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Coleco Industries, Inc. ( ) was an American company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as The Connecticut Leather Company. The name "COLECO" is an abbreviation derived from the company's original name which combines the first two letters of "Connecticut," "Leather," and "Company." It was a successful toy company in the 1980s, mass-producing versions of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and its video game consoles, the Coleco Telstar dedicated consoles and ColecoVision. While the company ceased operations in 1988 as a result of bankruptcy, the Coleco brand was revived in 2005, and remains active to this day.
In 1966, Leonard persuaded his brother Arnold Greenberg to join the company. Further acquisitions included Playtime Products (1966) and Eagle Toys of Canada (1968). By the end of the 1960s, Coleco operated ten manufacturing facilities and occupied a new corporate headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut.
Dozens of companies rushed to introduce game systems after the release of Atari's successful Pong console and the company entered the video game console business with the Coleco Telstar. Nearly all of the new game systems were based on General Instrument's " Pong-on-a-chip". General Instrument had underestimated demand, resulting in severe shortages. However, Coleco was one of the first to place an order and therefore one of the few companies to receive the full order. Though dedicated game consoles did not last long on the market, their early order enabled Coleco to break-even.
Coleco returned to the video game console market in 1982 with the launch of the ColecoVision. The system was quite popular and more powerful than the Atari 2600, and came bundled with a copy of Donkey Kong. The console sold 560,000 units in 1982. Coleco also hedged its bet on video games by introducing a line of for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, selling six million cartridges for both systems, along with two million sold for the ColecoVision for a total of eight million cartridges sold in 1982. It also introduced the Coleco Gemini, a clone of the popular Atari 2600, which came bundled with a copy of Donkey Kong.
When the video game business began to implode in 1983, it seemed clear that video game consoles were being supplanted by . Bob Greenberg, son of Leonard Greenberg and nephew of Arnold Greenberg, left Microsoft where he had been working as a program developer at the time to assist in Coleco's entry into this market. Coleco's strategy was to introduce the Coleco Adam home computer, both as a stand-alone system and as an expansion module to the ColecoVision. The effort failed, in part because Adams were often unreliable due to being released with critical bugs, and in part because the computer's release coincided with the home computer industry crashing. Coleco withdrew from electronics early in 1985.
The reorganized Coleco sold off all of its North American assets and outsourced thousands of jobs to foreign countries, closing plants in Amsterdam, New York and other cities.
In 1988, Canada-based SLM Action Sports Inc. purchased Coleco's swimming pool and snow goods divisions.
In 1989, Hasbro purchased most of Coleco's remaining product lines.
In 2005, River West Brands, now Dormitus Brands, a Chicago-based brand revitalization company, re-introduced the Coleco brand to the marketplace. In late 2006, the company introduced the Coleco Sonic, a handheld system containing twenty Master System and Game Gear games, including two from the Sonic the Hedgehog series. In 2014, River West Brands established the subsidiary Coleco Holdings for their Coleco-branded projects.
In December 2015, Coleco Holdings announced the development of the Coleco Chameleon, a new cartridge-based video game system; in actuality, a re-branding of the controversial Retro VGS console, whose Indiegogo campaign failed to secure funding when it ended in early November 2015, with only $63,546 raised of its $1.95 million goal. In the press release, it was established that the system would be able to play new and classic games in the 8, 16, and 32-bit styles. The release for the system was announced to be sometime in early 2016, with a demonstration at Toy Fair New York in February. However, some critics suggested that the prototype fell short of its developmental goals and was nothing more than the motherboard of a Super NES model SNS-101 inside an Atari Jaguar case. Later mock images of a prototype posted by AtariAge showed the device utilizing a CCTV capture card in place of a motherboard. After Retro VGS failed to produce a fully working prototype, Coleco Holdings pulled out of involvement with Retro VGS, terminating the project.
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