Coleco

Coleco was founded in 1932 as the Connecticut Leather Company, a supplier of leather goods and shoe products, from which its shortened name derives. It expanded into plastics and above-ground swimming pools before pivoting to toys and, in the 1970s, to electronic games. Its early Telstar line of dedicated home Pong-style consoles gave it a foothold in the young video game market.

Coleco's high point was the ColecoVision, released in 1982. More powerful than the dominant Atari 2600, it prided itself on delivering near arcade-quality experiences at home, and it launched with a strong pack-in conversion of the arcade hit Donkey Kong, licensed from Nintendo. Clever expansion modules even let it play Atari 2600 cartridges. For a brief window it was a genuine hit, selling millions of units and building a respected library.

The company's ambition outran its discipline. In 1983 it introduced the Adam, a home computer built around the ColecoVision, which was plagued by reliability problems, delays, and shortages. It arrived just as the North American video game market crashed, and its failure drained resources and damaged Coleco's reputation.

Coleco was rescued, briefly, by an entirely different product: the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, whose runaway popularity in the mid-1980s generated enormous profits and masked the company's underlying troubles. But the toy craze cooled as quickly as it had ignited, and Coleco's failure to find another blockbuster left it exposed. Heavy debt and collapsing sales followed.

Coleco filed for bankruptcy in 1988, and its remaining assets, including the Cabbage Patch line, were sold to Hasbro. The company was gone, a casualty of chasing volatile toy fads rather than building a durable electronics business. The ColecoVision remains fondly remembered as one of the best consoles of its generation, a machine whose technical promise was ultimately undone by its maker's overreach and misfortune.