Xonox

~ the goodbye ~

K-tel was a Minnesota company that had spent two decades selling things through television commercials, mostly compilation records with twenty hits on them ordered by a voice that sounded like it was shouting over a phone line. That business was real and it was enormous. Around 1980 the company decided the method transferred, and started several video game ventures at once.

Xonox was the cartridge label, set up in 1983 for the Atari 2600, the ColecoVision, the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. Its differentiator was physical. A Xonox cartridge had a connector at each end and two entirely different games inside, one readable from each orientation, so the shell came out roughly twice the length of a normal cartridge and stuck out of the console like a mistake. The price was the same as anyone else's single game.

The catalog was small and cheerfully disposable. Artillery Duel, Ghost Manor, Spike's Peak, Robin Hood, Sir Lancelot and Motocross Racer went out in various pairings, along with Chuck Norris Superkicks, which had the only license anyone would recognize. Eight base games produced sixteen double-ender combinations on the 2600 by being shuffled against each other, so the same title could be bought several times attached to different partners.

There is a trade interview from March 1984 in which Xonox is still talking about forthcoming releases in multiple formats. This matters, because the encyclopedia version says the company folded in the 1983 crash and that is a year too early. It was operating and planning in the spring of 1984.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the double ender ~

The double-ender was a merchandising idea wearing an engineering costume. From the shelf it read as two games for the price of one, and the reason it could be priced that way was that the games inside were small and made to a budget that assumed exactly this. Nobody was pretending otherwise. Playaround had already put reversible cartridges out with adult-themed content before any of this, so the shape was not new. Xonox is the one that industrialized it and built a whole catalog on top.

It also cost money in a way the marketing people had not modeled. The double-game cartridges built for the Atari cost K-tel $5.8 million, mostly in startup costs higher than anyone had projected, which is what happens when you commission a nonstandard piece of injection-molded plastic and a custom board to go inside it. Xonox eventually gave up on the gimmick and released some of the same titles as ordinary single cartridges.

~ the day it died ~

The crash of 1983 removed the retail floor under every third-party cartridge company in North America at once, and Xonox was one of dozens that did not survive it. The parent went down for its own reasons on top of that. K-tel had lost $18 million in a year on Candlelite Music, a purchase it discovered too late had been badly run, and another $7.8 million on real estate and energy investments. K-tel International filed for Chapter 11 on 5 October 1984 with $42 million in assets against $77.6 million in liabilities.

These cartridges were sold by an American television advertising company into American discount racks, a distribution channel that had no equivalent anywhere I could have reached and no reason to build one for a product that was already dead. The double-enders survive as collector items now, priced by rarity rather than by anyone's memory of playing them, which is a peculiar afterlife for an object whose entire pitch was that it was cheap.

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