Insertcredit has lead me to find out about this weird thing and as there is no thread dedicated to it here I thought I'd share the bits I found so far. One of the owners that went public is 98PaceCar who is also a member of Assembler. See the entries in the old thread here He posted about it in more detail about one year ago over at Digitpress. The same pictures as posted in the above forum can be found in a neat photo album here. I just found out about it today and even though it is a piece I don't have to actually own, it's obscurity alone is strangely attractive (especially maybe as I like Laserdiscs). I find it about as fascinating as the BBC Laserdisc thing posted in another thread here. Any other owners in the meantime?
That dude sure has a find what a piece of history im an LD fan also, but really the Laseractive or MSX LD selection blow it away for titles.
The Halcyon is a holy grail for a lot of people. I know it was for me. I was lucky enough to end up with several complete units, as well as the remains of the physical assets of RDI. I hope to have time to catalog everything someday, but it's literally tens of thousands of pages of documents, 35mm film prints, laserdisc masters, CED's (yes, there are actually prototypes of several games on RCA videodiscs), floppy discs, hand drawn animation, scripts, and everything else which went into making this system, as well as Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.
Sounds great. Why CED? Were they planning on using CED instead of LD at one point? CED did have some advanatages but it was heavy as anything and would have required a fair amount of needle replacement...
They wanted to go with CED at first because the players were significantly cheaper (MSRP would have been $300-$400 for the custom RCA SKT265 model they were going to use versus $1000 for the Pioneer LD700), as was disc replication. CED also has several advantages over LD for data storage as it allows for much greater bandwidth. In fact, I believe Ralph Bayer was actively pursuing a CED based solution to bringing laserdisc games to the Colecovision at one point because he believed the data bandwidth would have allowed the game code to be quickly loaded from the disc into memory on the Colecovision laserdisc add-on without the need for external cartridges or tapes. JVC did something similar with their VHD games for the MSX, although I know some of the early games did require a separate cassette. The later ones put both the game code and video/audio files on a single VHD. Durability was a perceived problem in-house at RDI, but RCA sent them various engineering test memos showing that CED discs and styluses are capable of thousands of plays without degradation. What ultimately changed everything was RCA's decision to get out of the CED business and their unwillingness to produce a custom run of only 500-1,000 units which is all RDI was willing and able to order initially. So, they ordered the more expensive LD700s from Pioneer, spending around $750K to do the initial run of 1,000 with the RDI logo and graphics attached.
Thanks, probably found out more about the development of the Halcyon from those two paragraphs of text then all the websites about the machine ever. CED would probably have been better apart from the weight of the CED discs compared to LDs. I wasn't aware that Ralph Baer was part of the team for the Coleco LD / CED project, will email him later and see what I can find out. What materials do you have on Dragons Lair? Be interesting to see what you do have.
I spoke to Mr. Baer about this probably 5-6 years ago at CGE. His memory was sort of vague, but I later found an article containing a lengthy interview he did at the height of the "popularity" of FMV games in the early 90s and he talked about his feelings that CED would have been a much better format than CD-Rom and he also talked about the prototype he was working on for the Colecovision. I really need to track down that article again. In any event, I pretty much have all the development materials from the AMS/RDI side of things for DL and Space Ace. Everything from floppy discs with code to the full hand annotated scripts for each game, the 35mm prints of the animation, the prototype laserdiscs they used at trade shows, various test pressings, DL and Space Ace on CED (interestingly, most of the coloring was not done yet, so many scenes are nothing more than animated sketches) master voice over session reel to reel tapes, concept sketches (for levels, as well as side art, cabinet design, etc...) and basically everything except for the actual hand painted cells which would have been the Bluth side of things.
The Halcyon is certainly a sweet piece to own as a collectible, but it's really not worth playing IMO. Thayer's Quest is fun, but not enough to deal with setting it up when I want to play. Still, there is little else in my collection that holds a candle to it and I'll always remember when I actually got my hands on it. The entire deal was pure luck on my part both by being in the right place at the right time as well as having the money to spend on it. There are rarer and more expensive things out there, but the Halcyon was one system I never though I would see, let alone own so it will always be one of my most cherished pieces. Bojay1997, do you happen to have rom images from the carts? I've dumped and archived the roms in the computer itself, but haven't been willing to open up my carts to dump them for fear of breaking them. Also, was there ever a box for Thayer's Quest? I have the map, overlay, and manual, but no box. I did get a 2 sided box for the NFL game along with 2 overlays and a manual though.
