RDI Video Systems

~ the obituary ~

Carlsbad, California, 1985. RDI Video Systems finished a home game machine that asked $2,500 of its buyer. It got that machine as far as a couple of stores and ran out of money in the same few weeks. The machine was called the Halcyon. It sat a laserdisc player next to a small computer, each of them about the size of a VCR of the period, and it waited for you to talk to it.

The company began as Advanced Microcomputer Systems under Rick Dyer. He had played Adventure and wanted to write his own, and he spent years on a fantasy game called Shadoan, which took its scale from The Lord of the Rings. The route to paying for it ran through arcades. Advanced Microcomputer Systems took a proposal to Cinematronics for a game driven by a laserdisc player with animation from Don Bluth Productions, and Dragon's Lair arrived in 1983 to a national audience. Space Ace followed in 1984. Somewhere in there Dyer renamed the company RDI Video Systems, and the arcade money went into the home machine. The Wikipedia article puts the founding at 1982 in its infobox and calls Advanced Microcomputer Systems newly formed in its 1983 text. That is the first of several places where this record disagrees with itself.

The Halcyon was planned for January 1985. The same article gives an initial retail price of $2,500 in its lead, a range of $1,800 to $2,500 in its infobox, and an intended range of $1,800 to $2,100 depending on model in its history section. Six games were planned. Two were finished: Thayer's Quest, which was the adventure Dyer had been building toward, and NFL Football LA Raiders vs SD Chargers. Voyage to the New World, Shadow of the Stars, Orpheus and The Spirit of the Whittier Mansion never shipped.

Then the funding stopped. RDI's financiers pulled out and the company was finished in the same year its machine was supposed to arrive. The console never reached most retailers, and the reason given is that there were no affordable disc players to put in it.

~ the case file ~

~ a z80 and a votrax chip ~

Inside was a Z80 with 64K of memory split between ROM and RAM, plus a second computer that did nothing except recognize speech. That subsystem reported two things back to the Z80: which word it thought it had heard, and how confident it was about the match. Speech going the other way ran through a licensed text-to-speech algorithm carrying an English vocabulary tuned to pronounce hundreds of proper names, and emerged through a Votrax chip. Video was meant to come off RCA's CED players until RCA stopped making them late in development, at which point the whole design moved to laserdisc. The replacement was an unbadged Pioneer unit, and the Halcyon spoke to it through an infrared LED attached to the front with a suction cup.

Every owner had to train it. Yes and no came preloaded as four recorded human voices, two female and two male, chosen for pitch and timbre so that most English speakers would match one of them. Every other word you taught it yourself, a few seconds at a time, into a noise-canceling microphone when the game prompted you. The machine then repeated back what it believed you had said before acting on it, and an unusual inflection got you the wrong action.

~ $2,498 ~

A few machines did reach shops. Beverly Stereo and Video sold the Halcyon at $2,498 and later cleared it at $999, and Video Scene in San Diego advertised one at $1,898 in a Los Angeles Times ad dated 26 April 1985. The clearance notice ran that December. That is the entire retail history of this console as the record holds it, two stores in Southern California. Nobody anywhere else was in a position to buy one. Fewer than a dozen units are known to survive.

~ what the record cannot agree on ~

Wikipedia's RDI article says in three separate places that the company folded before the console was released, and its page on Rick Dyer says the console was never released at all. Dyer's own account, preserved on an AtariHQ museum page, is that "RDI started shipping for real the second week in January 1985, and the creditors unanimously voted to give us a 90-day extension." Both of those cannot be right. The newspaper ads sit on Dyer's side of the argument, because a store does not advertise a $1,898 machine it has no stock of, and a clearance price in December means somebody still had units to clear.

This was not a company beaten by a competitor or stranded by a format war. It ran out of investors while holding finished hardware. That failure mode leaves nobody to blame. Dyer kept working. He designed a line of fitness equipment called Powercise in the late 1980s and had another arcade hit with Time Traveler in 1991, then Kingdom: The Far Reaches and, in 1996, Kingdom II: Shadoan, which carried the name of the game he had set out to build in the first place. He later sold real estate in Julian, California. One Halcyon is on display at the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas. For almost everybody alive, that is the only place the machine built to learn a human voice will ever be seen.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »