I remember seeing this whole fiasco go down. Plenty of people tried to get the word out it was a scam. Years later a different company came along and actually did make their own custom console that uses cartridges, it's called the Evercade. There's a Duke Nukem collection coming out later this year.
Well, sort of. Evercade cartridges are just SD cards with extra pins available in case future carts needs extra I/O to function and the console hardware is a pretty standard ARM SOC, so the costs of R&D and logistics of getting the components are much lower than something like the proposed VGS.
Nowadays we already had a real Coleco Chameleon/Retro VGS done right a.k.a. The EverCade. It's a retro system that support both retro and indie games and could play them in both handheld and console form and used cartridges as its media. Only thing different between the EverCade and the Chameleon was that all games are released as collection rather than individual games on the EverCade and could be updated to fix bugs and add additional patches such as remap options, filter options, and other qol features.
I remember when all of this went down. I just wonder what they were hoping to accomplish with this. Just another crowd fund and run scam I guess. Seems like trying to drag Coleco's name into the mud was their ultimate downfall. Good decision by Coleco acting as they did.
I’m thinking “why on earth would you not make a unique shell design?” I know, save money, but they wanted to raise nearly $2,000,000 just to look like another unsuccessful game console? Stupid all around
I remember this scam like it was yesterday. Had I been a lawyer, I would have filed a class-action suit against the scammers to refund the money they stole and sentenced them to prison for defrauding the investors.
This scam was popularized by some major retro gaming RU-vidrs as well. I saw early on how unlikely the whole thing was, just major suspicions. They are actually one of the major reasons I have never invested in any crowd funded consoles. I get it that people need money to launch their projects, but "concepts only" are not good investments.
A handful of RU-vidrs that specialize in retro gaming got conned as well. Really sad and unfortunate because they were really looking forward to seeing the Coleco Chameleon come to fruition, only to get shafted.
Mike Kennedy and co. approached several engineers during its development, including people like Kevtris (known for developing Analogue's FPGA products), to provide cores for their console but lacked enough funding and cheapened out. I guess they planned to pay more up front had they were able to raise the crowdfunded money. But since they fell way short of the goal, it was only a matter of when, not if, the project would collapse.
The funny thing about glitch free games is that no game is glitch free especially back in the cartridge days. Final Fantasy 1 and 6 have long list of bugs on oversights(early revisions of FF3 US has a glitch that can corrupt your save memory and the only way to fix it is to disconnect the battery). Pokemon Gen1 is notoriously buggy. DKC2 has a glitch that bricks your cartridge in a similar way to the Sketch glitch.
Attaching the Coleco name to it was the perfect scum icing on this scam. I can't even imagine how they thought they'd get away with it. There's has to be something to deliver to consumers to get away with it in the first place!
Intellivision Amico much? I actually read the book about the whole Coleco Chameleon debacle and I'm not surprised it didn't come out. Mike Kennedy is/was an ideas guy first and foremost. He never really put any effort into his many, many failed projects, expecting people to do his job for him.
I like the idea of cartridges. It encourages developers to avoid careless glitches we see these days and helps to avoid rushing games to the market. But yeah, it just isn't super viable these days.
Was in correspondence with Mike regarding an interview. Unfortunately, the SNES Sydney Hunter in the prototype thing dropped and he declined. I think many alternative consoles try to run business like Nintendo or Sony. But, you never have the time, money and faithful customer base that entails.
it seems to have disappeared from the net, but i remember a picture of mike kennedy kneeling and smiling next to one of the giant blocks of metal that were the atari jaguar injection molds.
The trouble with projects like this, and the Amico is that the people behind them have all these pie in the sky ideas for something only to quickly find out that making those ideas a reality is much harder than it looks. But it's too late. They already made their promises, and they got the ball rolling full speed ahead, but can't really deliver. Suddenly your "affordable" retro system that's supposed to bring gaming back to the glory days is much more expensive, and can't do most of the things you promised it would.