I do have the dumped roms for both game cartridges, as well as copies of the source code on 8" and 5.25" floppy and on paper hard copy printouts. The box for Thayer's Quest was literally identical to the football box with the exception of the fact that there were no graphics or printed info on the outside. It was literally a white cardboard 12" clamshell with a cardstock insert that holds the cartridge. The overlay, map and manual just rested on top of the insert. I haven't dug deep enough into the archive to determine if they planned to do a separate box or even sell Thayer's Quest separate from the system, but based on what I've reviewed so far, it doesn't look like that was the plan.
Glad to hear you have the rom images. I've had this nagging fear in the back of my head for quite some time that the roms could die and I'd be left with a paperweight. At least I know that someone else out there has them! It would be interesting to do some digging into the code sometime. I've found a number of bugs in the NFL game (pretty glaring ones actually). This is the biggest thing that makes me believe it was never released outside of the investors, but I've never found out for sure if it was released or not. I guess the only way to find out for sure is either in your docs or talking to Rick Dyer about it. Have you seen the video that's on the 20th anniversary Space Ace DVD? What's your opinion of it if you have? Makes me feel really bad for Rick and company as it really comes across as a labor of love while RDI was still viable. The way he talks about the system shows an incredible amount of pride in what they were doing and knowing how it ultimately died a young death makes it hard to watch.
The question of whether or not it was released is something I'd really love to answer, but there are so many documents, that I just haven't had time to really organize and analyze everything yet. I know there was final "retail" packaging since there was a system that was sold on Ebay right around the time I purchased the RDI archive 9 years ago now that had a full multicolor box for the laserdisc player and unit. It was supposedly another unit given to an investor. I would suspect that if it was ever made available, it was offered in something equivalent to the Neiman Marcus catalog since I doubt any other retailer would stock something that expensive. I know in a San Diego Union-Tribune article a decade or so ago, Rick Dyer claimed they sold around 100 of them. I suspect this is not accurate, but I do know for sure they had 1,000 LD700 Pioneer players on hand at their Carlsbad facility when they "started" production. Several hundred were gone when they liquidated, so they were either sold or taken by employees. In any event, I'm not that sympathetic to Rick Dyer. The investor I bought everything from (who has since passed away sadly) lost a lot of money and had a lot of bad feelings from his dealings with Rick and his wife. The truth is, Milton Bradley passed on the initial design of a Halcyon-like system that Dyer proposed in the 1980-81 time frame and were pretty specific about why they thought it was a bad idea. He disregarded the advice they gave him and proceeded to design something that could never hope to meet with mass market retail success. I think the Halcyon is a remarkable system for what it hoped to be, but there's a part of me that equates it to that episode of the Simpson's where Homer designs a car for his brother Herb's company. It's a monstrosity that nobody but Homer would ever buy. In some ways, the Halcyon is a little like that with speech recognition, a headset, a keyboard, cartridges, laserdiscs, overlays, maps, etc....It's like he never really understood what playing videogames is all about. That's just my opinion.
I've heard of people finding just the laserdisk player and laserdisks in the wild, but have never heard of anybody finding anything else related to it. In my computer, the roms are actually eproms and not mask roms, so I would suspect it was a pre retail unit if it ever reached retail. I had heard a rumor about them being available mail order at one point in California, but never could get any real info on it. That's a great parallel. I had never thought about it that way, but Dyer was trying to cram a whole lot of technology into a single package for no real reason other than to have it. I guess he was just way too far ahead of what technology could do at a consumer level. Never knew that he had pitched it prior to RDI either, that's very interesting to know. Any idea what reasons MB gave him when they turned it down?
