On 31 May 2018, ColecoVision owners were given a date to circle. Less than four weeks later, on 25 June, a brand-new cartridge called Risky Rick in Dangerous Traps would go on sale for a console that Coleco had retired back in 1985. No nostalgia compilation, no licence revival, no flashback plug-and-play: this was a freshly coded platform game, sold in a printed box with a proper manual, for hardware that had been off shop shelves for more than three decades. Announcements like that were no longer unheard of in the ColecoVision scene by 2018, but few arrived with quite this much confidence — or quite this knowing a choice of hero to imitate.
The ColecoVision console with one of its distinctive joystick-and-keypad controllers, the hardware Risky Rick was written for. Photo: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
First, a Correction to the Usual Guessing Game
Anyone who follows modern ColecoVision publishing learns to reel off the same handful of names. CollectorVision, Team Pixelboy and Opcode Games have all done a great deal to keep the machine supplied with software, and it would be easy to assume one of them stood behind any ambitious release. Risky Rick came from elsewhere entirely. The publisher was ArcadeVision, and the game itself was the work of Easter Egg, whose members spent years building it before ArcadeVision introduced the finished product on the AtariAge forums on 26 May 2018, under the proud strapline that this was the most impressive title never to have appeared for the system on a standard 32K cartridge.
That European flavour matters to the story. Before orders opened, the cartridge had already been shown in public, where ArcadeVision said it went down well at Retro Madrid in Spain in April 2018 and at Retro Game Alpes in France the following month. The manual in the standard box was printed in English, French, German and Spanish, the cartridge contacts were finished in immersion gold, and the package even contained a registration card tied to a hall-of-fame contest for players. This was not a bare board mailed in a padded envelope. It was presented, deliberately, the way a small commercial publisher of the early 1980s might have presented a flagship release — only with rather better printing.
The Hero Being Homaged: Rick Dangerous
The wink in the title was aimed at computer owners of a certain age. Rick Dangerous, designed by Simon Phipps and developed by the newly formed Core Design, reached the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and other machines in 1989, published in Britain on the Firebird label. It was an unabashed spoof of the Indiana Jones films, and it wasted no time making the debt obvious: after his plane comes down in the Amazon while he is hunting a lost tribe, British agent Rick begins his adventure fleeing a huge rolling boulder, exactly the sort of peril the movies had taught everyone to expect.
From there the 1989 game moved through an Egyptian pyramid and a castle stronghold before finishing inside a secret missile base, with Rick armed with a pistol, sticks of dynamite and a prod for stunning enemies. What players remembered most fondly — and most bitterly — was its philosophy of level design. Traps were hidden, deaths were sudden, and progress depended on memorising exactly where the spikes, darts and collapsible floors were waiting. Phipps himself later admitted his first game was simply too tough in places. In other words, Rick Dangerous was famous less for being fair than for being funny, charming and gloriously mean.
Risky Rick in Dangerous Traps set out to bottle that same mixture on a machine from 1982. Its itinerary keeps faith with the inspiration: an Amazon temple, a great pyramid and a missile base are among the settings named when the game was announced, and the business of creeping, climbing, shooting and blasting through trap-filled rooms in search of fame and fortune is pure Rick. The name change does the legal distancing; the fedora-shaped silhouette does the rest.
A ColecoVision console from the front, showing the cartridge slot and the controller storage bay that defined its bulky, businesslike styling. Photo: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
A Short-Lived Console With a Long Afterlife
To understand why this release turned heads, remember what the ColecoVision actually is. Launched in North America in August 1982, it was built around a Zilog Z80A processor running at 3.58 MHz, with just 1 kilobyte of main memory, 16 kilobytes of video memory and a Texas Instruments TMS9928A video chip producing a 256-by-192 picture, while a TI SN76489 handled sound. Those numbers sound frail now, but in 1982 they delivered home versions of arcade games — Donkey Kong was bundled with the machine — that embarrassed the older Atari 2600.
The good times did not last. The North American video game crash, Coleco’s disastrous diversion into the Adam computer and the company’s retreat from electronics meant the ColecoVision was discontinued in 1985, barely three years after launch. Ordinarily that is where a console’s library freezes forever. In the ColecoVision’s case, a devoted homebrew community refused to accept the freeze, and through the 2000s and 2010s releases grew steadily more sophisticated. By 2018 the interesting question was no longer whether enthusiasts could write new software for the machine. It was how close to a 16-bit computer game they could make it behave while using nothing but the stock hardware Coleco shipped in 1982.
Assembly Language, Custom Tools and No Expansion Hardware
That last condition was ArcadeVision’s central boast, repeated in every description of the game. Risky Rick was written entirely in assembly language, from scratch, using custom-built tools and routines, and it fitted onto a standard 32K cartridge — the same ceiling Coleco-era developers worked under. Crucially, it required no add-ons: no Super Game Module, no memory expansion, nothing plugged into the front of the console. Whatever it achieved, it achieved on an unmodified machine.
