ColecoVision is third gen, why don't you guys have it changed on Wiki

[goldenegg]

 

Well, I just thought you guys cared about this issue, obviously not. OK your loss.

 

What 'issue'? You say that as if there is a problem that needs to be addressed, but there isn't. Generation rankings are an arbitrary system that provides no real value.

[youki]

I don't really about Console's Generation but i have personnaly always considered the following.

 

1st generation : Pong and Derivated and Console with cartridge that does not use MicroProcesseur. (pong, odyssey, fairchild ..etc )

2nd generation : Console using cartrige and real Microprocesseurs ( Atari VCS, Intellivision, Colecovision, Vectrex, Odyssey 2, advision , Sg1000 etc... )

3nd generation: Console 8 bit "modern" / post crash : NES, SMS , 7800, PC Engine , Gx 4000 ..

4nd generation: Console 16 - 16/32 bits like : Genesis, SNES , Jaguar , etc...

5nd generation: Console "3d" : PS one, Saturn, N64

6nd generation: Console 3d next gen : Dreamcast, Gamecube, Xbox, ps2

sh*t generation... all that comes after!!!

 

So for me Coleco, would be more 2nd generation.

[+Gemintronic]

My version of reality pretty much matches the above. Except I feel the Jag competed with the PS1 generation.

 

I honestly thought the O.P. was joking around. At least in my childhood the coleco competed with the VCS and Inty. No one remembered it when the SMS and NES came around.

[Trebor]

Having lived through the era, indeed, the Atari 2600, ColecoVision & Intellivision went together - As did the game marketing for those systems.

 

These kind of commercials I recall quite fondly:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNoYtU7P-lY

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd9DgHIt6-E

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA-Av431iV8

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnf-x6ZTwTU

 

There were no competition, complimentary, or comparison commercials inclusive of the ColecoVision during the 7800/NES/SMS era (Commonly referred to as 3rd Gen).

[Keatah]

I tend to think of things in "eras" or "ages" such as:

 

The 8-bit era

The 16-bit era

End of the floppy disk era

Era of DRM

Pre-cartridge era

Black and White or Color era

Pre-internet era

The era of the CD-ROM

Era of Spinners or the era of solids

..and so on and so forth.

 

These arbitrary "categories" are chosen around technological change and emphasize the passing of one technology to another. The era of cartridges gave way to the CD-ROM, for example. Or Solid State Drives ushered in a new era of performance at the expense of the spinner.

 

As we move forward (and history gets recorded) each generation or era of things will tend to widen and expand from the specific to the general. To some modern day kid, the era of classic games might consist of anything made prior to the PS4 and XBox1. Two years later this will have to be reconsidered.

 

Age can be a little more defined as it marks the beginning of a technological shift as opposed to era - time span. The age of the internet. The Information Age. But in general writings geared toward the layperson, age and era are nearly interchangeable and their meaning made clear through context.

 

Writers and the industry are of course welcome to define generations and eras however they see fit. But there will always be a nagging thought lingering around the scope of each divide. And the work will grow inaccurate over time.

 

I would also propose the using the term "age" like so, "The age of the videogame is upon us." In this manner it describes society's infatuation with videogames in the 1980's. It isn't time specific, but rather revolves around the beginning of when something was becoming popular. And yet there was no digital on-off switch as to when videogames were popular, no markable date on the calendar.

 

Heh. Note my own contradictions. Good luck to all in figuring it out!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_%28geology%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age

[ColecoDan]

Cause I don't care about Wiki in the least bit and never look at it for info.

[Jess Ragan]

It's all a marketing ploy anyway. But yeah, that high voltage wants the Colecovision and 5200 to be part of the third generation and not the Famicom (released a year after the CV & 5200) shows the agenda he's pushing and has nothing to do with "accuracy".

 

He does hate him some Nintendo. At the same time, the Famicom was designed just one year after the ColecoVision and Atari 5200, and a case could be made that it's of the same generation. The game crash does complicate things, though. The systems that came after it were different enough from what had come before them that it's difficult to justify lumping them all together.

 

Personally, I can't stand it when people try to put the Dreamcast in the same generation as the original Playstation. Nope, sorry, the system you're looking for is the Saturn. Thanks for playing, though! You may not know dick about gaming history, but you'll get a free year of Turtle Wax and a copy of the home game just for being here.

[Rhomaios]

 

He does hate him some Nintendo. At the same time, the Famicom was designed just one year after the ColecoVision and Atari 5200, and a case could be made that it's of the same generation. The game crash does complicate things, though. The systems that came after it were different enough from what had come before them that it's difficult to justify lumping them all together.

