M Network Colecovision

M NETWORK COLECOVISION

Having already established the M Network line to release videogames for the Atari 2600, it was natural that Mattel would extend the line to include Colecovision after that system was introduced with great success.

Developing Colecovision games, however, was trickier. Figuring out how to program an Atari 2600 comes from examining the hardware; a Colecovision, however, like an Intellivision, contains an operating system in ROM.

At Mattel, programmer David Akers (Star Strike for the Atari 2600) did, on his own and on his own time, figure out how much of the Colecovision operating system worked. One day he just sort of said, "Look what I did," and demonstrated a simple Colecovision program. Everyone was impressed, except for the legal department; they were apoplectic.

The operating system ROM was considered by Coleco to be proprietary and top secret. When releasing a game for Colecovision (or Intellivision for that matter), you had to be able to prove you figured out what is in that ROM by yourself (a procedure known as reverse-engineering), or be open to charges of industrial espionage (as when Mattel sued Atari for $40 million for hiring away several Intellivision programmers).

The burden of proof is on the company doing the reverse-engineering, so the work has to be done under intensely controlled and documented circumstances. The lawyers were afraid that if word of Dave's experimentation got out, Mattel could be sued by Coleco. Dave was told to stop and the people who knew about his work were told to keep it secret.

But Mattel Electronics Marketing soon asked for Colecovision games. Despite the work Dave had already done, Mattel bought a how-to manual on Colecovision programming from Sound Software of Olympia, Washington. They had reverse-engineered the Colecovision themselves and were selling the information (for $50,000 we were told) to companies who didn't want to go through all the trouble of (a) deciphering the code and (b) documenting that it had been done legitimately and legally.

Armed with this squeky-clean documentation, development of Colecovision games began in July 1983 in Mattel's Hawthorne, California and in its Nice, France offices. Only one of the Hawthorne games, Masters of the Universe: The Power of He-Man, neared completion before the division was closed, and Mattel never released a Colecovision title.

At the French office, however, which continued to work after the rest of Electronics had been shut down, three Colecovision games were completed: BurgerTime, Bump 'N' Jump and Illusions. Under their agreement with Mattel, the French office (newly named Nice Ideas) was free to shop the games to other publishers. Coleco finally released them.

FUN FACT: Manager Keith Robinson was put in charge of Colecovision development in Hawthorne. One idea he and programmer Tom Priestley had was to convert the Intellivoice games for Colecovision. Although the voice lab had been shut down, speech had already been synthesized for nine Intellivision games, released and unreleased, plus foreign versions of several of those titles.

After the commercial failure of Intellivoice, Mattel obviously wasn't going to create a voice module for Colecovision. The key to their idea was that the cost of the General Instruments speech synthesis chip had dropped to the point where it would be practical to put a synthesis chip into every cartridge. (This idea came from the M Network Atari 2600 cartridges. Mattel had originally planned on releasing an Atari expansion module with extra RAM for "big games," but the Intellivoice flop made them decide to simply add RAM chips to the big game cartridges.)

To demonstrate their idea, Keith and Tom bought a talking clock chip kit at Radio Shack. Tom cobbled together a cartridge from the parts and Keith slapped together a Colecovision program to trigger it. It worked perfectly. (The only problem with the cartridge was that a Colecovision doesn't have an audio-input pin on its cartridge port - the voice cartridge had to be plugged into the Colecovision's expansion port.)

Keith and Tom demonstrated the talking Colecovision to Vice President Gabriel Baum, who excitedly took it to Marketing. Unknown to Keith or Tom, Gabriel had just been forced to put together a list of programmers and artists to be laid off in November. Armed with the "ColecoVoice" idea, Gabriel was able to convince upper management to save about six programmers to develop the idea.

The layoff came and the programmers were saved, but no further work was done on "ColecoVoice."