I just came to the disturbing conclusion that the ColecoVision built the foundation, or at least the first floor, of the video game industry as it stands today. Even though the ColecoVision itself didn't last long past the video game crash of 1983 (which the Japanese amusingly refer to as "Atari shock"), it begat enough children to fill a few long, especially boring chapters of the Old Testament.
You know how in the show Xena: Warrior Princess, every fifth woman just happens to look exactly like Lucy Lawless, because the God of War (no, not the bald one. Kevin Smith. No, the other Kevin Smith) had Mortal Fever and couldn't keep it in his codpiece? That's the sum total of the second generation of game consoles*. There's so much ColecoVision DNA in game consoles and computers of the 1980s that it's nuts.
Everybody likes to say that the ColecoVision was made from off-the-shelf parts, but it seemed like everybody was raiding the same shelf. Sega's little seen SG-1000? Nearly identical to the ColecoVision, with Sega ripping off the specs and changing only a couple of minor details. The Master System builds on the hardware of the SG-1000, while patching over many of the system's faults. The richer color palette, smoother scrolling, and an extra helping of RAM effectively make the Master System a Super ColecoVision.
The MSX computer standard, adopted by dozens of corporations and sold throughout the world? That's a ColecoVision with a keyboard, albeit with more memory and an alternate sound chip. You get them both in the Super Game Module, a peripheral that makes the ColecoVision an MSX without a keyboard.
Even the Sega Genesis and Game Gear find themselves stuck in the tangled web that is the ColecoVision family lineage. The Game Gear is a handheld Master System, with very little to distinguish itself from its progenitor. You get some extra colors and a little less screen real estate, but beyond that it's the same hardware, in a (somewhat) convenient travel size. The Sega Genesis uses the Master System processor as a sound chip and is natively compatible with the bulk of its games, which means that it's a Super Master System... and logically, a Super Duper ColecoVision.
You have to wonder if the ColecoVision really was a failure after all. Sure, it couldn't save the company that made it, but its progeny continued to influence the industry deep into the 1990s, until the next wave of cutting edge RISC, MIPS, and ARM processors marked the end of the trusty, but increasingly crusty hardware. Even long-suffering Game Boy players were eager to leave the Z80A in the past by the turn of the century... I know I was unreasonably excited by the launch of the Game Boy Advance, and considering its popularity and healthy sales, I couldn't have been the only one.
* The line between second and third gen consoles seems drawn to coincide perfectly with the American video game crash, and it feels... inaccurate. Disingenuous. Dismissive of other territories, where video games were still popular. Somehow, ALL consoles released after Pong units but before NES are magically regarded as "second generation," when the NES (as the Famicom) was released just one year after the ColecoVision and the same day as the nearly identical SG-1000. Why is the NES regarded as a third generation console, but the Atari 5200, the successor to the Atari 2600, is considered a second generation console? The boundaries just don't make sense.
The line between second generation and third generation was made decades later by Nintendo fanboys who did not care about anything pre-NES. Considering the game media at the time considered the 5200, ColecoVision, and Vectrex as a new "wave" or "generation," the fact people retroactively changed them is ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteThe way I see it, The 1st Generation of getting video games to the screen would include Odyssey, PONG, and PONG Clones, Coleco Telstar etc., because that was what we had. Cartridges define 2nd Wave so the 2nd Generation is Atari 2600, Fairchild, Odyssey2, even (half Generation ahead perhaps) Intellivision. Excluding the few magazines (trying to be cool) using "4th Gen", almost Every magazine at the time called ColecoVision VS 5200 3RD GENERATION. Anything else is Wikipedia Users with too much time on their hands trying to change history...Great piece by the way.
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