts and manufacturing, it's even worse than that since the same SEC filing also stated that "Intellivision now admits that it cannot account for $1.35 million paid to Ark Electronics USA, a Chinese electronics manufacturing firm with a headquarters in California. Monday's disclosure blames the issue on a "contract dispute" without explaining further, but Intellivision indicates that the company may not be able to recover either the cash or any console-making components that Ark has already purchased."

The wiki says that it was removed from the app store in March 2020. My biggest gripe with mobile gaming. Games get pulled from the stores as their servers get shut down when the developer no longer wishes to support it or loses the license to the IP. I used to play GI Joe: Battlegrounds and Star Trek: Wrath of Gems. Both gone.

IE is currently 7-8 million dollars in debt to multiple parties. If they go to bankruptcy, it's usually only the largest investors/lendors that see any money back at all from the dismantling. I doubt the $100 backers would see a dime returned unless they request a refund that gets honored before the company officially goes belly up.

A lot of eye-popping info in that latest SEC filing. The inflated price of the console over the sum of its parts suddenly makes sense. It wasn't even profit margin. It was the need to cover an extremely bad $810,000 loan that stipulated $100 of every console sold needed to be paid to Sudesh Aggarwal until the load was repaid in full. And, they need another 10 million (2 funding rounds of $5 million each) just to keep the company afloat for another 7-9 months?

Exact same for me. In Super Mario Bros, I never mastered the 1-up mechanic from repeatedly kicking the koopa troopa into the staircase, and I would always run out of lives in world 8. I had the same problem with Super Mario Bros 3, always getting stuck in World 8. Meanwhile, I beat Super Mario Bros 2 countless times.

I've gotten drift on a couple of my older joycons. I've always just sprayed Deoxit into the thumsticks, no disassembly required. It usually eliminates the drift for several months at a time until dust/dead skin reaccumulates inside it and needs a fresh spray out.

I had a ColecoVision growing up, but didn't even know what the Adam was until I was much older (I was 7 when it released). My family bridged the gap of the Video Game Crash between the ColecoVision and the NES with a TRS-80 Color Computer 2.

My best friend had NFL Football, which was the first NES football game to have the NFL license. I remember being particularly disappointed with it. If I recall the passing game was awful. We got a lot more fun out of Tecmo Bowl, which came out at the same time. While Tecmo Bowl didn't carry the NFL license, it did have the license for player names from the NFLPA (which NFL Football ironically did not), and the gameplay was just altogether superior.

The Coleco Adam trifecta, but ouch at the price! ColecoAdam Arcade Super Game Pack Full Set CIB Donkey Kong Donkey Kong Jr Zaxxon I have Donkey Kong Jr and Zaxxon, but not looking to spend $1K+ to complete the set.

I'm definitely going to be picking it up when it releases. I have a few games in the series, although the only 1 that I got so hooked on that I played it start to finish without getting sidetracked by other games was SMT Devil Survivor Overclocked on 3DS. I think it helped that I had a days long power outage due to Hurricane Irene just after that 3DS enhanced port released in 2011. So, I was playing a lot of 3DS at home with no TV or console games to distract me. Not to say that's the only reason I enjoyed the game though, far from it. I also have Devil Summoner Soul Hackers and Shin Megami Tensei IV on 3DS, which I started but haven't gotten back to finishing yet. And, I also started the SMT III Nocturne remaster on Switch recently.

Ah, I missed your original question of being tied to whether or not the threat had anything to do with the retailer carrying competitors. No, the threat itself was specifically WoW withholding Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag (the hot retail items at the time) from stores who weren't interested in placing orders for the NES.

I have no idea. I have read that book which Wikipedia also uses that as the source of the quote.

Coleco Industries prided themselves on being able to follow trends, from electronics (Coleco Vision) to dolls (Cabbage Patch Kids). But, they famously made a bad bet on the Adam when trying to follow the shift towards home computers which launched with faulty hardware. They were never able to recover from the bad reputation and losses acquired by that misstep. They never tried to make the next ColecoVision after failing to turn it into a computer since management wanted to get out of electronics completely at that point. And so they focused on Cabbage Patch Kids, Sectaurs, Alf dolls, and later hoping the acquisition of Scrabble and Parcheesi would keep things going. I don't buy the viewpoint that video games were cool in 1984, then uncool from 1985 through 1986, and suddenly cool again in 1987. When a fad becomes unpopular to the point that it's taboo for the "cool kids" to be seen with, and the hangers on get ridiculed, it doesn't make a comeback in 3 years. Cavaricci jeans didn't suddenly become ubiquitous in high schools 3 years after they went out of style. Pogs returned to obscurity. Disco stayed dead. Etc. Retailers got themselves burned in the early 80's by carrying a glut of bad third party games they couldn't sell at full price, because they didn't understand the market yet, and so they stopped carrying everything. I personally remember trips with my father in the mid-80's to Toys R Us in the tri-state area of the US looking for "new" games for our ColecoVision and being disappointed that there weren't any anymore. My older brother and I had to use our TRS-80 CoCo2 to get through those years until the NES arrived. That's when gaming mags started circulating around the school buses and cafeterias again. Not because it was a cool fad again, but because it was something that was available again.

Worlds of Wonder was hugely successful with Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag at the time. They were able to use that as leverage with retailers on Nintendo's behalf. As WoW salesman Jim Whimms told it, if a retailer didn't want to place an order for the NES, they needn't bother placing an order for the currently hot toy items of Teddy Ruxpin or Laser Tag either. To retailers who were bitterly adamant against hearing the words "video game", WoW salesman Jim Whims distinctly recalled delivering an ultimatum: "if you want to sell Teddy Ruxpin and you want to sell Lazer Tag, you're gonna sell Nintendo as well. And if you feel that strongly about it, then you ought to just resign the line now." Historian Steven Kent wrote, "Anyone who wanted to sell Teddy Ruxpin and Lazer Tag, including Sears and Toys R Us, was going to hear about the Nintendo Entertainment System."

It wasn't fear. It was need of establishing a distribution chain which Nintendo did not have in North America. It's not a coincidence that when the NES released in NA, Nintendo used Worlds of Wonder as its distribution partner. Worlds of Wonder had been founded by ex-Atari executives and employees.

Yeah, but which one still generates $900 million per year, and which one sells speaker hats now?