So, you made it through our delicious Nintendo and SEGA Sandwich of the 80s! But what’s this? There are leftover gherkins on your plate! Don’t make me call your mom; those are healthy for you!
Much like your disdain for pickled cucumbers, there were honest, hard-working consoles in the 80s that seemingly got lost in the shuffle – mainly because of the two wildly popular rivals and a bit of their own doing.
So, in the final part of the eighties, when gaming was reborn, we will be looking at a few consoles that unfortunately did not make it in those early years.
COLECOVISION — THAT’S JUST BAD TIMING, MAN.
Picture yourself as the Coleco CEO. You’ve been in the video game business for about five years now and have confidently found your footing. Your first-generation consoles were decent, but your handheld electronic games were even better – so much so that you were taking the market away from the likes of Mattel.
You felt it was time to venture into the home console market. The Atari 2600 and the Intellivision are a few years old now, and an opportunity arose to make a more powerful machine. It was time to make the ColecoVision, a console which entered the market in August 1982.
The hardware, which featured a Zilog Z80 CPU (the same one SEGA’s Master System would use years later) and a Texas Instruments video chip, had 1KB of RAM, 16KB of video RAM, and 8KB of ROM.
Even better, things were playing right into your hand. Atari brought out the 5200 and underwhelmed consumers with a console that served to play “updated” versions of 2600 games, even though it was incompatible with some.
ColecoVision’s console came packed with Donkey Kong—yes, that Donkey Kong. The ball was truly in their court, and one of the first expansion modules that they made for their machine was a cartridge adapter for Atari 2600 games, giving customers access to the largest software library yet (this wasn’t without a legal kerfuffle with Atari, but I digress).
So, given everything I just said, why am I labelling the ColecoVision as a gherkin? Look at the dates again.
The ColecoVision was released in the US in August 1982, a few months before the video game crash of the American market. While ColecoVision would be released in Europe in1983, its main market share was on US soil. Then, the Nintendragon was born, and the Famicom/NES soon made its appearance in American homes. This was such a reversal of Coleco’s fortunes that the company not only discontinued their console but exited the video games market entirely by 1985. The truth is that the game was rigged from the start. The truth also had something to do with that awful Adam computer of theirs (shipping broken hardware was something game companies were doing even forty years ago. Go figure).
TURBOGRAFX-16 – AMERICAN IDIOT
When I said that the SEGA Genesis was the first 16-bit console, I was telling a half-truth – a little white lie. NEC was a company looking to stake a claim in the video game market after it hit success with its successful personal computer business in Japan. Hudson Soft was a company looking for a suitor for its advanced graphics chips after a failed pitch with Nintendo.
Both companies found each other as a match and decided to swipe right. (This was the 80s, though, so Tinder used mail. Back then, you had to swipe your entire mailbox right to show your interest, resulting in many damaged properties.)
The result was the TurboGrafx-16, with a sleek design and even sleeker specs. 8kb of RAM, 64kb of video RAM; this was some advanced tech! Except, not all the specs were as advanced as perhaps advertised. While there was a true dual 16-bit GPU chipset under the hood, the CPU was still 8-bit. Just a little white lie. (Bear in mind that its name in Japan when released was the PC Engine. The “16” was a ploy for their American marketing release).
The PC Engine would sell 500,000 units in its first week of release. It was white hot in Japan and truly had the opportunity to stamp its authority in a new generation of consoles.
Then along came the SEGA Genesis. The BFG before the BFG took down Nintendo, and the TurboGrafx-16 was in its crossfire. The Genesis was a true 16-bit system with a 16-bit CPU, no strings attached. Both systems were gathering a steady head of steam in sales in Japan, but both knew what it had to do for superiority. They had to cross the pond.
This is where the TurboGrafx-16 turned from sleek and sexy to a smelly gherkin. Despite its wild success in Japan, it could not get off the ground in the US. If you recall, the SEGA Genesis had an aggressive campaign aimed at the youth in North America to buy their console. This included packing in the popular arcade hit Altered Beast with their console.
NEC packed in one of their successful Japanese games, but the only problem was that it was a completely unknown title everywhere else in the world. This, coupled with manufacturing way more stock than they sold, resulted in a commercial failure in the US and their withdrawal from markets in Europe entirely. This was even before the SNES made its appearance two years later.
While they still sold 10 million units (mainly in Japan) in the end, this was not compared to the 35 million unit sales that Genesis amassed.
ATARI – THE MISSING LYNX
This one is perhaps the biggest gherkin of the lot and definitely makes me more upset than the others did. While you could rightfully call Atari’s entire run of the 80s a pickled cucumber, it is not the failures of the 5200 and 7800 riding on the coattails of the 2600 that warrant this. It is how they handled their handheld despite it being successful.
To be fair, it wasn’t originally their handheld. Epyx had been designing the Lynx since 1986 and showed it off at some tech demos in the following years. In 1989, they were looking for a partner to help them release the handheld. The two giants Nintendo and SEGA declined (both would release their own handhelds soon), but Atari, perhaps feeling the scorn of their failed projects, agreed to partner up. Then Epyx completely folded by the end of the year, and the handheld solely lay in Atari’s hands. What they perhaps then did not know was that the Lynx was ahead of its time.
It was the first handheld game console with a colour LCD screen, already an advantage over Nintendo’s Game Boy, released a few months prior. It was also more powerful, with an 8-bit CPU and 16-bit “blitter” (a circuit or coprocessor that helps move and modify data in the computer’s memory) and could even compete with SEGA’s Game Gear and NEC’s TurboExpress.
Plans for a networking system using infrared links were ultimately abandoned, but there was a successful 8-player co-op game for the Lynx! Atari even improved the design to be more compact, have better battery life with rubber handgrips, and have a better-backlit screen, calling it the Lynx II.
But then Atari had to go full Atari. And that meant being a full gherkin.
Despite the foothold they forged with the advent of handhelds, they could not resist the allure of one more go at the home gaming console. In 1993, they redirected their efforts away from the Lynx and to the ill-fated Atari Jaguar. After that console’s failed release, it was the final nail in the coffin, and Atari exited the hardware scene. They did not go out with a bang but rather as silently as Silent Doom.
That pretty much covers our Scooby-Doo-sized sandwich of the 80s, with slabs of SEGA and slices of Nintendo stacking together and a healthy dose of gherkins left on the plate. Tune in next week to see our venture into the 90s, where things heat up, especially with the introduction of a third big player in the game.
Check out Part 1 here
Check out Part 2 here
BigMacDaddy is a rockstar, MLG gamer and world-renowned knowledge base for all gaming studios… in his dreams. In real life, he is a full-time software developer and loves family time. His hobbies include a lil’ YouTubing, chess, game development and travel.