The technical feature list published at launch reads like a checklist of things the TMS9928A was never supposed to do gracefully. Levels are built from scrolling screen-sized rooms rather than single static boards. Background elements can pass in front of or behind the player, giving scenes a layered depth the hardware does not offer for free. The graphics were promoted as colourful and high-resolution, the sprite animation in the release trailer drew particular praise from contemporary coverage, and the sound design included sampled effects played back without the action freezing — a genuine trick on a machine whose sound chip was designed for beeps, chords and noise.
Put together, those bullet points describe the real appeal of the project. A Rick Dangerous tribute was a shrewd choice of subject, but the tribute was also a demonstration: smooth scrolling, foreground priority and sampled audio were Easter Egg’s way of showing how much untapped headroom remained in a console whose commercial life had been cut short before its original programmers ever got a second or third generation of games to refine their techniques.
Three Boxes, Twenty Limited Editions
ArcadeVision sold the game in three forms. The standard edition contained the cartridge, its box, instructions in four languages and the registration card. Above it sat two limited editions, Adventurer Brown and Adventurer Green, restricted to ten copies of each. Those buyers received a special black-and-brown or black-and-green cartridge label and box artwork, a T-shirt carrying the game’s logo and a poster, while brown-edition owners also got the different box presentation described by the publisher as a full-page visual. Twenty numbered temptations for the completists, in other words, and two hundred or so reasons for everyone else to order the standard box quickly.
The announcement post closed with a countdown: thirty days until 25 June 2018. Our original news item appeared on 31 May, part-way through that countdown, when the limited editions and the promise of a June launch were the whole story. Everything since belongs to hindsight.
Inside a ColecoVision with its casing and RF shielding removed — the modest board whose tight timings Risky Rick pushed so hard. Photo: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
What Actually Shipped, and How It Landed
The game did ship, broadly on the date promised, and the first owners reporting back on AtariAge in July 2018 sounded pleased. Players described working through the opening temple, learning the trap placements by the traditional method of dying on them, and reaching the pyramid stage; one summed it up simply as a really fun game that played great, another admitted to settling in to memorise the first level — which anyone who knows Rick Dangerous will recognise as the sincerest compliment available. Demand held up, too: ArcadeVision closed a second production run within weeks, announcing at the start of August that only three games remained in stock. For a boxed cartridge for a console discontinued in 1985, that is a sell-through most publishers of the day would have envied.
There was, however, a complication, and it grew directly out of the game’s proudest claim. Because Easter Egg had tuned the code so tightly — ArcadeVision spoke of optimised routines and adjusted video-memory timings — some owners found their copies would not progress properly, would show scrambled graphics, or appeared to fall into a kind of demo behaviour instead of running the full game. The reports clustered around modified consoles: machines with extra RAM, replacement BIOS chips, composite or RGB video conversions and the like. A few owners of apparently stock systems reported problems as well, and the AtariAge thread grew heated, running to eighteen pages as the publisher pushed back.
ArcadeVision’s position, stated in July 2018 and never really softened, was that the game had been designed from the beginning for an unmodified 1980s ColecoVision, that it had been tested for months on untouched French, Spanish, German and American systems without issue, and that every cartridge had been tested before its box was assembled. The company argued that the optimised timings meant the program effectively slipped into demo-like behaviour on inaccurate hardware or clone devices, insisted no deliberate lock-out code had been written, and said it was preparing a version that buyers could run fully without relying on the original cartridge. It also took delivery of one customer’s modified console to investigate. Depending on where you sat, this was either a developer defending an honest technical limit or a publisher blaming its customers’ hardware — and the thread contains plenty of both readings.
Strip away the argument and one fact survives it: the fault line was the ambition itself. A game written conservatively, well inside the hardware’s comfort zone, would very likely have run on anything. Risky Rick misbehaved precisely on the machines that had been altered, because it was doing things with the video hardware that altered machines no longer timed quite the way Coleco built them. In the homebrew world that remains a live debate rather than a settled verdict: how far should a developer go in exploiting original hardware if the result excludes the modifications collectors have made to keep ageing consoles alive?
Why Risky Rick Still Gets Mentioned
Time has been kind to the game itself. Complete copies now trade on the second-hand market at prices comfortably above what boxed homebrew releases usually command, loose cartridges alone are tracked by price guides at figures that would have bought a small ColecoVision bundle a few years earlier, and the title routinely surfaces when the community names the most technically impressive software the machine ever received. It also helped set a template: the lavish boxed presentation, the numbered limited editions and the European show circuit that ArcadeVision and Easter Egg used in the spring of 2018 became a familiar pattern for premium ColecoVision releases that followed.
There is a neat symmetry underneath it all. In 1989, Core Design took a hero modelled on a film adventurer and built a game about remembering where the traps were. Twenty-nine years later, a small team took that same hero, renamed him slightly, and rebuilt his world inside 32 kilobytes for a console that had been dead for most of the intervening decades — and the traps, appropriately, turned out to include the hardware itself. If you own a tidy, unmodified ColecoVision, Risky Rick in Dangerous Traps remains one of the strongest arguments ever made for plugging it back in. Just watch out for the boulders. And the spikes. And everything else.