CommaVid

» see commavid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

CommaVid was run by physicists, out of an address on North Farnsworth Avenue in Aurora, Illinois. Irwin Gaines and John Bronstein did most of the programming between them. Joseph Biel wrote Stronghold and separately took contract work porting Coleco's Venture to the Atari 2600, which is the kind of job that existed in 1982 and has not existed since.

The company was supposed to be called Computer Magic, and the MagiCard cartridge still carries a Computer Magic, Inc. label on it. CommaVid is what was left after COMputer MAgic VIDeo was pushed into one word. Seven cartridges reached shops, numbered CM001 to CM009 with two gaps in the middle: MagiCard, Video Life, Cosmic Swarm, Room of Doom, Mines of Minos, Cakewalk and Stronghold. Mission Omega and Underworld were never finished. A tenth game called Rush Hour was farmed out, the programmer was in a car accident, and all that survives is a finished box and a prototype that flickers.

Wikipedia says the company was defunct in 1983 and offers nothing behind the year. The closest thing to an account came in 2003, when Joe Santulli got all three founders into one interview for Digital Press, and what they described was a wind-down rather than a failure. CommaVid "bowed out like many others in that early crash" and "paid all of the bills". The investors were offered fifty cents on the dollar and every one of them accepted. There was no filing and no public notice of any kind.

~ the dossier ~

~ the magicard ~

MagiCard was the first thing CommaVid sold and the least like a game. It was a programming environment on a cartridge, shipped with a manual of around 128 pages, and you could only get it by sending away for it. Video Life, a Conway's Game of Life for the 2600, was offered to the people who had already bought MagiCard and to nobody else, which is why there are almost none of them.

Mail order meant exactly one route to the object, running through one address in Aurora, from a firm that folded before the name meant anything outside Illinois. I have never seen one in any condition. What I recognize is the premise underneath it, that the machine you play on ought to be the machine you write on, and that premise reached me a long time afterward through a PC and a compiler rather than through a slot on a console.

~ fewer than twenty copies ~

The only production numbers anyone has came out of Gaines in that 2003 interview: somewhere between fifty and a hundred MagiCards, and fewer than twenty copies of Video Life. He was recalling it two decades later and no record exists to check him against, so those figures are testimony rather than a ledger. They are also the reason the name still circulates.

The Chicago Reader, writing about the collectors' market in September 2003, said a Video Life cartridge could fetch as much as $3,000. By then the rights to the company had passed to John Hardie and Sean Kelly, who told Santulli they had no comment on what they intended to do with them. The domain today is a Directnic parking page, and the cartridges that made the name are scarce for the plainest reason available: nobody ordered any more of them.

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