rob_ocelot

Well, normal in the sense that many trade show prototypes never see the light of day past the show. Normal for products that are over-hyped and under deliver. I did some searching for "Toy Fair intellectual fraud" and the like but came up empty. Leads me to believe it's one of those things thats an industry unspoken "you could do it, but you'd look really stupid doing it".

If someone throws their money at this without doing a modicum of research, even just a casual google search of 'Coleco Chameleon' or 'RetroVGS' then there's probably not much you can do to convince them otherwise. No need to appoint yourself their defender, IMO. Vote with your dollars and don't support the project, with an informed opinion. Your job is done.

These types of trade shows are all about smoke and mirrors -- sizzle and dazzle. Everyone is fibbing in small ways to make their product seem better than their rivals. The show organizers are not responsible for the content or lack thereof of the people who purchased space for a booth, nor are they in the business of policing intellectual property disputes while the show is going on. At worst, it's highly embarassing within the industry to be caught out stealing another company's IP at one of these shows -- that's usually a soft deterrant to these sorts of shennanigans. Smaller fish or companies with no shame or self-awareness might be able to get away with it without anyone noticing.

Probably not the proper venue for that sort of thing. It's not like this is a one-time event and there's plenty of rope elsewhere to trip themselves up on. We've been through this dog and pony show before with the 'kitchen table' demonstration. I suspect this will go right into the Kickstarter and go about the same way as the IGG campaign did. At that point we'll get some more blaming and finger pointing at the 'haters' who doomed the project and we'll gear up for Round 3 -- Where the 'new' console will be even more awesome with even more developers on board. Hopefully someone will step in at that point and say "no" or they run out of other people's money to spend.

I'd pay good money to see a Swede eat socks on camera. I'll bet a Kickstarter for this will generate more money than the Coleco Chameleon's. Don't even need a working sock protoype either!

The design phase requires a hardware guy. John was their hardware guy and he's no longer with them. Kevin was never with them. None of the 'VP of blahblah solutions' types on their 'meet our staff page' is a hardware guy. Unless there is some silent partner in the hardware community who is helping them but keeping their name off board (because, cloak and dagger is awesome?) all we've got here is someone who crammed for their oral book report by badly rewriting the back cover blurb and passing it off as their own work. A pile of shit that was hastily thrown together in the hotel room the night before the Toyfair. Anyone who funds this Kickstarter is not going to end up with a console. You are contributing to the Mike No Longer Wants To Be A Sandwich Arist Fund.

When the inveitable man behind the curtain is shown the backtracking explantion will be "I thought an FPGA and the original hardware were one and the same"

I don't think there's a palm big enough for me to bury my face in after reading this... Mike is banking on people like you who are trying to wish magic retro consoles into existence. Ever wonder why Nigeria has so many princes who are separated from their money?

What I'm finding hard to fathom is there's at least two other people in this venture who had to have (or *should have*) signed off on what was going to be displayed at the Toyfair booth, the booth layout, promo materials like flyers and business cards, etc. Seriously, none of these supposed 'industry veterans' spoke up and said, "You can't take Nintendo's IP to a huge industry trade show and pass off someone else's work as your own, you'll be pulling the feathers out of the tar within the hour"? If this didn't happen then it's back to the same old bullshit of last summer where Mike was witholding important day-to-day business operational info from the other partners (eg. Kevtris pulling out). When your associates learn that one of your major hardware contributors is no longer involved (and actually never was) IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ON CAMERA INTERVIEW your company has far more problems than just cash flow.

Lots of 'variety' and 'various' and blah blah filling up paragraphs of space saying absolutely nothing that wasn't already being said before. This is the same or lesser-capable innards wrapped in the same plastic shell and trotted out with a new coat of paint. In a few months this will all turn sour and you'll be back pointing the finger at forums like AA and throwing your new hardware guy (if one even exists now) under the bus. As the instructions on the back of the bottle say: Rinse, wash, and repeat.

Interesting to note that none of the Coleco logos or the render console have any trademark symbols. Is this a new trend now, to leave those off in the hopes that someone steals the image and you can go after them legally?

