To commemorate my upcoming 50th birthday, I acquired a piece of technology that shares my birth year: the Coleco Telstar, a video game console released in 1976. It’s the subject of my latest retro video!
I purchased this device for a local historical society project celebrating the United States’ 250th year, intended to demonstrate to younger generations what home entertainment looked like when the country turned 200. The unit, a Pong clone, was manufactured by the Coleco, formerly known as the Connecticut Leather Company making this quite relevant for a local Connecticut historical society!
This specific model, the 6040, was the first edition released by Coleco. Its market success was largely due to its price point; while competitors like the Magnavox Odyssey and Atari’s Pong console retailed for approximately $100, the Telstar launched at just $50. Adjusted for inflation, that $50 price tag is roughly $290 today. This aggressive pricing strategy helped the company sell over a million units, a figure surpassed only by a Nintendo Pong clone sold exclusively in the Japanese market.
Internally, the device is distinct from modern consoles as it lacks a central processing unit. Instead, it operates using a specific chip, the AY-3-8500, which has the game logic hardcoded directly into its circuitry. Because the software is fixed on the chip, the system is not programmable. It generates sound through a built-in speaker rather than the television set and connects to displays via an analog RF connector, originally designed to work with a switch box on the VHF band’s channel 3. While a power connector was available as an add-on, the device was primarily intended to run on six C batteries.
The gameplay experience is controlled by knobs that move paddles on the screen, with a difficulty slider available to adjust the game mechanics. The console features three variations: a standard tennis-style Pong game, a single-player handball mode, and a hockey game where players control both a goalie and a forward. Upon testing this specific unit, I noted several functional issues consistent with its age, including a stuck game selector switch and a malfunctioning difficulty slider that fails to resize the paddles correctly on the “pro” setting.
This device represents the entry of Coleco into the video game market, a venture that eventually led to the release of the legendary ColecoVision console and the less successful ADAM personal computer. The Telstar remained on the market for approximately two years before the company shifted focus to handheld games and programmable consoles. It serves as a historical marker for home gaming in 1976, predating the significant technological leap that occurred just a decade later with the introduction of titles like The Legend of Zelda.