Coleco Chameleon: retro vision, modern console — and gaming's most famous cautionary tale

Remember Retro VGS? The team proposed a cartridge-based console housed in the original shell tooling of the Atari Jaguar — and watched its crowdfunding campaign collapse. Their second attempt came with a classic brand attached: the Coleco Chameleon.

The itch it aimed to scratch was real. Playing a classic console’s library today is easy if you accept emulation: emulators, ROM sets, and in-browser archives like those on Archive.org let anyone revisit the classics without downloading a thing. But original hardware is another story — working units are scarce, and the people who own them don’t let go cheaply. Hence the shortcut: build a modern machine that feels like the old ones. That’s the road to the Coleco Chameleon.

The leadership was the same team behind Retro VGS, whose cartridge console crowdfunding raised just 4% of its $1.95 million goal. The Chameleon was round two, and the changes went beyond the name: more USB ports, and support for 8-, 16-, and 32-bit cartridges — enough to make observers suspect a Raspberry Pi-class board inside.

The critical question was price. Retro VGS launched at $300 plus shipping and sank. A more reasonable market price was expected to follow, with the first prototype due for its public debut at New York Toy Fair that February.

We waited — and history delivered one of gaming’s great cautionary tales: the Toy Fair prototype turned out to be a joystick board in a Jaguar shell, the project collapsed, and the Chameleon became shorthand for vaporware. The real retro revival happened elsewhere — in the mini-console boom and the retro game console market, where legit plug-and-play machines and original hardware both thrive.