ColecoVision Review

The ColecoVision arrived in August 1982 promising arcade games at home, and for once the promise held. Its graphics hardware outclassed both the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision, producing smooth, colorful sprites with little of the flicker players had learned to tolerate, and Coleco secured the first home version of Donkey Kong as the pack in game. Strong conversions of Zaxxon, Lady Bug, Venture, Cosmic Avenger and Mr. Do! followed, and it sold more than half a million units by that Christmas.

Retrospectives remember it as the technical high point of its generation. The expansion modules were inventive too: one let it play the whole Atari 2600 library, another added a steering wheel, and a third turned it into the Adam home computer. Members of Nintendo's Famicom team have cited it as a benchmark for their own console.

What held it back was comfort and timing. The stock controllers pair a numeric keypad with a stubby joystick and side buttons that are tiring to use for long, and the library of around 136 games stopped growing when the 1983 crash and the costly Adam computer pushed Coleco out of video games by 1985. It remains a landmark of the years before the NES, and a fine collector's machine for fans of early arcade games.