My little history started when I was around 5 years old, my parents bought a ColecoVision. That was pretty much the base of video gaming :
-The controllers were made with with an analog joystick (kinda, the games didn't really respond analog-like like PSX/PS2 though), two buttons (that were one and the same for controls) and a numeric keypad that main use was to select the amount of players and difficulty. In certain games it could be used in different manners, but for the most part it was never
used.-The console itself was bulky and square. It even had slots to insert the two controllers into them. Since the controllers were about as big as two packs of cigarettes put side by side, you can imagine the size of the entire thing.
For a first generation console, it made alot of ingenious things thought. There was a trackball add on for certain games, that also put to use two buttons instead of only one. The trackball was truly analog compared to the other controllers, yet I only know of one game that used that feature. The game was called Slither, which was more or less a Galaga-style of play, except you could shoot up or down
While the trackball unit hooked to the controller ports of the main unit, it was about as big as the main console itself and had it's own controller slots since you were using the main unit's. Problem is, they never thought about making them stack or fit together to look cool or even save space, so it was a mess of wires.
Aditionally there was an Atari-converter, which basically allowed you to play Atari games on your Coleco, the first backward compatbility feature ever. Although it was completly different as Atari was actually a competitor at the time, and even tried legal actions. But in my 5-8 years old mind, I thought it was cool and asked my parents for an Atari AFTER the Coleco, thinking it was the better system. In reality, Atari was just a notch under Coleco powerwise.
Gamewise, it came with the old time classic of Donkey Kong, but we owned many many games for it, such as Donkey Kong Jr, Gorf (space shooter that I adored), Ladybug, Pacman, Zipper (Hitchcock music O_o), Smurfs and many more. There was only two styles of play at the time :
-Tiny characters on huge grounds : Spelunker or Donkey Kong fits that style where you can see the entire area at a glance.
-Bigger characters with screen switching : Smurfs for example.
This system defined linearity. At this stage in gaming, if you weren't stuck on a single screen, you had only one direction to go : to the right of the screen. Controls were as simple as they ca be with a single button press.
The only exception to this was the awesome Baseball game, that was using the special Action controller. It was much larger than the original controller, the keypad was smaller, and it was held like a handle instead. Your 4 fingers would hit 4 different buttons placed like triggers inside the unit, which was mostly hidden of view on purpose. The top near the keypad had two small wheels to control vertical and horizontal.
In practice, the baseball game would be played like this with that controller : The four trigger buttons were hidden so you wouldn't show your opponent what kind of ball you're be throwing. A mix of the directional handle and the 4 buttons would control the ball in 100s of different manners, although all that was really affected in this limited perspective was height and speed, which was still better than many NES baseball games in all truth.
The 4 buttons would also control which base you'd be throwing the ball to, or which fielder you'd be controlling. You'd keep the button pressed to move the fielder to catch the ball and press the button again to throw it to another base. The wheels would control the runners on base, pressing a button would dictate them to 'run to that base', so pressing the second button would force all of them to run to second base.
It was very complex, and ahead of it's time considering that 4 buttons joysticks were not used until the SNES afterwards. The ColecoVision was a pioneer on that side, although the popularity of console gaming did not lift up ina major way until the NES. Atari also arguably had a much bigger success at the time and a firm hold on the market for several years.
This concludes the first part of this little history lesson.
2 comments:
That's amazing. I knew about the ColecoVision's big controller but I never knew there were so many attachments to it.
If the rest of its hardware had been better, it probably would've put the NES to the test.
Nintendo was the one that created Donkey Kong, clearly labeled on the cartridge. But this was the first console it appeared on outside of arcade coin-munchers. I would speculate that Nintendo decided to do their own console a few years after so they could get their own games out on their own systems.
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