Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Before any of this, Coleco sold shoe leather. No joke. The name is literally short for Connecticut Leather Company, founded back in 1932 to supply cobblers. Somewhere between there and here they became the biggest above ground pool maker in the world, they made Cabbage Patch Kids, and then in August 1982 they dropped the ColecoVision and went straight for Atari's throat.
The weapon was Donkey Kong, sitting right there in the box. Nobody had ever done that before. Journalists and retailers openly asked why on earth Coleco would give away their most wanted game for free. It worked. Over 550,000 consoles moved by Christmas, Coleco's sales tripled to half a billion dollars, and the pack in game became a permanent part of how consoles get sold.
They also nearly lost it. Coleco's Eric Bromley met Nintendo boss Hiroshi Yamauchi and walked away with the home rights to Donkey Kong for 200,000 dollars upfront plus 2 dollars a unit. He flew home on a handshake with no paperwork. At the next CES he found out from Yamauchi's own daughter, who was doing the translating, that Yamauchi had apparently promised those same rights to Atari as well. It was the daughter who helped get a real signed contract in place. That is how close Donkey Kong came to being an Atari game.
Now look at those Atari boxes in the ad. Expansion Module 1 let a ColecoVision play Atari 2600 cartridges. It did not emulate anything. It was a full rebuild of the 2600's internals inside a plug in box, right down to a reverse engineered copy of Atari's own custom chip. Basically the first Atari 2600 clone ever built, sold by Atari's biggest rival, and it handed the ColecoVision the largest game library of any console of its day. Atari sued. They settled, and Coleco ended up paying Atari a royalty for the privilege of cloning them.
Here is the twist almost nobody knows. Masayuki Uemura, the man who led Famicom development at Nintendo, said the ColecoVision set the bar he was aiming at. Another Nintendo manager took one home and his family were stunned by how smooth the graphics ran. So the machine that first brought Donkey Kong into living rooms also helped shape the NES that eventually buried it. Did you actually have a ColecoVision, or was it strictly a wish list machine? Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#colecovision #coleco #donkeykong #atari2600 #arcadegames #retroconsole #80sgaming #retrocommercial #vintagead #consolewars #gaminghistory #1982 #8bit #retrogaming #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
Before any of this, Coleco sold shoe leather. No joke. The name is literally short for Connecticut Leather Company, founded back in 1932 to supply cobblers. Somewhere between there and here they became the biggest above ground pool maker in the world, they made Cabbage Patch Kids, and then in August 1982 they dropped the ColecoVision and went straight for Atari's throat.
The weapon was Donkey Kong, sitting right there in the box. Nobody had ever done that before. Journalists and retailers openly asked why on earth Coleco would give away their most wanted game for free. It worked. Over 550,000 consoles moved by Christmas, Coleco's sales tripled to half a billion dollars, and the pack in game became a permanent part of how consoles get sold.
They also nearly lost it. Coleco's Eric Bromley met Nintendo boss Hiroshi Yamauchi and walked away with the home rights to Donkey Kong for 200,000 dollars upfront plus 2 dollars a unit. He flew home on a handshake with no paperwork. At the next CES he found out from Yamauchi's own daughter, who was doing the translating, that Yamauchi had apparently promised those same rights to Atari as well. It was the daughter who helped get a real signed contract in place. That is how close Donkey Kong came to being an Atari game.
Now look at those Atari boxes in the ad. Expansion Module 1 let a ColecoVision play Atari 2600 cartridges. It did not emulate anything. It was a full rebuild of the 2600's internals inside a plug in box, right down to a reverse engineered copy of Atari's own custom chip. Basically the first Atari 2600 clone ever built, sold by Atari's biggest rival, and it handed the ColecoVision the largest game library of any console of its day. Atari sued. They settled, and Coleco ended up paying Atari a royalty for the privilege of cloning them.
Here is the twist almost nobody knows. Masayuki Uemura, the man who led Famicom development at Nintendo, said the ColecoVision set the bar he was aiming at. Another Nintendo manager took one home and his family were stunned by how smooth the graphics ran. So the machine that first brought Donkey Kong into living rooms also helped shape the NES that eventually buried it. Did you actually have a ColecoVision, or was it strictly a wish list machine? Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#colecovision #coleco #donkeykong #atari2600 #arcadegames #retroconsole #80sgaming #retrocommercial #vintagead #consolewars #gaminghistory #1982 #8bit #retrogaming #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
