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Why is the importance of ColecoVision almost never brought up historically?


JaguarVision

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In my neck of the woods, nobody knew anybody with an Intellivision (shocking, I know) and those commercials with them ripping on our Beloved Ataris generally outraged people like me.

There was a kid down the street that got an INTV for Xmas and he had Astrosmash which I thought was really fun. But I do remember thinking that the INTV's graphics were unusual.

 

Yeah and Plimpton pissed me off too...

 

Whereas ColecoVision's Mission Statement was "To bring the Arcade home", which is what everybody wanted. And they were releasing a lot of "obscure favorites", too, not just the same old thing!

My brother bought a ColecoVision when it came out in 82. Man I was blown away. I didn't have to go to the arcade or bowling alley as much anymore.

 

Now you guys have me Jonesing to play the ColecoVision. Since I added two pinball machines in the arcade I have nowhere to play console/computer games.

 

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There was a kid down the street that got an INTV for Xmas and he had Astrosmash which I thought was really fun. But I do remember thinking that the INTV's graphics were unusual.

 

Yeah and Plimpton pissed me off too...

 

Yeah,... those commercials!!

 

I don't think I'd be more Angry if they'd just said,

 

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Edited by GoldLeader
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Honestly I'm a kid that grew up on Atari 2600 and NES. Someone made a great comment about moving forward and not dredging up the past.

 

Look at the pack in SMB. It was awesome, had arcade like difficulty but it was new and awesome. I don't fire up my NES to play arcade games. I do it to play platformers and other stuff that was new at the time.

 

I do want a CV though. I've never seen one out in the wild and they seem to be rather expensive.

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I said before, but so many videogame histories tend to skim over everything pre-NES, except maybe to mention how "ET destroyed the industry". The whole era doesn't get enough credit.

 

This. For most, the NES is the baseline of the 8-bit era, partly due to Nintendo's legendary status - why go back any further if you have Shigeru Miyamoto at your side?

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I remember playing a coleco at a friends and a adam at my cousins. Both were amazing as the atari vcs was the only other thing I have ever played besides arcades.

There were those 3 or 4 years in hillbilly Canada where the 5200 and 7800 was non existent in most of the country and the nes would have been slow to release. The coleco was amazing and brought a level of excitement with venture and bc quest that was as amazing as playing the vcs for the first time.

If you never experienced that time frame and been there than looking back would see only vcs dot graphics and nes amazing games, which is the way 99.999% of the general 38+ age group would see it as today.

Edited by Jinks
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...

 

Also I'd say Intellivision seemed along the same lines as Atari but with better graphics, Whereas ColecoVision's Mission Statement was "To bring the Arcade home", which is what everybody wanted. And they were releasing a lot of "obscure favorites", too, not just the same old thing!

Atari was focused on Arcade games for their 2600 from the beginning. Combat, video olympics, surround, indy 500 were all based on arcade games. Their Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Missile Command cartridges helped sell millions of consoles. Atari was fortunate to have talented game designers/programmers that also created games for home as opposed to arcade conversions.

 

Mattel marketing had no clue about video games so they initially focused on sports games, and it worked. Mattel was also fortunate to have talented game designers creating video games designed for home.

 

Like Atari, Coleco focused on arcade conversions. It's good they had Donkey Kong; if someone had told me you could play Pepper II on coleco vision I wouldn't have known what to think. Third party developers did help round out their catalog with games designed for home. But like Atari, Coleco depended on arcade licenses to sell consoles.

 

At the time coleco vision graphics was clearly the next generation high resolution technology. But today we see that intellivision and coleco vision both used tiled graphics and the 2600 didn't. Intellivision had hardware diagonal scrolling and could put double the sprites on a scanline over coleco vision; the Atari 2600 had the most colours. But its the higher resolution and the donkey kong cartridge that distinguished coleco vision at the time.

 

Yeah,... those commercials!!

 

I don't think I'd be more Angry if they'd just said,

 

 

Were you guys really bothered by the Plimpton commercials? I kept buying Coca Cola despite the Pepsi challenge ads. Those Plimpton commercials, really backfired once coleco vision came out in 1982. Mattel marketing really never understood video games and didn't promote their games properly.