You didn't mention one of the most bonkers fact of this, they didn't buy the shell mold from Atari they bought it from a company that made dental equipment. The shell was used in a dental drill housing, there are pictures of it. Atari sold the mold a long time ago and they don't know who. It was sold as a lot to someone that just bid on it. It just happened to be bought at one point by that dental place. These guys found the shell and decided to make a games console. I wish they would have just sold cases for mini PCs, like have been done with C64 shells. The Jaguar console actually looks really cool, and they could have made money that way and maybe hired some hardware developers and then went to kickstarter. I wonder who owns the molds now. . .
I remember this. I had only been collecting a couple of years, but even I knew how sketch this was. Funny enough the Coleco Chameleon name is used for a hombrew SD cartridge. One can play the ColecoVision library, the SG 1000, and a few other systems I'm not familiar with. I ordered it last week I'm waiting for it now. But people have been very happy with it.
Today, with a 3D Printer, a circuitboard printing service and all the components you can easily buy, to make a prototype it's really not difficult and expensive anymore. The only thing you need is knowledge in electronics and coding. Anything else is nothing special anymore. And if they don't even get this... It's straight up dumb...
Nice summary of the whole thing. If anyone's interested in the nitty-gritty, Slope's Game Room has a deep dive that gets really granular. As to whether a cartridge based system could succeed. I would posit the Evercade as an example that it, in fact, can. Of course the Evercade does have the ability to update both the hardware and the software on the cartridge,. With bugs being inevitable, you kind of need to have some method to fix them when they happen.
I used to listen to a colecovision podcast up to the point where kennedy found the molds for the jaguar and then he left the show....the show hasn't done much since.
Cartridges actually have good reasons to make a comeback now, as filesizes have become bigger and load time reduction becomes more of a need. Archival and industrial storage is moving from disks back to tapes now. I'd imagine the same will happen with games. Blu-Ray won't really be enough going forward, and people do love physical games. Flash memory is gonna be what replaces Disks in gaming, I think. It's cheap, fast enough to keep up with SSDs, and can hold more than enough data for a modern AAA title.
Crazy how many scam indie consoles there have been. Even back before crowdfunding there was stuff like the Phantom, another one with a wonderfully ironic name. Chameleon is notable for the sheer debacle of their fake stunts but I don't anything can top the audacity of the OTON X, the console with advanced AI that made games for you! In 2016. These days you can run a lot of console games on an FPGA thanks to the enormous effort put behind the MiSTer project. But back in 2015 a lot of the FPGA cores for more advanced systems had not been done, let alone made open source. So the Chameleon people would have had to do that work themselves which is a pretty tall order for people who can't even prototype some ICs on a board. It was pretty clear that this was never going to happen.
Mike Kennedy was offering more than Tommy TalliAMICO ever did. The Coleco Chameleon offered an amazing 16 bit library in a tested medical grade console shell. More than a footbath that glowed ever did.
i remember hearing about this back when it was brand new, what a disaster! Great video as always, not sure a huge amount of people are aware of this topic these days
Hopefully you caught up on sleep... As many pointed out, a retro cartridge based console CAN be successful. Ask the Evercade. I myself am looking to pick up one, as I'm getting tired of the monetization focus of mobile gaming.
I've been burned enough times on Kickstarter now to never want to touch it again. I got a pebble watch ok and even the metal version, but it never really lived up to the hype. I also got the very expensive kit bike for kids. Infento. Honestly high quality stuff, but fiddly and a pain. And we just haven't even used it. Then I went for the voice assistant that wasn't Google/Alexa and after about 3 years that was finally cancelled. And at some point I also paid for a drone that never materialised. So enough for me!
This basically came down to the engineer behind this project being a liar, and Mike Kennedy, the main lead of this project, being an overly trusting gullible idiot. In essence, Kennedy asked his engineer if he could do this, was told "easy-peasy" then faked progress along the way, lying to Kennedy NOT ONCE catching on before eventually it was far too late for the Chamelon but also Kennedy's reputation and even his livelihood. Mike Kennedy was never a bad person, just a bad leader who trusted the wrong person and didn't look into things that seemed fishy. The whole thing should have never happened. Kennedy should have spotted this guy is a liar almost right away and canned the project then and there, or else fired him and replaced him with someone who could have actually got the job done.
