Coleco turned out to be the only place in the Connecticut River Valley that met two golden criteria, ie.
- They were looking for programmers when i got out of grad school.
- They weren't an insurance company.
so i jumped at the job and started work there in January 1980. Coleco was a family company run by and extremely dysfunctional family and the office politics were unbelievable but they managed to do some interesting work in spite of it all. My tenure there corresponded with a meteoric rise in their fortunes due to the ColecoVision game platform, for which I can take quite a bit of credit, and the Cabbage Patch Doll - at that time the most successful toy ever sold - for which I can claim no credit whatsoever. Shortly after I left, Coleco went out of business.
ColecoVision was Coleco's foray into the home video gaming market . It was the brain child of Eric Bromley, a man who parlayed driving ambition and a decent facility with the Japanese language into an impressive fistful of licenses for Japanese arcade games. I was the Principal Software Engineer in Coleco's Advanced R&D group at the time so it fell to myself and my counterpart on the hardware side to design and build a game platform capable of playing these things. Development was done in z80 assembler and Pascal on HP microprocessor development systems using In-Circuit Emulation.
Donkey Kong was Coleco's biggest hit and, ironically, was given away free with every game unit. I only mention it here because, for better or for worse, it is the most enduring product of all my labors in the software business. You can still get the code on the internet and run it on any number of ColecoVision emulators. Again, this project was done on HP development systems in z80 assembler and Pascal.
various game projects A lot of what Coleco did before ColecoVision was hand-held games. I wrote a number of these including a hand-held version of Missile Command of which I was quite proud at the time. Because I was in the R&D division, I got to work with a broad range of technologies - all kinds of microprocessors and microcontrollers, speech synthesis, graphics chips, sound chips etc.