Coleco Chameleon .... hardware speculations?

godslabrat · April 8, 2016

It's too bad Mike didn't look out for himself better, or had someone to keep him from flying into the sun like he did. No bank would have approved a small business loan for a dream that was this poorly developed, just as no one wanted to crowd fund a Kickstarter for an empty box with nothing inside but hopes and wishes.

Why he insisted on running his mouth, promising stuff that never existed, dreaming up Kickstarter reward tiers for things that were (at best) in the nascent phase of development ... that's what keeps me in this thread. It's simultaneously fascinating and disturbing to me, that someone could be that fixated on something that was obsolete 30 years ago, but wanting to bring it back into existence, using the tools and skills available to him (old console shell molds, a personality that likes to talk and be in the spotlight).

If any part of his version of events is true, it makes sense that at first he wanted the public to front the whole cost, at little to no risk for him except for his mouthpiece time. As that proved impossible, he got more and more desperate, putting some of his own money in, but not enough to actually achieve anything, just enough to hurt himself.

Anyway ...just thought I'd share a little of why I find this "hater" "circle jerk" "beating a dead horse" situation so interesting. It's not often that we get someone in this hobby that is able to make so much noise and flop so hard.

I can definitely see your point about there being an admirable quality about the sheer determination, found in spite of the lack of common sense or even ability. However, we have to make a distinction between a student doodling a dream and concept in his notebook margins, and Mike actually trying to make that dream a reality. That distinction is, specifically, that at some point, Mike decided to go ahead and ask for money to fund his hopes and dreams, having nothing to show for it. That kid doodling in his notebook isn't accountable to anyone but himself, he can fail as often as he needs to. When you try to take money, you have to leave behind the idea that screwing up is okay. Second, at multiple points along the way, Mike chose to lie about what he had and what he was offering. In his own words this week, he never had anything in hand, but he keeps going on about what "the plan" was. Well, to borrow a line from a very old thread, I can plan to sell a device I can strap to my ass that'll turn my shit into money, but if it doesn't exist, that plan is worthless.

Mike, multiple times, wanted to take money for something he now admits he didn't have. When someone is willing to do that, the admirable quality that you call "determination" becomes much more sinister. If they can't maintain their honesty, they become bound and determined to make that sale at any cost. That's what Mike became, and I don't find that admirable at all.

Inky · April 8, 2016

I guess the pertinent question at this point is, since the Knight Rider 2600 thread gets resurrected every New Year's, which holiday should this thread get resurrected on?

galax · April 8, 2016

I guess the pertinent question at this point is, since the Knight Rider 2600 thread gets resurrected every New Year's, which holiday should this thread get resurrected on?

April fools day of course, see you all back here in 357 days

+GoldLeader · April 8, 2016

I guess the pertinent question at this point is, since the Knight Rider 2600 thread gets resurrected every New Year's, which holiday should this thread get resurrected on?

How 'bout April Fools day?

+GoldLeader · April 8, 2016

April fools day of course, see you all back here in 357 days

Even as I hit "Post" I thought someone is already doing this haha...

Csonicgo · April 8, 2016

Really want to thank the people involved in exposing this scheme. We could have had this happen: People like this come forth and convince the press that they're "well known" in the "Retro Community", and they perpetuate this over and over, getting normal media readers to think we're all like this. Or that's what I feared, but thankfully we're depicted as the good guys this time. I'm so glad that the majority of the press did not fall for the deception. Most of the time, we get this self-proclaimed "representative" of a community that totally destroys any reputation the community had spent years, or even decades building up. Thankfully the gaming press is a little more competent than they used to be, given that they're usually gamers themselves. 10 years ago, I don't think I could have said that.

I know, I am also in the Doom community. Every once in a while, we have a loose cannon from the "killer fandom" (Yes, it is a thing, it is as disgusting as it sounds) that attempts to get Kotaku or Polygon's attention with a Columbine High School mod, or worse, get some disgusting mod trending on Facebook. I understand this might be something completely different, but it's rep damaging all the same.

