Downland1983

Oh, cool. I'll give that a try tonight.

Kind offer, but I think I'll hang on to it. Yeah. I had a Coleco Vision growing up, but never knew anything about the Adam until many years later (we had a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 as our first family computer). I wish I had known about these back when Adam's House/eColeco was selling them. Even so, I'm very happy to now have Donkey Kong Jr alongside the Zaxxon I was able to get last year. A couple of years ago, someone was selling all 3 of the Adam arcade cabinet styled boxes (box only): Zaxxon box sold for $66. https://www.ebay.com/itm/-/252515589321 Donkey Kong Jr. box sold for $205. https://www.ebay.com/itm/262597312004 And the Donkey Kong box sold for $250!! https://www.ebay.com/itm/262597323309

Was this a decent buy? https://www.ebay.com/itm/162859046304?ul_noapp=true I saw just the box with no game cassette or manual sell for $205 a while back: https://www.ebay.com/itm/-/262597312004

Ah, okay. I was going to try that next. Thanks for confirming.

Did you ever get an answer on this? I have Sydney Hunter and The Sacred Tribe for Coleco Vision as well, and have had the same problem trying to play the game on my Adam.

Very well thought out. I would love to see this come to fruition, as I would definitely be down for a copy. I loved the Scotland Yard board game, by the way. I had it as a kid, rebought it years later as an adult, and even bought the DS version.

Wow, awesome to see how right my guess was. It was Head to Head Baseball after all. The text in yellow was "Electronic".

Based on the caption description "exclusive licenses in arcade, sports, gaming, fantasy, play & learn..." compared to the names that can be clearly made out, I'm inclined to think the hard to read cartridge must be a sports game. Maybe "Head to Head" Football or Baseball before those games were changed to "Super Action" and released with the Super Action Controllers? I'm envisioning "Head to Head" being stacked vertically in the red text, and then football or baseball to the right of that in yellow. Although that leaves some text in blue above that which I haven't accounted for. It's a total guess on my part, and it might not even match up with the lettering that is visible though.

My pleasure. Glad I could help.

I did a quick search, and others mentioned noticing the same thing with their Imagic Wing War carts in a thread from 2009-2010. There were only a few replies and it was chalked up to a factory mix-up. But, it does confirm that others have encountered Wing War carts that play Moonsweeper as well. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/139537-colecovision-fans-i-have-wing-war-but-the-game-plays-moonsweeper/

lol, I have a similar memory except I think it was a coin-op strip poker at this particular truck stop. I recall us getting the model almost nude before we ran out of quarters. A trucker who had been watching comes over and says, "Let's see if we can't get her to show us her bush" (or something along those lines). He then popped in a few quarters and finished stripping the model for us. Good times, indeed.

Yes, I agree. Team Pixelboy is very deserving of a subforum.

Actually, that was Joshua (controlling the WOPR) who learned that lesson.

Yeah, I'd say keep an eye out on eBay for other listings and be patient. I nabbed one last summer CIB & working for $102.50, probably mainly because it was listed as local pick-up only. I was going to be traveling out of state on vacation within weeks of the listing anyway, so I really lucked out with the timing of being able to pick it up on my way home.

Oh, okay. I missed those then. I had my ebay search set to "Zaxxon Adam box", and this was the first hit I got since the empty box that sold in June last year. The box is dinged up, but in pretty good shape overall. It's in better shape than the one schoolgirl has had listed for a year at obscene price. I'm very happy with having it in my collection.

Thanks, I was pretty excited when it arrived. My minimum bid was outbid within hours, so I decided to just watch the rest of the auction to see what it would go for. On the last day, the higher bid was retracted and I won. So, I think it might have been a shill bid that got retracted when I didn't bite and try to bid over it.

Was this a good deal? http://www.ebay.com/itm/332194459475?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT According to ecoleco's site, he used to sell them for $43.95, but completely sold out. I know an empty Zaxxon box sold for $66 last September. But I haven't seen a CIB in the past year by itself other than the one school_girl_in_a_short_dress has been trying to get $500 from for the past year.

Okay, now you are taking it a bit far. Colecovision was not "largely rejected". The Colecovision was hugely successful for Coleco. Unfortunately, Coleco decided to put all of it's eggs in the Adam Family Computer basket next. When faulty batches went out at launch, an irreversible bad impression was left which the Adam never had a chance to come back from. Like the saying goes, you only get 1 chance to make a 1st impression. From New York Times, January 3, 1985: With Colecovision, the company already had a reputation as a winner in consumer electronics. ''We move with blinding speed,'' Mr. Greenberg boasted in the headier days of 1983, when the company was at its zenith. ''And we never try to be the lowest-cost producer.'' It was that strategy, the analysts were saying then, that could turn the Adam into Coleco's brilliant second act. And the early reviews of the machine fueled the optimism. The Adam's attractiveness lay in its packaging: It combined disparate parts - a computer, a printer, a keyboard, and software - in a ''bundled system'' that sold for about $700. By fall, however, the company was running into snags. The first shipments were delayed. Then systems were rushed out the factory door in Amsterdam, N.Y., in time for Christmas, only to be returned by angry consumers who complained of a variety of quality-control problems. 'A Bad Reputation' ''The bottom line was that they missed Christmas, and the quality problems gave Adam a bad reputation,'' said Jan Lewis, a senior analyst at Infocorp, a Cupertino, Calif., market research firm. The stock market reacted sharply. While Coleco shares sold for just below $60 a share when the Adam was first introduced, the combination of the production problems and rampant price cutting sent the stock below $20 by that December. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/03/business/coleco-gives-up-on-the-adam.html It was the losses on the Adam that caused Coleco to exit electronics all together and focus on their line of Cabbage Patch Dolls. But, the ColecoVision itself was never viewed as a failure, either then or now.

