A video game console with voice control and home functions, undoubtedly revolutionary for the gaming industry, you might think. And yet, that idea failed before its time. Discover the story of Halcyon, the failed video game console that was too expensive for its own good.
In the mid-eighties, the third generation of video game consoles was in force, where the Nintendo NES and Atari 7800 debuted. Successful and remembered consoles to this day, but there were also failures that very few remember. One of those cases was Halcyon. It all began in Carlsbad, the California city where RDI Video Systems was located, a video game company founded by Rick Dyer, responsible for the classic Dragon’s Lair. Rick wanted to revolutionize the video game industry with Halcyon, or HAL for short, a video game console with voice control in reference to the artificial intelligence HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey".
In the video, we can hear Rick say about his console that "it has what we call artificial intelligence, that is, the ability to learn and recognize your strengths and weaknesses." Halcyon featured two components: a player based on the Laserdisc system and a computer. On the outside, it had a keyboard as the main controller and a headset to give voice commands, while inside it had a Z80 microprocessor, with 64K of memory divided into ROM and RAM. The computer had voice recognition, with enough power to recognize human speech.
Other Halcyon functions included non-volatile memory storage and voice recognition training. The video content existed on a CED player controlled by a special computer, but due to video encoding and the optical stylus positioning limitations inherent to this technology, Halcyon had to be redesigned to use Laserdisc players.
Regarding games, only two of the six they had planned were developed, Thayer's Quest (similar to Dragon’s Lair) and NFL Football LA Raiders vs SD Chargers. Below is a look at the six games that were planned for Halcyon:
Thayer's Quest
This was one of the two games released for the console. Since the version of Thayer's Quest for Halcyon used a double-sided Laserdisc, many more scenes were shown that were not included in the game's release.
NFL Football LA Raiders vs SD Chargers
The second game released for Halcyon. This title used live footage of an American football game between the Raiders and Chargers. There was also another disc that used footage from a game between Dallas and Redskins.
Orpheus
Orpheus was one of the six games planned for the launch of the Halcyon console, but unfortunately it never entered production. The premise of the game was to guide Orpheus on an adventure to restore the life of his beloved Eurydice, venturing into the underworld and crossing the Styx river, where heroes and gods of Greek mythology dwell.
Shadow of the Stars
Another of the games that also never entered production. Shadow of the Stars consisted of commanding a star cruiser a thousand years in the future on a journey through the solar system. Humanity had disappeared in space, and the secret of its fate waits somewhere among the Nine Planets.
Voyage to the New World
Voyage to the New World also never reached production. It took place during the years of Columbus, where your mission would have been to face the fury of the North Atlantic and the danger of the New World. The goal was to search for the explorer John Cabot, lost somewhere in the vast wilderness of the North American continent.
The Spirit of the Whittier Mansion
The last of the canceled games. Newlyweds Stephen and Annie Grayson spend their honeymoon night in a haunted mansion. They don't believe in ghosts, but by dawn... they will. Too bad, The Spirit of the Whittier Mansion looked promising.
Leaving the games aside, HAL promised greater interaction with the user through voice control since it could learn up to two hundred words and engage in conversations based on various situations. Speech synthesis was produced using a text-to-speech algorithm, included as part of Halcyon's operating system. It included a special English vocabulary that would correctly pronounce hundreds of proper names. The phonetic output of this algorithm was fed into a Votrax chip. It was even said that it could have home control, with functions like opening and closing doors...
Halcyon was going to go on sale in 1985 at a price of 2,500 dollars, but investors and manufacturers saw little success in the console's future because it was too expensive and its production was ineffective and costly. The few assembled prototypes passed into the hands of certain investors and collectors.
As a curious fact, Thayer’s Quest went on sale years later for PC but under the name Kingdom: The Far Reaches. The title is available on Steam if you want to try it.