 

Personally, I can't stand it when people try to put the Dreamcast in the same generation as the original Playstation. Nope, sorry, the system you're looking for is the Saturn. Thanks for playing, though! You may not know dick about gaming history, but you'll get a free year of Turtle Wax and a copy of the home game just for being here.

 

Ha, yeah, that's just ignorance!

[Keatah]

Cause I don't care about Wiki in the least bit and never look at it for info.

Your loss.

 

Moving on.. It is clear that generation can really be anything you want it to be. All that is required is enough context and contrast - and the term defines itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_(disambiguation)

 

It's really this way with all language. 5 billion+ agree that the first meaning of "stop" means to cease motion. A slightly lesser known meaning of "stop" is defined points along a route or continuum. Consider markings and indentations on a dial, turn it to the first stop. Or stations along a bus route, hey-hey!! There's a bus stop.

[Keatah]

Personally, I can't stand it when people try to put the Dreamcast in the same generation as the original Playstation. Nope, sorry, the system you're looking for is the Saturn. Thanks for playing, though! You may not know dick about gaming history, but you'll get a free year of Turtle Wax and a copy of the home game just for being here.

 

I never really had a Dreamcast or Saturn or PS1 for any, therefore I know little about the systems. But I do know they were at the beginning of CDROM based console era, right in the middle of the "virtual reality" age. Whether they had 4th generation or 8th generation memory technology.. Or 6th generation CPU technology.. Who's to say?

 

And since these game consoles had mixtures of generations of tech, how much weight and influence does each sub-system have in defining what overall generation a console belongs to? Or do we skip that and look at some factor or feature of the games they played? Time difference between a series of older systems and these? How do you group them?

 

People do tend to pick out a defining feature that's being used for the first time. Consoles with CD-ROM and consoles without CD-ROM. Right there is a potential delineation for a generation. And then you have generations within generations. I.e. second generation CD-ROM console. Defined how?

 

CD-ROM is a major feature. All the while memory bus-width has more performance weight. But width isn't a commonly known feature. Too obscure now. So no one ever attempted assigning a generation label based around bus-widths.

 

But 8-bit vs. 16-bit. That was big difference and nearly everyone knew the advantages. And it was derived from the bitness of the CPU. Thus we have the 8-bit era, and 16-bit era. The transition to 32-bits wasn't as big a marketing deal and so it has no era associated with it. The term "32-bit era" may come into focus once the 64-bit CPUs age a little more and when all software developers stop writing and compiling 32-bit software. Maybe? Maybe not?

Edited September 8, 2014 by Keatah

[Manoau2002]

The problem with the whole generation thing is that there are systems that don't fit in nicely arranged categories.The three systems that come to my mind are the Colecovision, Atari 7800, and the pc engine/turbografx 16.

[ApolloBoy]

There's also the SG-1000 which was released on the same day as the Famicom and had games produced for it until 1987, but has the exact same capabilities as the ColecoVision.

[NIAD]

This whole categorization of game systems is a royal mess and one that will never be completely agreed upon by the masses. The point that I think is being missed here pertaining to High Voltage's original post as well as his posts in other threads is that the classification of the CV as a 3rd Generation or Wave system was made by the manufacturer, the Ad Companies that were hired by Coleco if they didn't handle it internally, the magazines of the time and the writers/authors of the articles and reviews of the time.

 

Every argument or discussion for or against has merit and always proves to be interesting reading... to me at least.

[Murph74]

It certainly does appear to be subjective as to what you define as a 'generation'. For me, the generational term is more akin to what was available and popular in the marketplace in a given timeframe-- systems that competed with each other directly. While I've not put a ton of thought into it, I'd likely sort the generations by major systems on the timeline, with the also-rans as subsections of the generations. Which would mean Atari, Intellivision and Colecovision were the leaders of Generation 1 in my book. NES/SMS were Gen 2, SNES/TG16/GEN were Gen 3, PS1/N64 were Gen 4, GC/Xbox/PS2/DC would be my Gen 5 and so on.

As mentioned, there would be room to add the also-rans in the various generations. I don't see the "pong era" as being it's own generation, but as an early part (or even predecessor) of the first generation. And of course, part of my logic also fails in that I only take North America into account, not Japan.