 

Intellivision was pretty awesome at the time, the George Plimpton TV spots were impressive once. The games had a computer-like depth that we just didn't see on the Atari home console. Colecovision was similarly impressive with its high resolution graphics and arcade-like visuals.

 

The thing is, you really had to be there to appreciate it, because NES and afterwards completely smoked them both in terms of complexity, diversity, and quantity.

 

I have no problem with lumping the pre-NES "second generation" hardware together: Atari VCS, Intellivision, Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Atari 5200, Vectrex, Bally. Their concepts (arcade at home), development (tiny teams, often one person), style of play (self-contained episodes, no game saving) and distribution methods (anyone can make any cartridge they want for any system, no effective lock-outs) are more alike than different.

 

If nothing else, the strong-arm publishing tactics of Nintendo makes the "third generation" (and everything that comes afterwards) a different species altogether.

I remember being very disappointed with the NES lacking an analog controller. I like the thumbpad vs joystick but it felt like a step backward at the time. An 8-way control was really limiting for sports games or any type of open field adventure or action game. I guess it's why it had so many side scrollers. And by the later 1980s programmers had access to rom cartridges ten times the size as to what was available a few years before. They could really pack-in the content in those cartridges. But don't confuse more content with better gameplay or time to complete a game with depth of play. The NES still has a huge library and lots of quality games. Edited by mr_me
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I still love the Plimpton commercials. Nothing amuses me so much as a pompous ass. (Looks in mirror). Hmmm.

There are several arcade games I only know about because of the Colecovision ports. They're in my favorites now. Venture, Looping, Cosmic Avenger, Frenzy, Pepper II -- I'm pretty sure I never saw a cabinet with any of these in real life.

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My main point on those commercials was that it made me MORE of an Atari fanboy...

 

If they had just tried to sell me an Intellivision based on its own merits (Better graphics, for example), I might have been more willing to listen. By the time ColecoVision came out, though, it just felt like they knew exactly what we wanted. I loved arcade conversions!

 

As far as the games. Well Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, and Frenzy were at all of our arcades, and Looping was a new kid on the block...Space Panic had been at the Mall but went away rather quickly...Most Omega Race machines were fun as hell and then disappeared to make way for new machines...but some of the more obscure ones like Cosmic Avenger, Mr. Do! or Space Fury might only be at one arcade in town (and for a short time frame) and if it was at one of the arcades on the other side of town I may have only played them once in my life...Obviously everyone's experience will vary based on where you grew up and how many of these games you'd seen. I thought it was cool getting games I'd never even seen in an arcade...

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I don't even get why the OP doesn't think its imporatance isn't brought up historically. It was permanently burnt into my mind years ago that Atari, Mattel, and Coleco were the Big 3 of that time and what kind of things they were doing while competing with each other which includes the ColecoVision. It wasn't some obscure console that we had to wait until the Internet for most of us to find out about. It was a big deal. If someone doesn't understand its historical significance then it isn't because its importance isn't brought up enough. It is because they haven't paid attention.

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I don't even get why the OP doesn't think its imporatance isn't brought up historically. It was permanently burnt into my mind years ago that Atari, Mattel, and Coleco were the Big 3 of that time and what kind of things they were doing while competing with each other which includes the ColecoVision. It wasn't some obscure console that we had to wait until the Internet for most of us to find out about. It was a big deal. If someone doesn't understand its historical significance then it isn't because its importance isn't brought up enough. It is because they haven't paid attention.

 

That is actually a damn fine point!

 

I would guess the OP was talking about how Nowadays, in this internet connected world etc., you have younglings who missed out on ColecoVision back in the day....And generally don't give The Devil his due!

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  • 2 years later...

Haha what you don't think the same thing is going on today in every tech company? Damn right they have there little shadow peeps out there buying anything that has something new to add to the market to backwards engineer these competing products as fast as they can to see how much they can steal without violating the patent and how much they will have to come up and change to make it look like they're not copying off someone else's homework ?

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