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Internal Colecovision Memo


Bartsfam

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Last week I won an EBay auction for an internal memo from Coleco on Colecovision Game Design Guidelines for Playtesting Games. I have a collection of internal memos, press releases, and promo kits from Coleco, and wanted this for the collection.

 

I was asked to share the documents from some AA members. I received them in the mail today..WITH..a Certificate of Authenticity from the auction house, (I didn't expect that..)

 

The certificate says that the memo is from the collection of Coleco employee B. Dennis Sustare. He was a Coleco employee from 1982-1985, and among other things he was a designer for Frenzy, Dragon's Lair, Looping, Smurfs Save the Day, Lady Bug, and many more. He was also a designer for the Super Action Controller and the Roller Controller.

 

I've attached the guidelines and the certificate to this post.

 

Enjoy!

 

Coleco Game Testing Memo0001.pdf

 

post-24893-0-15699300-1450755592_thumb.jpg

 

 

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I wonder if that is still current for all game testing. I find it better in development industry for the tester to not know how things should work.

 

1) It tests how good your human computer interaction development is to know if your system makes natural instinctive sense on how to use the program.

2) Usually a tester finds problems you never knew about because you kept doing things that you designed for instead of stupid things users would do if you don't teach them how to use it.

 

Now I am not in gaming industry so I guess that could be how they do it in the gaming industry.

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And one more item..not really an internal memo, but letters given to Colecovision Video Club members.

 

One letter says WELCOME!, and the next letter says sorry, your subscription has been cancelled. An unfortunate sign of impending doom. There must have been a lot of disappointed kids when they received the cancellation notice.

 

I wonder if the proposed Scholastic Magazine/ADAM computer magazine was ever published, as stated in the second letter?

 

Anyone ever seen a copy or know of it's existence?

 

 

Colecovision Video Club.pdf

Edited by Bartsfam
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The Scholastic Adam Computer magazine was never published and actually canceled pretty quickly. Those that subscribed to it had their subscription transferred to Family Computing and when FC finally dropped support of the Adam, Computer Shopper picked up support for a while until they dropped the Adam from coverage. The final national mag that ran Adam articles was Vulcan Computer New. All the coverage from these mags was pretty token at best (not a lot of Adam advertising dollars coming in), so if you didn't know about newsletters like ECN, AUG, N&B, NIAD, E&T, AdamLink, etc., you were SOL as far as Adam news.

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And one more item..not really an internal memo, but letters given to Colecovision Video Club members.

 

One letter says WELCOME!, and the next letter says sorry, your subscription has been cancelled. An unfortunate sign of impending doom. There must have been a lot of disappointed kids when they received the cancellation notice.

 

I wonder if the proposed Scholastic Magazine/ADAM computer magazine was ever published, as stated in the second letter?

 

Anyone ever seen a copy or know of it's existence?

 

 

attachicon.gifColecovision Video Club.pdf

 

Somebody made a typo on that cancelation letter. :P

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I wonder if the proposed Scholastic Magazine/ADAM computer magazine was ever published, as stated in the second letter?

 

Anyone ever seen a copy or know of it's existence?

 

 

attachicon.gifColecovision Video Club.pdf

 

ADAM Family Computing Magazine from Scholastic ultimately became Family Computing Magazine instead and was devoted to all the 8-bit computers of the time, I used to buy every issue at the store when it came out. (because a Canadian subscribing to a US magazine often means paying more than the sticker price) so you saved by buying off the shelf.

As I now look it up under Wikipedia to prompt my memory "The title was changed, first to Family & Home Office Computing and finally to just Home Office Computing with ever-diminishing coverage of home computing topics"

 

Oh way cool, just found that these magazines are all scanned and archive here

I typed in every one of those BASIC programs and when they didn't work, was so pleased with myself to find where the typo was....

Edited by coleconut
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