The Telstar was the first "pong-in-a-chip" system. Here is what says Leonard Herman abouth the Telstar in its excellent book "Phoenix, the fall and rise of videogames":
"Coleco released Telstar in 1976. Like Pong, Telstar could only play video tennis but it retailed at an inexpensive $50 that made it attractive to most families that were on a budget. Coleco managed to sell over a million units that year. Ironically, one reason for the super sales can be traced to a severe chip shortage. Because of the onslaught of manufacturers who wanted to produce videogames, General Instruments under estimated the number of chips that they needed to fulfill the demand by sixty percent. Coleco didn't suffer at all from the shortage. Because they had been the first company to place an order with General Instruments, Coleco received a full supply of chips just in time for Father's Day 1976. No other company received an entire shipment of chips and many received only twenty percent of what they ordered ! With numbers like this it isn't hard to imagine how Coleco took the lead in the home videogame race."
The system in itself is quite simple and offers only 3 games. The paddles are built-in the system, a common fact on the first pong systems. There's a 3 positions switch that controls difficulty (beginner : slow ball, big paddles / advanced : fast ball, big paddles / expert : fast ball, small paddles). If this is common to the first Telstars, this is quite different from most of the other pong systems which offer individual settings.
All these features are quite weird when you know that AY-3-8500 chipset offers 6 different games and more setting options... But here lies the "marketing genius" of Coleco. The Telstar was only the low range model of a whole forth-coming product line with enhanced features. Thus the first Telstar was intentionaly limited!
The "World of Video Sports" system seems to be a variant of the Telstar, but not different in any way...apart from the plastic overlay of course...
theres an easier way to not youse d-cell type batteries, simply rewire the compartment from the other side and rig a 9-volt plug on to it and that works for it (mine had a corroded compartment) and it works fine now~
Friday 18th February 2011
philip
i still have one, and it still works, once i find enough of the giant d-cell batteries to fill it. hours of mind-numbing retro fun!
Monday 28th March 2005
j4ck (us)
Wow, I used to have one of these! It was GREAT! I currently also have my original Atari 400, Apple II+, Mac SE, and 286. Does anyone know where I can buy of these. Awesome!! Thanks,