Every school shooting puts us on notice - some christian groups have DDoSd fan sites trying to shut them down, dox the forum admins, spam the reviewing system, it's all a mess. One angry individual even uploaded a fake mod for Doom that, when unzipped, decompressed to a whopping 2 GIGABYTES in size - causing a lot of people's computers' hard drives to fill up completely with garbage.

Edited April 8, 2016 by Csonicgo

Flojomojo · April 8, 2016

That kid doodling in his notebook isn't accountable to anyone but himself, he can fail as often as he needs to. When you try to take money, you have to leave behind the idea that screwing up is okay.

*nods*

That's what pulled me in around the time of the Kickstarter. While I never considered giving him a penny -- even putting a single dollar on the Kickstarter for the purposes of tracking it would have alerted all my friends that I was "supporting" them -- I was outraged that anyone would even consider taking this clusterflock seriously. Especially while there were lazy puff pieces from mostly-respectable media sites, talking about it as if it were a new printer coming from HP or some other humdrum but plausible tech news. The Coleco name added to the outrage. Coleco was a real company with real products. Mike recently claimed "I wasn't building that crap in my garage," but even if he had, that would have been more real than what actually existed.

Once the Toy Fair frauds came out alongside the patently stupid Kickstarter reward tiers (which never came to pass, of course), it was open season on hypocrites, which is always fun. Watching the questions roll into the Facebook page before they were deleted was highly amusing.

I guess if you're making a story about this (maybe a This American Life style documentary format would work?), you could use these chapter stops:

I. The hope: RetroVGS's initial pitch (its lack of focus, Carlsen's table video, and how the concept flailed around before flopping utterly on IndieGoGo)

II. The pitch strikes back: Coleco Chameleon (the name, the marketing, the hype, the promises, the Toy Fair ... and on AtariAge, the deletion of the old hate thread and its more powerful "chameleon speculation" rebirth right after)

III. Revenge of the nerds: First prototype is outed as Nintendo's work. The "team" backtracks on the Kickstarter to "make it even better," the second fake is outed as a video capture card, Coleco disowns them, Gizmodo prints a retraction, and everything goes quiet, even this thread.

IV. The patsy awakens: Our hero comes back to defend his honor, but instead of being thought of as a crook, is now considered a STUPID crook.

In addition to the backhanded compliment, "in another context, his tenacity would have been admirable," I will say one sincerely nice thing about Mike Kennedy: he knows how to hold a wine stem like a gentleman. http://winefolly.com/tutorial/hold-wine-glass-civilized/

Csonicgo · April 8, 2016

Also, this is slightly off-topic, but the Coleco Chameleon article on Wikipedia really nails what all went down. Still kind of angry they don't consider us a reliable source though - but then again, when we have shysters around that generate 330+ pages of discussion...

I suppose we all have a little Jesse Ventura inside us. :grin:

Now that this Boolsheet is almost over, I'm in the mood to grab a Raspberry Pi 3 and make my own Coleco Chameleon. Any of those molds arrived, Al? I'll need around 50 cases. And 2 million bucks.

Because 2 million makes you sound nice and legit.

2 legit 2 quit.

phoenixdownita · April 8, 2016

....

IV. The patsy awakens: Our hero comes back to defend his honor, but instead of being thought of as a crook, is now considered a STUPID crook.

....

schmfhhptooy LOL ... and now I spit/spat tea all over my keyboard .... look what you've done.

+Nathan Strum · April 8, 2016

So, I finally caught up on this thread, and decided to make a few comments on Mr. K's big post.

(snip)

at this time I have made the decision that my reputation is worth protecting

As opposed to coming to the conclusion that you made a host of phenomenally stupid decisions that have disrupted an entire community, and decided to attempt to make amends by sincerely apologizing, taking full responsibility for your own actions, and bringing forth a completely transparent account of all of the events that have happened throughout the entire RetroVGS/Coleco Chameleon fiasco?

Just checking - you know, as a point of clarification.