Beyond the lack of team dynamics or an established single portal for all your PR I'm more disturbed by the thinking and language on display. If this whole concept is as awesome as you keep telling us then why do phrases like "dodged a bullet there" even creep into the conversation? That is seat-of-your-pants talk not we-are-airtight-and-ready talk. That you even thought throwing this at us in a feeble attempt at assuage any fears over a lack of tangible hardware speaks volumes for your interpretation of what your core audience wanted or even who your target audience is. Whether John broke rank is immaterial, as you get to both grind him under the bus and then praise him for making the bus in the first place. Pretty much the same treatment Kevin got (IMO). I was hesitating posting this cartoon because it hits the nail on the head so squarely but here goes... Your fundraising campaign was your one and only shot of hosting Saturday Night Live and you blew it. You not only farted on the air, you had the gall to blame it on the cameraman and in the same breath asked Lorne Michaels if you could host the show again next week. In an industry where first mistakes are usually fatal unless you have deep enough pockets to buffer the loss there's usually no second chances. You are going to have to work twice as hard and three times as long to get back the people who already had decided to support you.

I think you are seriously overestimating your target market. Asking a few friends and friends-of-friends if they'd want a product like this is a far cry from actual market research with huge sample numbers -- something companies pay *millions* for. What looks on the surface to be a goldmine may actually be the same twenty collectors buying multiples of everything. It's very easy to fall into the trap of myopically deducing that everyone thinks and feels like you do about old games or even gaming in general. Like it or not, the style of games we played in the past are the new disposable entertainment people whittle away at while waiting at the dentist. Just because people are playing these games on their phones doesn't mean they are willing to sit down in front of their TV with a controller and play them. We are talking about two very different animals here. I wouldn't use the homebrew developer community as a model either. Almost all homebrews I've seen are labours of love that probably lost money. Just because they are low print runs and sell for hundreds or thousands on the secondary market doesn't mean there's a viable market there either. If this practice was such a cash cow why doesn't every homebrew developer just hold back most of their run of the game and sell it on ebay for inflated prices? Name dropping a bunch of developers means squat if there's no hardware for them to develop on. If you can't stick to a basic verbal agreement not to spill the beans about a company's involvement then you are setting yourself up in the future for some large monetary losses for breaking what will be legal NDA's. If this concept is as good as you say it is then it should be able to stand on it's own merits and not need propping up from Konami and the like. Remember, big console makers take a loss on the hardware to get market penetration and then make their money on software. Even then it takes years to see a return on investment. If you are in this for the long haul then it's going to be a very lean first few years. At some point you will hit saturation, where everyone who wanted an RVGS will have bought one and you will have an even steeper uphill battle to get the attention of the people who weren't interested in it in the first place. That, or you come up with new ways to get the same people who already bought the hardware to reinvest in it. Sony and Microsoft have entire divisions working day and night on this very problem, so why again should I take notice when you *say* you can do this better. Do it better. Show me. Then we'll talk. tl/dr: Don't put the cart(tridge) before the horse... er hardware.

Your official RetroVGS knee pads are a little dirty. You should wash them.

30 years from now... *Many of us will be dead *We definitely won't be using analog video, much less HDMI *We very likely will have undergone some sort of economic fallback or collapse. Kind of hard to pass your beloved precious gaming artefacts on to your children or grandchildren when they are more concerned about their next meal *There will still be DC-3 aircraft in the air *You will encounter more unicorn farts than you will RetroVGS consoles

But the train is still full steam ahead with no sign of stopping. I'm sure at least one of the trio will bail before we hit the end but it's the stubborness of the principals involved that keeps me coming back to see what new unintentionally hillarious things get said off the cuff. I think the Triverse interview is just the tip of the iceberg. Face it, the gaming community hasn't had quite this slice of entertainment pie since the press scandals last year. One way to salvage this mess might be for them to make their own frank documentary about how and why it failed. Terry Gilliam style.

I bet you $10 a certain someone is going to threaten AA to give up the identities of all the posters on this thread so we can be sued for libel. If that happens we can throw a big 'You don't even know what libel is' party for everyone in the thread at my loft. I'll supply drinks.

Carl, were the three all in the same room for the interview or were these different Skype connections from different locations? They didn't really seem to know what each other was going to be talking about. Woita not knowing who Kevin was.... OMFG, priceless.

It's this part of the inverview that really displays just how much they don't have their shit together. Not only are they not on the same page, each is reading from a different book! Mike's telling us the system isn't for emulation, so go buy a Retron 5 or roll your own. John's telling us to go play retro on the old hardware (which I thought was the main push for the RVGS -- old hardware that doesn't break down and you can play on your HDTV) Steve and John don't even agree whether the FPGA is necessary (because this machine isn't about emulation, but can do it... it just might need additional hardware...or not) If these guys are THAT confused then how are they supposed to address the confusion in their customer base?