I'd be really curious about this as well (and I always longed to own an RDI system). I met with Rick back in 1994 when he was making a few rounds to game publishers (one of which I was at) peddling Thayers Quest, but using the "Kingdom" title. It was being pitched for Sega CD at the very least, but since word leaked of Playstation, that was his goal. He wanted to finish all the other chapters of the series (not sure how much if any work was actually done on these back in the RDI days). But he was struggling (I thought at the time). After our meeting I began to talk to him about RDI, and quite frankly, he was very smug with a hint of arrogance about the whole venture. I said I was curious if it was produced, and if he had any, and he said he still had 100 brand new systems (interpret that how you will) still. I asked to buy one, and he pretty much on the spot blew me off. At the time, I thought it was pretty smug, especially since he was trying to get me to sign a deal with him to pick up Kingdom - and while I wanted an RDI unit, it certainly didn't impact the deal since we saw no future with him. But his relucatance sure made me not want to work with him, and his past certainly wasn't a bed of roses by any means. Anyway...I digress. I'd love to see some of the stuff you have, especially marketing materials (I'm fascinated with packaging and advertismenets). It'd also be neat to get the 35mm films scanned in as well.
I know for sure the laserdisc players were liquidated in San Diego County at auction. I actually found a loose RDI branded player at a swap meet in San Diego a year or two before I got the RDI archives. The guy who bought most of them and then resold them had a laserdisc repair shop in northern San Diego County. I met him a decade ago when I wanted to get an LD-700 fixed. He offered to sell me a NOS RDI branded LD700 for $200 which seemed like too much at the time. In any event, we talked for a while and he told me that he was actually friends with Rick Dyer and would call him to see if he had any other Halcyon stuff laying around. Basically, Dyer's answer was no at that time. As for Rick Dyer and the whole issue of whether or not he has any Halcyons, I suspect the answer is no. I'm guessing his ego probably prevents him from telling the truth, but there's no way given what's in the archive that he would have walked away with the Halcyons and not most of the other stuff I have. Things like awards and other items of sentimental value. I believe that the liquidators literally came in one day without notice and just seized the assets. There's just too much stuff in there that would have been taken by employees if it hadn't happened that fast. There are also detailed inventories of every single component that was ordered prior to the bankruptcy and there just weren't enough parts to have made that many of the computer portions from what I can tell. I have a complete set of scripts for the entire Thayer's Quest saga which are in large binders with the hand written notes, as well as concept sketches. I need to compare them to what became the Kingdom games. Take this for what it's worth, but I believe that Rick Dyer didn't actually have the rights to Thayer's Quest following the bankruptcy and probably didn't have the rights to just take the animation and re-voice and re-name the characters and re-release it as Kingdom. I know the investor I bought the RDI stuff from was particularly bitter about this point and was hoping that I would go after Dyer since he transferred his rights in everything he bought from RDI's liquidators to me. Frankly, I don't think there's much of value there since other than a DVD that probably sold a couple of thousand copies and some poorly selling games for the CD-i, 3do and PC, Thayer's Quest really has never made anyone any money. As far as I know, Rick Dyer is out of the videogame business now and I believe he is selling real estate in San Diego County. This whole thread has inspired me to start digging through the archive again to answer these questions and to share more about what's actually there. For that, I thank all of you.
very cool - if you need any help with scanning or sorting through stuff, let me know - I'm in the O.C. (I hate that it's called that now).
I've heard from another collector that they had approached Dyer about the Halcyon and he said that he didn't even have one for himself. I'm inclined to believe that myself, but there's really no telling.
Bojay- You mentioned 35mm film a couple of times... If that's actual film prints (like theatrical prints) and not just slides or something, we should talk... I have access to a facility that many of the movie studios use to transfer their film for DVD and HD. They can do a professional cleaning, color-correction and scanning of the film to one of these formats (and I can arrange it at a ridiculously cheap rate). You should get the film converted to a digital format soon either way, if it wasn't properly cared for back when it was made, it could be turning red and starting to break down... Plus, I'm sure we'd all love to see whatever it is!
I'm sure with a 35mm to HD transfer, a bit of programming on the side of BD-Java, and we could have a pseudo-emulated Halcyon running on Blu-Ray disc. I'd love to see that stuff transferred to HD. Psycho, does the facility you have access to do 2k transfers or can they also do 4k transfers?