But since you aren't going to respond to this thread anymore, let's recap:

(snip)

And it will show that I paid him considerable amounts of money for what was essentially two fake prototypes. One that I saw (Toy Fair unit) and one that I never saw in person (clear PC card unit).

(snip)

Supposedly, Sean had a working prototype ( that I NEVER saw) playing Neo Geo games in Jan 2015. This prototype was later used again when he rejoined the project explaining how we supposedly had a prototype so fast AFTER Carlsen left.

(snip)

At the time of John’s leaving in September 2015, Sean “LEE” Robinson re-entered the picture and reached out to Steve and I. He indicated he wanted to help us get this project back on track, but his condition was that he remained “behind the curtain” (his words) due to the mess he was inheriting from Carlsen. At this time I agreed to that condition and also agreed to let him and Steve work together on this without my interference. While I thought I had a competent hardware “team” working on this, and was being told early on by Sean we had games running on our hardware/software prototype and that our costs had dropped considerably, I felt confident to go ahead and continue building this venture, bringing a “go-to-market” team together and making the decision to launch this under the Coleco brand.

(snip)

In mid-January, I had a lunch meeting with Sean and point blank asked him what he needs from me to spend the next 30 days working on the prototype full-time to get it prepared for the Toy Fair. We agreed on $4,000, which I quickly got to him via a check that he cashed with me at my bank. It was then a day before I was traveling to the show that he came over to my house with the Toy Fair “Prototype”, with his instructions to NOT SHOW the back of the unit no matter what. But without any specific information as to why I shouldn’t show it, other than it used an aftermarket connector that was composite-out and that was used because he didn’t have the HD stable enough to get us through the show. I believed him and went to the show with that unit.

(snip)

During the show we were accused of not having that system even plugged in so I made the decision to take a photo of the back of the unit showing it was clearly plugged in. If that was true about using the composite connector, I really felt people would understand why it was used and decided to show the pics. I didn’t feel we had anything to hide. Then all hell broke loose and it was identified that SNES mini parts or the whole PCB from an SNES mini was inside the console shell. I was left in a terrible spot at this point and I had a decision to make that evening at the hotel. Do I take this thing apart and see what was in it and quit the show or continue on with the show, demoing the games that were going to be on the system, and then address this issue with Sean when we got back from New York. Right or wrong, I continued on with Toy Fair

(snip)

When I returned back home, I met Sean again and gave him the “prototype” back and he was still swearing that despite the SNES “parts” he used, the games were still running on the SNES FPGA software that he had constructed in a few short months. Again, I believed him and we moved forward.

(snip)

Then in a move to extract more money from me he indicated that for $3,000 paid now (2/29/16), and $3,000 paid in 60 days he could wrap this up and have a production ready prototype completed. So, again, I wrote him out a check he promptly cashed with me at my bank.

(snip)

Sean even joked about how people online were trying to identify the board in our shell, laughing and telling me they won’t find it because it’s our original work. He even made these comments through my car Blue Tooth speaker with my wife in the car and she heard everything. Again, I believed him.

(snip)

So, believing I was going to have a working prototype for Toy Fair, I told Sean and Steve I was going to move forward with the Kickstarter campaign and use Toy Fair as a launching point for the campaign. A date was set. Now to Sean’s credit, he played that this was not a good idea and didn’t agree with me scheduling the Kickstarter to begin during the campaign was a good idea. But, at this point, I thought I had a real prototype playing games and was assured by Sean many times that our costs were now hovering around $100, so figured, let’s not wait any longer.

(snip)

Something was just not adding up to me and I continued to lose sleep at night wondering how this all could have happened. First, he never showed me anything in person, that he was working on. I never went to his house, nor was ever given an address where he lives or works. He subscribes to my magazine so I looked at the address the magazine is sent to – a UPS store PO Box. I have paid this guy $7,000 and have nothing to show for it. Oh, I also bought two FPGA cores from a “friend” of his (whom I never met in person) whose wife was having medical issues and needed to sell some things and just so happened his friend had made an Intellivision and Amiga FPGA core. Sean told me his friend would sell them to me for $2,500 which I, again agreed to, and wrote Sean out another check which he promptly cashed at my bank and was going to give the cash to his “friend”. Did I ever get any software cores? NOPE! So, in total, with a couple other smaller checks I wrote to him, paid him nearly $10K in January and February 2016. Nothing to show for it except two fake prototypes and NO FPGA CORES!

