Halcyon



"Do you believe in magic? You will."

Let this disaster serve as a cautionary tale: what happens when you are greatly successful once, then cling to that while the world moves on?

The Halcyon is a LaserDisc-based machine from RDI Video Systems, the same company that made the LaserDisc-based arcade hits Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Trouble is, the novelty of interactive movies was wearing thin, but RDI just didn't notice it. Nor they took in account that most kids don't have the same kind of budget as professional arcade operators. So they produced the most expensive video game console ever ($2500, or $5400 adjusted for inflation), designed around a kind of game that people didn't really care for, at a time when the gaming market had simply collapsed. To no one's surprise, RDI could not find a market for it, and only a handful of units was produced before the company went bankrupt.

It was ambitious, you have to give them that: it even had voice synthesis and speech recognition. But RDI's quick demise meant it was left with a library of just two titles: a sports game of digitized video, Raiders vs. Chargers - later re-released as an arcades as "NFL Football" - and an interesting animated fantasy, Thayer's Quest - later released on several platforms (aka Kingdom: The Far Reaches). So there's not much to play here, but its extreme rarity makes this system a fantastic collectible.