Emerson Arcadia 2001

The Arcadia 2001 was a second-generation 8-bit console released by Emerson Radio Corp in 1982. Although it was designed to outshine the Atari 2600, the release of the superior Atari 5200 and the ColecoVision at approximately the same time meant that the Arcadia 2001 was obsolete almost as soon as it hit the market. The system failed to make any sort of dent in the market before the video game crash of 1983, and is considered to be one of the biggest game console flops of all time.

The Console

The Arcadia 2001 was designed to be portable, and was powered by a standard 12-volt power supply, so it could be used for example on a boat or in a camper van. However, this required the user to have access to a similarly powered portable TV, which was extremely rare in the early 1980s. The console itself had five buttons: power, start, reset, option and select.

The unit came with two Intellivision-style control pads, with plastic overlays that could be applied over the number pad. The control pad also had a screw hole in its centre, so that it could be transformed into a joystick, in the same way as the Sega Master System.

Although the game library was composed 51 unique games and about 10 variations, Atari's use of exclusive rights to many games made it very virtually impossible for Emerson to bring popular games to the console. Emerson tried to solve this problem by creating its own versions of the popular arcade titles including Pacman, Galaxian and Defender; however, they were then sued by Atari over its exclusive rights to these games and Emerson was left with thousands of games that could no longer be sold.

Variants

Unlike most other consoles, the Arcadia 2001 was sold from many different firms under different names. For example, in Canada it was manufactured by Leisure-Dynamics and known as the Leisure-Vision, whilst in New Zealand it was made by Grand Stand and Monaco Distributors Ltd and known as the Video Master or Tunix Home Arcade respectively.

Each variant of the console had a different number of games released for them; whilst some (for example the Schmidt TVG-2000 from Germany) had almost every game released, others (like the Tele-Fever, again from Germany) only had 4 games released.