I appreciate you covering this fiasco, but I really can't agree with "cartridges are obsolete". Surprised you haven't heard of the Evercade which did this idea correctly and seems to be doing well enough financially with it. That's proof there are a lot of people who still like collecting carts, and don't agree with the modern "ship it now and patch it later - maybe" mentality. The Atari 2600+ is also generating a lot of positive buzz due to its focus on real carts.
when kickstarters at least come with a product i dont call this a big scam. its a scam when they fail to deliver any product like we saw sometimes. personally i would never invest anything in a kickstarter project. its like rolling a dice. those spending money there should know very well they are taking a chance. complaining after is dumb to me. just not invest in any kickstarter project if you dont want lose your money.
I was always suspicious of this. I did like how they got the shell molding tho. The only real/legit retro console that's been released as of late is the MISTER. And I'm still waiting for a real consolized version of it
Awesome video! Coleco Chameleon, Intelivision Amico, and a few others that turned out to be duds. This one takes the cake though. Total scam. Amico was at least a real deal, just not managed properly.
I disagree with the comment on cartridges. Homebrews are made today for retro consoles and they are fine. It is possible to make a game that is mostly if not totally bug free and release it on cart. It simply needs to be tested a bit more. Also, I remember when this went down too. No, it was never going to see the light of day.
You could always make a game on a cartridge with rewriteable flash and get some level of patchability that's probably still best avoided as much as possible. Using actual mask ROMs is probably not sensible economically unless you somehow plan to sell hundreds of thousands of them.
Great video!! Pojr, I am curious about your thoughts on the Evercade. That is a cartridge based retro system that seems to have caught on with old school video game fans and collectors of physical media.
2:30 - Wasn't it proved that Atari didn't have a working VCS when they started? Wasn't it just emulation to monitor with a shell? I believe that kicked up a LOT of dust back when the VCS first started.
Between the VCS, Amico and Chameleon it seems like every pre-Famicom console needs to be tied to some dubious new piece of hardware. When are we going to get the Magnavox Odyssey Cubed?
The Retro VCS/ Coleco Chameleon saga was one of the funniest fiascos I have ever witnessed. Just about everyone particularly the ones involved in the project like Gamester81 etc, was at each others throats once the thing fell through and Mr Kennedy was deemed satan. 😂hilarious
Whenever people talk about the good ol days of no dlc, patches, etc I'm just like "Yeah... but that means if a game that sucked, it sucked FOREVER. And we bought Street Fighter II multiple times" As for a retro style console being viable? I guess it depends on the price point. The Evercade seems to be doing well enough, but it emulates games and each cartridge is basically a classic game collection.
I think I missed something. Were they going to make NEW "retro" games for this thing? Or were you able to play well known retro titles? I've never understood why things like the Raspberry Pi can exist since I would assume the games are copyrighted, no? Also great video as always.
@@tonyrichards254 right good point. So does that somehow bypass all the copyrights of the games? I wonder if they are even enforced. I mean, the likelihood of someone finding a Rampage machine and putting quarters in it that get back to Bally Midway at this point seems very unlikely. I doubt they care too much if their game is emulated so people can play at home. But when it comes to Nintendo games or PS games, I would imagine copyright could come into play, no?
Emulation itself is not illegal. The games themselves are still copyrighted, so they would have needed licenses and distribution deals to use those games. New games could be (and are) produced for old consoles. If someone were to try to do this today, they'd likely try to take the Mister project and commercialize it further than it is already. It's a working execution of a similar idea but without the cartridge bit.
I'm a retro fan and for me part of the fun is owning and playing on the original hardware I just dont see the point in something like this you could just buy an android box
