Coleco Chameleon Controversy! - Rerez

This Rerez Talks rant originally aired in March 2016

So ladies and gentlemen everyone out there apparently hates the Coleco Chameleon now. Good you should have hated it the moment they announced the damn product. But let's not get ahead of ourselves there. Let's talk about why everyone hates it right now. The guys that were making the system showed off this kind of transparent body of the system, which hilariously looks like an Atari Jaguar, and they looked inside of it and they were like hey look at that it's a video card instead of a motherboard. And everyone lost their collective shit. That was hilarious. The fact that they thought they were going to get away with showing off a motherboard that wasn't really a motherboard inside of a system by using a very easy to use and very common accessory that a lot of people buy nowadays I just thought that was the funniest thing in the world. They could have used anything. I in my basement right now have chipsets and motherboards and things that would probably be a lot harder to identify but they decided to use something that's a common thing that anyone could have identified. If you're gonna be a sneak about something at least try and be a good sneak. That's like going to rob a bank while wearing a nametag. But anyway I digress that's not important what is important is the fact that everyone is kind of upset that this thing is not going to come out. At least a lot of people out there that I've spoken to seem to be upset about that but here let me explain why they’re wrong.

Now this is the Super Nintendo. Many of you know it many of you like it. This right here is an NES cartridge and these two things don't go together but the reason I brought them here is for an example. These cartridges were produced at the time simply because there was no real other method for them to make these things in a way that games could be transported to people that were wanting to play video games on their systems. They could have used really expensive dial-up modems or maybe some cable connections like Sega TV did at one point but right here this was the best thing they could have done at the time. Now let me explain. This could hold quite a good deal of information. Not a heck of a lot of information but enough to store a single game. Then the other thing that this thing did really well was to prevent people from being able to do pirating on it so you couldn't just copy these things left and right like you could with a floppy disk at the time. That's why they used cartridges. Cartridges were a good necessary evil. Even though they were pretty expensive to manufacture they were really good at basically getting games out there to the public and the best method that they could use to make the most money they could. That's why they used cartridges. They didn't use cartridges as some perverse loyalty to huge plastic gray boxes. They made cartridges this way because it was the best method they had at the time. The TurboGrafx-16 used HuCarts, the Sega Genesis used cartridges and even up until the N64 they used cartridges on that system as well. But as many Nintendo historians will tell you the use of cartridges on the Nintendo 64 probably wasn't a good idea at the time because it ended up costing a lot of money to make those cartridges when Sony came out with the PlayStation producing really cheap discs because you could mass produce CDs like they were nothing.

Now all that being said why everyone is so upset about that Chameleon system was because I guess a few people really wanted to have a new cartridge based system. Well why? We have video game systems out there right now that you can purchase pretty easily and just get a whole bunch of games on very cheaply. You could make your own Steam box. You can make yourself a really cheap computer that could just plug up to your TV and download a whole bunch of indie games. But let's forget about all that stuff and let's talk about the Ouya. The Ouya was a Kickstarted video game system produced by a bunch of people that had never really made a video game system before. And the protip with that one was that you could download the games fairly easily and fairly fast and that failed. An indie game system that had the ability to run emulators and a whole bunch of other stuff failed. What made you think the Coleco Chameleon was going to have any chance with cartridges, a much more expensive and harder to mass-produce technology? They were literally going to have to take these things, make them, package them up and distribute them. It would have been super expensive and super difficult. If you think it's expensive to release discs on the PlayStation 3 and 4 imagine how expensive it would have been to make cartridges.

Look guys the Coleco Chameleon was never going to work. Ever. On anybody's platform. It just doesn't make any sense. Even if you just discredit the whole cartridges being expensive and being hard to mass produce argument these systems I've been talking about, the Super Nintendo and all those other ones, they worked because they had exclusive first party games. Was the Chameleon going to have exclusive first party games? No because what happened to the Ouya? The games they did have that were exclusives were timed exclusive that only lasts for like a year and then right after that you started seeing these games get released on every other platform. That stuff just disappeared and it evaporated and nobody wanted an Ouya anymore and well that's kind of how it works. We're existing right now in a video game market where downloading is becoming the primary way we play these video games and that's just the way it's gonna keep on going. I think optical media is going to go away but to take things back and regress to the point of using cartridges is quite literally insane. We can't do that as a game industry, as a community of gamers, because it would cost way too much. Right now on my Steam library I've got about 100 or 200 games and I've got that many games because I can store them on there and I don't have to worry about them disappearing. On every platform I have where I can download digital games I've got a whole bunch of digital games that I can just access like my iTunes catalog. It's a very quick way to just download a bunch of stuff and use it and cartridges don't operate that way. I've got friends that have gigantic video game collections of retro games from the past that are these huge big things in their basements that have so much space taken up to just store these cartridges. Sure the idea of collecting games of that age is novel, there's a cool thing about that, because some of these games are kind of disappearing. But I promise you in the future when we have more downloadable games, when we have things that are DRM free and stuff like that, where it's easier to get these things from one person to the other it's going to be far better and far greater for a whole bunch of people to experience older video games. But if we go and make a brand new cartridge system right now it's going to bomb. Even if that Coleco Chameleon didn't have a video card inside of it even if they didn't do that it still would have been a terrible idea. It still would have been something that nobody would have ever wanted to buy. And if they did they would have regretted it really fast.

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