Halcyon



Let this 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 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). Yes, this was probably the most expensive video game console ever. To no one's surprise, RDI went bankrupt a few months later.

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 animated fantasy, Thayer's Quest. Now, as 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.