Reading Triverse's interview with the team (thanks for the work, BTW!). I really don't get what their problem is with cart ports that wear out -- and they want to include one that will last 100 years. Every mechanical device wears out. Those with protection against wearing out have coatings or lubrication that must be maintained. You might not think of a cartridge port as a straightforward 'mechanical device' but most people don't consider books as mechanical devices either. Everytime you use or enjoy them a part of them wears away or degrades -- you can't apply force and generate work (in the physics sense) and not do some miniscule damage somewhere. Physics is working against you. Over the course of a console's lifetime a certain percentage of the units will have failures, no matter how good and airtight you think the QC might be. Lets pick a number, say 5% of the RVGA's made will have a cart port fail in 5 years. That number will at least double over the next five years, not including console that get repaired. Extrapolate that to 50 or 100 years. If you design your cart port so hardy that you eliminate those early 5% then you are throwing good money down a hole chasing those few consoles that would have been missed by your QC anyway. It makes far more economic sense to keep a modest wharehouse of spare parts for 100 years and replace them as needed. Trying to satisify that 5% of gamers who likely would find something else to be upset about doesn't sound like a good strategy to me nor does designing something so bulletproof that your sales flatline after a few years when everyone who wanted one has one. They will run themselves out of their own business. It reminds me of people who ask "If airplane black boxes always survive an air crash why don't they just make the whole plane out of what they make black boxes out of?"

We used to call games like that 'homebrews'. Then someone decided they could do this full time and thus the term 'commercial homebrew' was born. My first impression of Gunlord -- "Wow someone ripped off Turrican so much it hurts, right down to apeing Huelsbeck's music". However, I appreciate what Gunlord represents in the 'old way' of game design so I can't harp on it too much.

What I'm wondering now is when is the plug going to be pulled? I suspect Mike is going to drive the train to the very (bitter) end of the track because this is no longer business to him, it's a personal crusade. Marketers are taught to communicate with their audience on an emotional-associative level and the marketing arm of the trio is the reason why the campaign is all over the place in it's presentation and communication. The guy who feels this was all his idea and has (IMO) put in the least amount of technical work but has deluded himself into thinking it's solely his project and thinks quoting buzzwords as equivalent to real knowledge is the one holding the reins. Last minute changes because of "better" ideas, sudden new paradigms for their business model that even their webmasters can't keep up with, all kinds of emotionally driven schoolyard politics on social media, spending more time and energy blaming others than making constructive solutions -- all of this junk is sabotaging the business in ways that reeks of "if I can't have it, then no one else can" type of scorched earth thinking. I suspect this would have gone down differently if it was three technical guys with an idea and a marketing guy stepped in to help them focus their idea into business model. At least in that scheme they could fire the marketing guy for putting the cart before the horse. You'll notice that the other two guys aren't saying much, and when one of them did it looked stiff and like he had no other choice BUT to. Mike does all the talking and it's a 10/90 signal to noise ratio. He talks so much he contradicts himself and doesn't realize he's done it in the same interview session. For this guy to come clean and admit he's screwed up would mean he'd have to be honest with himself, and that's clearly not happening. I would not be entirely shocked if the next move was to delete the other two from the proceedings and continue this as a one man campaign against the 'internet bulles' that are in his mind the real cause of this situation. Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Mo.... er RetroVGS

Careful, admitting that in the open could get you labelled as a 'schadenfreuder'.

Watching that video reminds me of this: Power goes in here and video games come out the other end, here. Simple, really.

I don't understand the fascination (or fetish) Retrogamers have with playing cartridges. It's like a selective memory for the 'good old times' that isolates one aspect of the period but ignores everything else happening at the same time that was crappy. Cartridges were a necessary evil for delivering content because other forms of media were too expensive, fragile, complicated, or just plain didn't exist. Consoles back in the day were successful IN SPITE OF cartridges, not because of them. How about those terrible RF modulator boxes you had to screw into the back of your TV? You know, the ones that buzzed with interference whenever someone on your street so much as turned on a blender. I can fully understand using a CRT over an LCD due to lag, but would anyone willingly pick RF over composite? How about those awkward joysticks that were just a little too big for your ten year old hands? I don't see anyone singing the praises of the 5200 or Colecovision controllers these days like they were some fine wine. Today, your 40+ year old hands are more comfortable with the USB joypad and custom button macros -- but the game HAS to be on a cartridge or my whole retro experience isn't 'pure'! It's a no-win situation for the RetroVGS. They want to make a console that will fill a percieved niche but it also has to conform to the industry standards to make it usable in a modern living room, including the ability to display on a hi-def TV. Gamers sort of expect conveniences like being able to turn on the whole shebang wirelessly from the couch -- and then in a weird display of creative anachronism have to get up and walk across the room to plug in a cartridge. Either you are hardcore retro or you are weekend warrior retro. Two very distinct markets that I personally don't think a one-console Swiss Army Knife can straddle.