Coleco Industries

~ the obituary ~

colecovision launched in north america in august 1982 when i was not yet two years old. by the time i was old enough to know what a video game console was, in ankara around 1989, colecovision was a footnote in english-language retro coverage and coleco itself had already filed chapter 11. the company never reached turkey at retail. its name shows up in my mental landscape only through cabbage patch kid references in american sitcoms, and later through forum threads about the adam.

coleco started in 1932 as the connecticut leather company, a hartford operation that sold shoe-leather to repair shops. maurice greenberg ran it through the depression and the war. his sons arnold and leonard took the company in two directions in the fifties, leather laces for shoes on one side and plastic-handled lacing kits for kids on the other. the colorful plastic kits did better than the leather. coleco shortened its name in 1961 around the time it pivoted to above-ground swimming pools, which were the company's main business for over a decade. by 1972 coleco was the largest pool manufacturer in the world.

the video-game pivot started with the telstar in 1976, a pong clone built around the general instrument ay-3-8500 chip. the chip shortage that year tanked coleco's finances and the company barely survived. it bounced back in 1980 with arcade-licensed tabletop electronic games and then with the colecovision launch in august 1982, an 8-bit cartridge console that shipped with a port of donkey kong in the box. colecovision sold about two million units by 1985 and was the only console that gave atari serious trouble at the price point.

the adam home computer was the mistake that killed the company. announced in june 1983 as a 600 dollar colecovision-compatible home computer with a daisy-wheel printer and a tape drive, the adam shipped in october that year with quality problems and missed the christmas window. coleco took it off the market in january 1985. cabbage patch kids dolls had launched the same year and were the saving grace through 1984, with parents lining up at toy stores nationwide and revenue cresting at 850 million dollars. the selchow and righter acquisition in 1986 for 75 million put scrabble and trivial pursuit into the coleco portfolio but loaded debt onto the balance sheet just as cabbage patch demand began cooling. coleco filed chapter 11 on july 12 1988 with 335 million owed to creditors. hasbro paid 85 million for the cabbage patch ip in 1989.

~ the case file ~

~ colecovision ~

the colecovision shipped at 175 dollars in august 1982 with donkey kong included. the build quality was a step above the atari 2600. the console had a zilog z80 cpu at 3.58 mhz and 1 kb of ram. coleco licensed sega arcade titles directly and shipped zaxxon and time pilot among its first-year releases. the expansion module 1 was a passive adapter that let colecovision play atari 2600 cartridges, which atari sued coleco over and lost. the console sold about six million units lifetime through its 1985 discontinuation.

the colecovision is the console american kids in 1983 sitcoms were always begging for at christmas. it lived for about two and a half years against the atari 2600 and then collapsed in the great video-game crash of 1983 alongside everything else on the shelf.

~ the adam disaster ~

the adam was supposed to be the colecovision's growth path into the home computer market. the design promised cassette-based storage at floppy speed, a built-in word processor, a daisy-wheel printer included in the box, and price parity with the commodore 64. early units bricked at first power-on because of a magnetic surge from the tape drive's read-write head. units that survived first boot still had reliability problems. mass returns hit coleco within months of launch. an estimated 300,000 unsold adams sat in warehouses through 1984. coleco took a 35 million dollar writedown in early 1985 and pulled the product.

the adam disaster is the case study every business-school text uses for hardware ship slippage. the deadline coleco missed was christmas 1983, the consequence was a quarter-billion in inventory and reputational damage that the cabbage patch boom briefly papered over.

~ the long tail ~

the coleco trademark passed through several hands after 1989. river west brands relaunched the coleco name in 2005 with a tabletop pong clone aimed at the nostalgia market. the brand still appears on retro mini-consoles in 2026 under licensed manufacturers. the connecticut leather company that started in 1932 is gone, the swimming pool business is gone, the cabbage patch dolls live on under wicked cool toys as of 2026.

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