- The New Coleco Chameleon will be a dream come true for retro gamers.
I can never forget September of 1982, when my family drove an hour north to buy ColecoVision, the new game system that would eventually make the Atari 2600 irrelevant. ColecoVision sold well, but eventually suffered from the home video game crash that took full effect in 1983.
Now, the makers of ColecoVision are about to release a new cartridge-based console. The Verge has the news.
“Coleco went bankrupt in the late ’80s. However, it was reformed in 2005, and now it’s announcing its first new console in decades: the Coleco Chameleon, a modern machine that will play games stored on plastic cartridges.”
The Verge adds that the company is teaming up with Retro Video Game Systems to provide the machine sometime in 2016. The fact that the system will use cartridges is very intriguing; that hasn’t happened since the Nintendo 64 in 1996. Coleco is expected to show off the final version of the system (the picture above just show the prototype) in February.
The original ColecoVision came out in the Fall of 1982.
This will obviously be marketed to ColecoVision fanatics from the 1980s and there are plenty of us. What I would love to see is for Coleco to release the never-released Super Game cartridges that were promised with a Super Game Module in the Summer of 1983.
The Super Game Module was supposed to add more RAM so the games could have more of an arcade feel than the original ColecoVision cartridges. For example, ColecoVision’s Donkey Kong had three levels instead of the four the arcade had. The Super Game version of Donkey Kong was supposed to have the final level. Games such as Super Donkey Kong Jr., Super Zaxxon, and Super Front Line would also add more levels and better graphics.
The Super Game Module was eventually cancelled and instead, Coleco made advanced versions of their games for the ADAM home computer, which was promising, but became one of the biggest disasters in the history of home computing. This column wrote a huge article on the ADAM exactly one year ago.
While ColecoVision suffered from the video game crash of 1983 (it survived that year, but stopped selling in 1984), Nintendo revived home video games with the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), which was released in 1985. The NES took a couple of years to catch on and, by 1988, almost every video game enthusiast had one.
The new Coleco game system certainly won’t revive anything and it really isn’t aimed to. However, mark my words: The Coleco Chameleon will sell very well when it is released in the coming new year.