Now... here comes the best part:

(snip)

So, trying to make more sense of all this, I started Googling Sean and this is where things get super crazy. I will just post the links that are online for all to see and you can all take it from there. There is even more stuff you can uncover if you want to all look:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.video.arcade/bs4zJtfa4oY
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rec.games.video.arcade/almightyarcade
http://www.megalextoria.com/forum2/index.php?t=msg&goto=297838&
http://compgroups.net/comp.sys.cbm/sean-robinson-founder-of-commodorecomputerclub.c/3039131

In addition, I have confirmed with the Riverside County (CA) Assistant DA, Sean was charged a few years ago for 7 counts of Felony Grand-Theft and served part of a one-year sentence in jail and then got out on probation which he evidently complied with and then he made a plea to have the prior conviction AND his admittance of guilt overturned. A loophole that the DA mentioned drives prosecutors crazy.

And you didn't once think to check into his background after he never showed you the first prototype from an entire year earlier, but before you started writing him check after check after check, without him showing you anything?

(snip)

In the end, I am the only one that has lost anything, money, potential opportunity and my reputation in this hobby

The self-centeredness of this statement is completely appalling.

I have come to the inescapable conclusion, that you, sir, are stupid.

"stupid"
ˈst(y)o͞opəd/

adjective

adjective: stupid; comparative adjective: stupider; superlative adjective: stupidest

lacking intelligence or common sense.
"I was stupid enough to think the prototypes were real"
synonyms: unintelligent, ignorant, dense, foolish, dull-witted, slow, simpleminded, vacuous, vapid, idiotic, imbecilic, imbecile, obtuse, doltish;
antonyms: intelligent, sensible
dazed and unable to think clearly.
"ambition was numbing his brain and making him stupid"
synonyms: into a stupor, into a daze, into oblivion;
informal - used to express exasperation or boredom.
"Mike told him to just get under the stupid bus"

noun informal
noun: stupid; plural noun: stupids

a stupid person (often used as a term of address).
"don't let them see the back of the prototype, stupid!"

(Definition from the COLECO Business English Dictionary © COLECO Press*)

*With thanks to jaybird3rd

Flojomojo · April 8, 2016

Now that this Boolsheet is almost over, I'm in the mood to grab a Raspberry Pi 3 and make my own Coleco Chameleon. Any of those molds arrived, Al? I'll need around 50 cases. And 2 million bucks.

In my considered opinion, a cute little 3D printed ColecoVision would be a lot nicer than an accursed Atari Jaguar case.

If you ignore my advice, whatever you do, don't expose it to bright light, don't get it wet, and don't feed it after midnight.

ROFLcade · April 8, 2016

Also, this is slightly off-topic, but the Coleco Chameleon article on Wikipedia really nails what all went down.

I just went to check it out, and I laughed out loud when I saw that the article calls it the "Retro Chameleon" due to Coleco yanking the license. Too funny.

Flojomojo · April 8, 2016

I just went to check it out, and I laughed out loud when I saw that the article calls it the "Retro Chameleon" due to Coleco yanking the license. Too funny.

Thanks for the reminder to check that out. It is funny --but probably needs to be cleaned up to use permanent links and Wikipedia-acceptable sources. The Eurogamer write up is probably the best, even though it draws from this thread, Wikipedia favors journalistic coverage rather than primary sources. All the original project media (rvgs page, Coleco page, rvgs Facebook) has gone down the memory hole.

This is the best part, for me: "This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale."