As for ColecoVision being 'third generation', there was talk of that outside of marketing on the technical side of things as well: "The VCS and Odyssey 2 are considered first-generation machines, the Intellivision a second-generation unit. ColecoVision marks the third generation of programmable video games. Its background display has better resolution than do the moving objects of the other systems and both objects and background can change color on a pixel-by-pixel as well as line-by-line basis. To do this, the machine uses 16 kilobytes of RAM devoted to the display, and game play uses another kilobyte, compared with 128 bytes of RAM for the VCS and about 3 kilobytes for the Intellivision." (Perry/Wallich, IEEE Spectrum, March 1983)

 

For my money, the term 'generation' is historically a misnomer in this context. I think something like "third phase" or "third tier" may fit better.

 

No matter how you define the timeline, it's been an amazing and fun ride to see the evolution of the video gaming in our lifetimes! While I still play modern systems occasionally, I'll take a joystick and 2 or 3 buttons over the 4-joystick/14 button controllers of today when given the choice: too many buttons = too much thinking = much less fun for me. Call it a Generation Gap.

[Greg2600]

The generations are organized far more by marketing/retailing properties than by hardware. In the case of CV, I suppose it's grouped with VCS, INTV, 5200, Astrocade, etc. as a pre-crash system. Has no place being grouped with NES/FAM, SMS, or 7800 though, all of which are superior and were sold competitively against one another. The SG-1000 was essentially identical to the CV, but it was released in mid-83 in Japan along with the Famicom. The SMS is just a SG-1000 with more RAM/VRAM. Quite frankly I'm not sure if it's right to even consider the SG-1000 as a separate system from the SMS.

[+wood_jl]

edit: I got my generations confused. Who cares, anyway?

[youki]

The generations are organized far more by marketing/retailing properties than by hardware. In the case of CV, I suppose it's grouped with VCS, INTV, 5200, Astrocade, etc. as a pre-crash system. Has no place being grouped with NES/FAM, SMS, or 7800 though, all of which are superior and were sold competitively against one another. The SG-1000 was essentially identical to the CV, but it was released in mid-83 in Japan along with the Famicom. The SMS is just a SG-1000 with more RAM/VRAM. Quite frankly I'm not sure if it's right to even consider the SG-1000 as a separate system from the SMS.

 

I think you had never really played a SMS!!!... even if the SMS has a compitablity mode with the SG1000 , the SMS is far superior from the SG1000 and even technically in lot of points superior to the NES.

 

Just look look for instance Wonderboy.

 

SG1000 version :

 

 

SMS version :

 

 

 

the difference, is not just the RAM/VRAM....

 

If you are not convinced , try to play same games of that list

 

http://www.retro-sanctuary.com/TOP%20100%20Master%20System%20GAMES%20page%205.html

 

 

 

 

[Greg2600]

 

I think you had never really played a SMS!!!... even if the SMS has a compitablity mode with the SG1000 , the SMS is far superior from the SG1000 and even technically in lot of points superior to the NES.

 

the difference, is not just the RAM/VRAM....

 

 

There's no question about that, but compare early Famicom games with later NES games, it's like night and day as well. In Nintendo's case, they expanded the system's capabilities using cartridge hardware. SMS did that as well, but the hardware specs between the SG-1000, SG-1000 II, and Mark III are not THAT different. Several years, additional RAM, additional cartridge ROM size, and better programming WILL result in better games.

 

My point is that the SG-1000 and SMS/Mark III should either be the same "system," or if separated, the SG-1000 needs to be grouped in the earlier generation with the CV. Especially considering that it was discontinued in 1985.

[youki]

 

There's no question about that, but compare early Famicom games with later NES games, it's like night and day as well. In Nintendo's case, they expanded the system's capabilities using cartridge hardware. SMS did that as well, but the hardware specs between the SG-1000, SG-1000 II, and Mark III are not THAT different. Several years, additional RAM, additional cartridge ROM size, and better programming WILL result in better games.

 

My point is that the SG-1000 and SMS/Mark III should either be the same "system," or if separated, the SG-1000 needs to be grouped in the earlier generation with the CV. Especially considering that it was discontinued in 1985.

 

the Big difference between the SG1000 and the SMS is the VDP. There is a chasm between both.

 

Like if you compare a PC CGA card and a Matrox Ultima 2 (VGA with accelerated hardware for the 90's).

 

I agree that SG 1000 is same generation than CV (2nd generation) , but SMS (the Mark III) not.

[ValkerieSilk]

Christ!!! I'm on my 3rd Gin and Tonic after reading through this shit ☹

[Dr. D.]

Just reminiscing here... so dates may be inaccurate.

 

I was born in 1962. Some friends of our family had a Pong, 1975ish because we were still going to their house a lot and they were still coming to our house a lot. I remember everyone sitting in the living room watching people play it. I only got to play it a little.

