Halcyon



Let the Halcyon serve as a cautionary tale: what happens when you are greatly successful once, then cling to that while the world moves on? It is a LaserDisc-based machine from RDI, the same company that made the arcade hits Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Trouble is, the novelty of interactive movies was wearing thing, but RDI just didn't notice it. So they built this machine for a kind of game that people didn't really care for, at a price no one was willing to pay: $2500 (or $5400, adjusted for inflation).

It was ambitious, you have to give them that: it even had voice synthesis and speech recognition. But it had a library of just two games: a lame American football one, and an interesting fantasy cartoon Thayer's Quest. And since that was later released on other systems (aka Kingdom: The Far Reaches), you have no reason to get this console, unless you are a collector with a hard-on for obscure machines.