It's good that you bring up the console gamers going to 8 bit computers during the crash, because the home computer price war of the early 80's was another strong contributor to the crash itself. When home computers which had more applications than just video games came down to a sub-$200 price point, they became more appealing of a purchase than a $200 console that only had 1 application.

Because the video game industry was new to retail, it was the retailers themselves who didn't know how to order for it. They weren't able to discern the next Asteroids or Pitfall! from shovelware crap. And it wasn't that instead of buying a $40 game, parents were spending $40 buying their kids 8 bargain bin games at $5 a piece. They were spending $5 on one bargain bin game and calling it a day content with having saved $35 in the process. The spend was not the same the way you imply it was. Also, no matter how many bargain bin games sold, by the very nature of their markdowns, they represented lost revenue for the industry in and of themselves. Because the bargain bins were so clogged with shovelware, the retailers didn't want to deal with it anymore, so they curtailed their orders all together. It's funny that you mention the Wii, because like the Atari 2600, the Wii suffered from a glut of shovelware produced by 3rd parties looking to make a quick cheap cash grab off a huge userbase. It's successor suffered from an identity crisis and poor marketing. Because the casual consumer didn't have their ear to the ground and know that the Wii U was an entirely new system, they figured it was a prohibitively expensive add-on to the Wii, which they already had, and so ignored it. Nintendo learned a great deal from this. They gave the Switch a name that divorced itself from the Wii & Wii U, paid for a Super Bowl commercial viewed by 111.19 million people (the first time Nintendo has ever aired a commercial during the Super Bowl in the company's history) and have continued to air ads on tv (and even in movie theaters) on a regular basis. As a result, the Switch has been sold out on a regular basis prompting Nintendo to increase their current manufacture order to 16 million units, which is more units than the Wii U was able to sell from 2012 up to now. But, I digress. If it was the consumer who soured on video games in the mid-80's and not the retailers, there wouldn't have been a market for the NES to explode into, and there wouldn't have been a need for Nintendo to alter the identity of the Famicom into something else just to get it into the stores. The demand was there.

"Those awful games flooded the market at huge discounts, and ruined the video game business" - David Crane (Co-Founder of Activision) http://www.arcadeattack.co.uk/david-crane/ The entire reason that Nintendo had to bring the Famicom over to the US as "The Nintendo Entertainment System" and bundle it with R.O.B. was because the U.S. retailers didn't want to place orders for another video game console. They had to market it as a toy. That wasn't to assuage the consumers who were ready for more video games. It was to assuage the fears of the retailers who had been burned just a couple of years prior by over saturation of bad games. This also led Nintendo to come up with the measures they used in the late 80's to limit the freedom of 3rd Parties that so many consider draconian now, but in reality brought stability back to the video game market at a time that desperately needed it. That is the exact point I'm trying to get across to zzip.

Pokémon Go may have dropped off in activity, but it's not like it's taking mobile down with it. Yes, I still had a Coleco Vision in 1985, and yes I was still clamoring for new games. But, during the video game crash there were no new games to be had. On the software-side, there were no new games to be bought no matter how many times my father took me to Toys R Us to check. My brother and I had to get our gaming fix on our dad's TRS-80 Color Computer 2 from 1985 until we got an NES. Not because we wanted to, but because we had (not that I don't have extremely fond memories of Downland, Dungeon's of Daggorath, etc). I don't ever remember video games being uncool. Arcades may not have been explosively popular in the mid to late 80's, but they were still popular even into the early 90's. At least where I am. Shovelware had a huge impact on bringing the early 80's console market to a halt. Retailers at the time didn't know any better in the early 80's when order software titles for their shelves and when huge piles of started filling the bargain bins, they stopped ordering which helped crash the whole system much like how rampant speculation can drive a stock market crash. If console gaming were just a fad fueled by Pac-Mania, it wouldn't have come back as strong as it did with the NES and remain strong ever since.

I don't think saying that Pac-mania wearing off caused the video game crash in North America is very accurate.

"Hello, you!" Totally agree. I love me some "Fact Hunt" and "Games That Yanks Can't Wank".

Decathalon - 8,116 Best I can do. I had to hot swap in a Tac-2 controller from my Commodore 64 after start-up for better performance. For some reason, any time I register a score on the High Jump or Pole Vault, it resets back to Attempt 1 and won't continue to the next event until I register 3 consecutive misses? 2 events wouldn't have made up the 2100 points I'm still behind by though, so congrats again NCG.