Halcyon (console) - History

History

Rick Dyer was one of the many fans of the interactive fiction game Adventure. He envisioned a game that would feature illustrations of every scene in this game, the first prototype being a roll of printing calculator tape that would be wound forward and backward via microprocessor to show illustrations and information drawn on its surface.

Later this was refined to a slightly different technology of a filmstrip projector, which was later synchronized to a tape recording of a narrator reading the text normally shown by the game as the player entered each scene.

With the advent of the videodisc player, Dyer realized he could consolidate onto one medium the audio and visual content, which was called The Fantasy Machine. Presentations of this device to prospective toy manufacturers failed.

Later it was realized that still images with narration were insufficient to capture the toy market, so animation projects began. The first project was titled The Secrets of the Lost Woods, which included a section known as the Dragon's Lair. NB: Dragon's Lair animation and production was separate from that of The Secrets of the Lost Woods. The lair existed only as a yet-to-be-finished "node" of the woods.

Dragon's Lair and Space Ace supplied enough profits and credibility for RDI Video Systems to progress toward realizing their technology into a home entertainment and edutainment format.

To help control the consumer price of this unit, it was first designed around the RCA Capacitance Electronic Disc player. When RCA canceled the production of these players prior to the completion of the Halcyon project, it was re-designed to use a laserdisc. One of the biggest obstacles in this re-design (after its significantly higher cost) was the short 30-minute-per-side capacity of Constant Angular Velocity or random access laserdiscs.

Suffering from a retail price tag that would discourage consumers and content that would require several laserdiscs to contain, investors and manufacturers saw little success in the future of Halcyon. Its few hand-assembled prototypes went into the hands of certain investors and collectors. Well-known names among these investors included Merv Griffin, Quinn Martin and Cassandra Peterson.

Ironically, Dragon's Lair was not part of Halcyon's initial content repertoire. The Secrets of the Lost Woods footage was used to develop firmware for the unit prior to Fred Wolf's production of the Thayer's Quest animation.