 

We got a Coleco Telstar (black and white) with the revolver attachment for target shooting. Black and white. My sisters and I played all the games on it (Pong, hockey, and target shooting) a few times a week. I think my Dad still has it.

 

A family I babysat for in 1979-1980 had an Atari 2600. I remember playing Breakout and Football with the older of the kids, and then lots of Breakout after they went to bed. And some kind of flying game like the World War I section of Time Pilot. It had a fly-2-planes-at-once mode (they paralleled each others moves). My first encounter with wraparound (i.e., cylindrical universe).

 

We got an Intellivision for Christmas 1979. We played lots of Frog Bog and Dungeons and Dragons. I still think it was way cool the way that night fell in Frog Bog and it finally got too dark to play. And also the inventory function for D&D (had to count fast clicks to know how many arrows you had left). I don't remember other cartridges offhand (they were expensive). My Dad still does have it and it is in working order.

 

In college, summer of 1983 or 1984, I stayed at my fraternity house while working a research job. A brother had an Atari 800. Everyone played Star Raiders on it for hours and hours. I would just fly around for the Star Trek moving starfield effect. I later wrote an x86 assembly program for the IBM PC to duplicate the starfield in CGA graphics, with keyboard controls because there was no joystick for the computers at the computer lab. There was also a game called SHRDLU, but I don't remember if that was for the Atari 800 or his C64.

 

My last semester in college I took a biological computing lab that had a PDP-11/34 minicomputer and a bunch of Tektronix graphics terminals. We learned a BASIC dialect (MUBASIC, Multi-User). There were many text-based games, like GOLF, WUMPUS, and STARTREK. Later I translated them all to Microsoft BASIC for the IBM-PC.

 

My Dad got a Coleco ADAM for Christmas 1984. I had graduated, in medical school and out on my own, but when I was home I played with it some (plus helped them debug SmartBASIC programs). They had Carnival and Space Panic cartridges, but played the Donkey Kong Super Game most of all the games. This was the ADAM I ended up with when Dad junked it in 1988 for a Tandy 1000HX.

 

A friend gave me HACK version 1.03 (a text game with ANSI graphics) on disk for MS-DOS. I played it all through graduate school. It took me years but I finally got the (genuine) Amulet of Yendor and won the game. You really did have to hack the game to win (including saving the game on multiple floppies so you could go back to a previous version if you died, or tried a spell or potion that was bad, decrypting strings in the .EXE, and figuring out the data format of the "bones" files).

 

When I discovered the greater ADAM community in 1990 (through the Cleveland Freenet), I was given a bunch of ColecoVision game cartridges and games converted to floppy disk. Of these, my favorites were Spy Hunter (my all-time favorite video game ever), Gyrus, Root Beer Tapper, and Pitfall II (I never did get past the last batch of flying vultures). But I was more interested in EOS and SmartBASIC and tech, so I never played games much.

 

In the 1990s and early 2000s, my kids played some of the ColecoVision games on my ADAM, and also on an emulator for MacOS 9.x (once I got a zipfile of about 100 ROM images).

 

In the late 2000s, my kids had a second-hand Nintendo Gamecube (a free gift) and an N64 (also used). I watched them play some games, but I never played any of them. I can't even remember the titles. One was some sequel to Zelda, the other was some Sims version, and the other was a build-your-own-cutesy-world-with-animals game.

 

For me, Pong/Telstar are one group, Atari 2600/Intellivision/ColecoVision are another group, and then my data are too fragmentary.

 

#include <std_disclaimers.h>

 

*Dr. D.*

Edited September 12, 2014 by Dr. D.

[Noah98]

I think of generations by what consoles were competing with each other in terms of hardware capabilities and new games. Sure, some consoles held on and were still getting releases into the next generation, but I don't think that counts. When I was a kid, I grouped them like this:

 

1st Generation: Pong, Telestar, Odyssey, etc.

2nd Generation: Odyssey 2, Channel F, Bally Astrocade, Atari 2600, Intellivision

3rd Generation: Colecovision, Atari 5200, Vectrex

4th Generation: Atari 7800, NES, SMS

5th Generation: Genesis, Turbografx-16, SNES, Neo Geo

6th Generation: PS1, Saturn, 3DO, Jaguar, N64

7th Generation: PS2, Dreamcast, Gamecube, XBOX

8th Generation: PS3, XBOX 360, Wii

9th Generation: PS4, XBOX One, Wii U

[Noah98]

Having lived through the era, indeed, the Atari 2600, ColecoVision & Intellivision went together - As did the game marketing for those systems.

