Super Cassette Vision

~ the goodbye ~

Before Nintendo owned the Japanese living room, Epoch did. The company had been founded in 1958 making plastic baseball boards and had worked its way through toys and card games to the Cassette Vision in 1981, which was Japan's first commercially successful console with interchangeable cartridges. It sold around 400,000 units and took more than seventy percent of the home console market. For about two years, the answer to who was winning consoles in Japan was a toy manufacturer nobody outside Japan had heard of.

Then Nintendo shipped the Family Computer in july 1983, with Sega and Casio arriving in the same window, and the Cassette Vision was obsolete in a season. Epoch's reply took a year. The Super Cassette Vision went on sale on 17 july 1984 at 14,800 yen, built around an 8-bit NEC microcontroller at 4 MHz with a video chip Epoch had designed in-house. It could draw 128 sprites and every one of them had to be a single flat color. It was a real improvement on the machine it replaced and it was aimed at a shelf Nintendo had already taken.

Around thirty games came out for it, including Dragon Ball and Doraemon licenses and conversions of Pole Position II and Mappy. Nothing moved the numbers. Total sales came to roughly 300,000, which is fewer than the machine from 1981 had managed, and by 1987 Epoch had stopped making consoles altogether. The company did not go under and did not try again. It simply left the category it had invented in Japan and went back to what it had been doing since 1958.

That exit is the reason this grave is not sad. On 20 march 1985, while the console was failing, Epoch put a doll's house and nine families of small flocked animals into Japanese toy shops under the name Sylvanian Families. Those are still being made. They are sold in far more countries than the Super Cassette Vision reached, including this one, and the children buying them have no idea the company behind them once held seventy percent of a market that Nintendo took away. Hardware is a business you can be thrown out of. A small rabbit in a dress is apparently not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed in france ~

The only country outside Japan that got the machine at any scale was France, where a distributor called ITMC sold it from 1984 under its own brand name, Yeno. At least sixteen Japanese titles were localized for the European release. It did reasonable business for a while, because France in 1984 had no dominant console and a lot of shelf space, and then Nintendo pushed properly into Europe in 1986 and the question stopped being open.

The Yeno badge is the whole story of eighties hardware distribution in one word. The same plastic box was a Japanese toy company's flagship in Tokyo and an unfamiliar French brand in Paris, and which of those you grew up with was decided by an importer rather than by anything about the machine.

~ the pink one ~

In 1985 Epoch tried a variant. The Super Lady Cassette Vision was the same console in a pink carrying case at 19,300 yen, bundled with a game called Milky Princess and pointed at girls, on the theory that there was an audience left over which the Famicom had not already claimed. It was a repackage rather than a platform, and it went nowhere. Casio would spend a great deal more money making the same bet properly a decade later with the Loopy, and that did not work either.

~ the long tail ~

The machine now exists mostly as a hardware curiosity. Its video chip is odd enough that people who reverse-engineer old consoles for fun keep writing about it, and the monochrome sprite limitation gives its games a look that nothing else from 1984 quite has. Working units come up in Japanese auctions regularly and Yeno units come up in French ones, which is a neat physical record of the only two markets it was ever really in.

Epoch is still trading. It made the Barcode Battler and it still makes Aquabeads, and it remains the reason a large part of the world's toy shelves have small woodland animals on them. The console is a footnote in its own company history, which is roughly the correct weight, and the Cassette Vision that came first is the one that deserves the plaque.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »