Halcyon

The Halcyon is an unreleased home video game console produced by RDI Video Systems. The system was planned to be released in January 1985, with initial retail price for the system being . Fewer than a dozen units are known to exist and it never reached retailers because of a lack of affordable disc players. The design featured a LaserDisc player and attached computer, each the size of an early-model VCR. Of the six games planned, only two games were released: Thayer's Quest and NFL Football LA Raiders vs SD Chargers. RDI Video Systems claimed that the system would be entirely voice-activated, and would have an artificial intelligence akin to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. History Rick Dyer was one of the many fans of the interactive fiction game Adventure, and wanted to develop his own game, Shadoan, which was an expansive fantasy game inspired by The Lord of the Rings. He envisioned a game that would feature illustrations of every scene, and developed a prototype called "Secrets of the Lost Woods" (a small section of his larger Shadoan game) that used a roll of printing calculator tape that could be wound forward and backward via microprocessor to show illustrations and information drawn on its surface. Later this was refined to use a filmstrip projector that was 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 the audio and visual content onto one medium, and created a device 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 Dragon's Lair, which, like "Secrets of the Lost Woods," was a smaller section of Dyer's envisioned Shadoan game. 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.