 

These kind of commercials I recall quite fondly:

 

2ndGen1.PNG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNoYtU7P-lY

 

2ndGen2.PNG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd9DgHIt6-E

 

2ndGen3.PNG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA-Av431iV8

 

2ndGen4.PNG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnf-x6ZTwTU

 

There were no competition, complimentary, or comparison commercials inclusive of the ColecoVision during the 7800/NES/SMS era (Commonly referred to as 3rd Gen).

I'll have to respectfully disagree here. The 2600 and Intellivision were left over from the previous generation. Atari tried to position the 5200 against the Colecovision and Mattel was planning on an Intellivision 3.

 

The PS3 and 360 are still getting releases now and are advertised with many popular next generation new releases. Titanfall, Destiny, Diablo III, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, etc. were all released for last gen as well as the PS4 and XBOX One. I think we can all agree though that the PS4, XBOX One , and Wii U are all a new generation and the Wii, XBOX 360, and PS3 are last generation. I think the same goes for Atari 2600 and Intellivision vs. Atari 5200 and Colecovision.

[Rhomaios]

I think of generations by what consoles were competing with each other in terms of hardware capabilities and new games. Sure, some consoles held on and were still getting releases into the next generation, but I don't think that counts. When I was a kid, I grouped them like this:

 

1st Generation: Pong, Telestar, Odyssey, etc.

2nd Generation: Odyssey 2, Channel F, Bally Astrocade, Atari 2600, Intellivision

3rd Generation: Colecovision, Atari 5200, Vectrex

4th Generation: Atari 7800, NES, SMS

5th Generation: Genesis, Turbografx-16, SNES, Neo Geo

6th Generation: PS1, Saturn, 3DO, Jaguar, N64

7th Generation: PS2, Dreamcast, Gamecube, XBOX

8th Generation: PS3, XBOX 360, Wii

9th Generation: PS4, XBOX One, Wii U

 

"Competing with each other" is muddy, though. Even discounting the 2600, the Genesis and Turbografx were both competing with the NES, the Jaguar was competing against the Genesis and sNES, the Neo Geo CD, which was basically Neo Geo hardware in CD format, was competing against both the SNES/Genesis and also the Saturn/PS1. The Dreamcast didn't compete at all against the GameCube and Xbox because it was already discontinued, and in fact, most of its life was in competition with the PS1 (until consumers chose the PS2). The Famicom was released in 1983 in Japan, which means it came less than a year after the Colecovision, 5200, and Vectrex were released. And most importantly, computers were a major factor in competition. The Commodore 64, Amiga, and PC don't fit in there nicely at all, and for good reason.

[Noah98]

 

"Competing with each other" is muddy, though. Even discounting the 2600, the Genesis and Turbografx were both competing with the NES, the Jaguar was competing against the Genesis and sNES, the Neo Geo CD, which was basically Neo Geo hardware in CD format, was competing against both the SNES/Genesis and also the Saturn/PS1. The Dreamcast didn't compete at all against the GameCube and Xbox because it was already discontinued, and in fact, most of its life was in competition with the PS1 (until consumers chose the PS2). The Famicom was released in 1983 in Japan, which means it came less than a year after the Colecovision, 5200, and Vectrex were released. And most importantly, computers were a major factor in competition. The Commodore 64, Amiga, and PC don't fit in there nicely at all, and for good reason.

I agree that it is muddy, and I see where you are coming from. Still, I think the consoles you used as examples were trying to kickoff the next generation. They were trying to be the first in the next generation, so the older consoles were still competing with them even though they were on the tail end of their lifespans.

 

The Dreamcast replaced Sega's PS1 competitor, the Saturn and tried to start the next gen race. Unfortunately, the PS2 overwhelmed it.

 

The Turbografx-16 wanted to differentiate from the 8-bit systems by becoming a next generation system with 16 bit graphics. Just because a system failed, does not mean that it should be grouped with the previous generation.

 

I'm only looking at the U.S., so I don't think the Famicom matters. After the big crash, the NES started a new generation. I also think that computers are a separate category from consoles.

 

I guess I just feel like consoles should be grouped fairly so that they can be compared on even ground. I don't think that it is fair to compare a 2600 with a Colecovision. It also doesn't seem right to compare a 5200 with an NES. However, I think Atari 2600 vs. Intellivision, Atari 5200 vs. Colecovision, NES vs. SMS vs. 7800, T16 vs. Genesis vs. SNES, PS1 vs. Saturn vs. 3do, etc. all seem like fair fights.