If it just got deleted, that would be fine too. Nothing came of this, and nothing ever will. It's not a video game console, it's a doodle, a brain fart, a whim.

phoenixdownita · April 9, 2016

Hey, didn't know there was a whole wikipedia category for these .... things,

check it out:

Vaporware_game_consoles

I don't think the CC even deserves to be there, but whatever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chameleon_(video_game_console)#References

And why oh why the AA link to the thread is to page 126 where I "swear" .... I see ... because I do swear so well deserved!

DerekRumpler · April 9, 2016

I haven't had time to look at the previous posts, so I might have missed something, I heard the news earlier today through CUPodcast.

Is it me or does it seem shady that Mike apparently did business with a known fraud (or so I've heard via Pat and Ian's podcast) and then threw him under the bus (the second time he has done that that I know of) in a bid to save his own reputation?

Plus, I've been told by someone in the know that he supposedly hasn't even paid his Retro Magazine writers for many months.

I am going to call a spade a spade. While it is my hope that he is sincere, I would never trust him. Everything he touches comes across as extremely shady (GameGavel, Retro Magazine, RetroVGS/CC, etc.). If anyone tries to throw money at his ventures (and I am sure that there will be more) knowing his past then they deserve to lose their money.

I do believe the man can change, but I think one sign that he has done so is to back away from all his private ventures and work for someone else (if anyone will take him at this point). And don't ever put him in a position where he can con people.

I'm sorry if this is unnecessarily harsh. I am just sick of this song and dance.

Edited April 9, 2016 by DerekRumpler

CPUWIZ · April 9, 2016

What did you lose and how did you get hurt?

atm94404 · April 9, 2016

Hello Everyone,

<snip>

t was then a day before I was traveling to the show that he came over to my house with the Toy Fair “Prototype”, with his instructions to NOT SHOW the back of the unit no matter what. But without any specific information as to why I shouldn’t show it, other than it used an aftermarket connector that was composite-out and that was used because he didn’t have the HD stable enough to get us through the show. I believed him and went to the show with that unit. My biggest concern at the time was getting this conglomeration through the TSA and on the plane.

<snip>

This one bit really jumps out at me.

Because of 9/11, one of two things is going to happen at the airport.

1. Mike checks the fauxtotype in his baggage. A ticket agent will ask him "Did you pack your own bags and have been in control of them the entire time? Are there any hazardous materials, batteries, etc...?"

2. Mike carries the fauxtotype through security, and a TSA agent will ask him about the obviously homemade device. The questions will be along the lines of "What's this? What does it do. Does it contain any harzardous...? Can you plug it in to show...?"

By his own admission, Mike knows it is likely (if there is a competent TSA on the job) he will have to answer questions about this gaggle of wires and electrical tape. He is going to have to LIE about it because, according to Mike, hasn't seen the inside of the case. If Mike is really in the dark at this point, he is potentially putting the lives of hundreds of people at risk. It could have been a bomb, a container of poisonous gas (lots of room in that Jag case), anthrax, who knows. Mike can't even vouch for Sean being the kind of person that "wouldn't do that" because, according to Mike, he hasn't done a Google search on Sean. He doesn't even know where he lives. He's just a guy who contacted Mike a few months ago that Mikes's barely spoken to. Someone who demanded Mike pay him $4000 to build him something. That something Mike has never seen until the day before his flight. A something that Sean is really nervous about people getting too close a look at. And Mike's going to carry this onto a plane from California to New York.

If we believe Mike's version of events ("I knew nothing, I'm a patsy") are true, he's not just stupid- he's criminally stupid and danger to himself and others.

Edited April 9, 2016 by atm94404

Osgeld · April 9, 2016

What did you lose and how did you get hurt?

endless hours following this mess, and a massive headache trying to figure out the stupid

though admittitly, though mike was the reason, its my own fault

DerekRumpler · April 9, 2016

And this is why I won't be answering any more questions. Just for the record.

You're really not the victim here.

+Random Terrain · April 9, 2016

If we believe Mike's version of events ("I knew nothing, I'm a patsy") are true, he's not just stupid—he's criminally stupid and a danger to himself and others.

Coleco Chameleon .... hardware speculations?

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