The Halcyon is a home video game console released in January 1985 by RDI Video Systems. The initial retail price for the system was $2500, and it featured a laserdisc player and attached computer, each the size of an early-model VCR. Only two games were released for the system before RDI went bankrupt: Thayer's Quest and NFL Football, although trailers for several others were created. RDI Video Systems claimed that the system would be entirely voice-activated, and would have an artificial intelligence on par with HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Halcyon was based around the Z80 microprocessor, with its 64K memory partitioned out to ROM and RAM. A separate speech recognition computer provided the additional power needed to recognize human speech.

Video content existed on a special computer-controlled CED player provided by RCA. Because of video encoding and stylus positioning constraints inherent in this technology, still frames (where action would be suspended pending player input) had to be encoded as a repeat of 2 or 3 seconds of video. Late in its development, Halcyon had to be re-designed to use Laserdisc players because CED units were put out of production by RCA.

Suffering from a retail price tag that would discourage consumers and content that would require several laserdiscs to contain, investors and manufacturers saw little success in the future of Halcyon. Its few hand-assembled prototypes went into the hands of certain investors and collectors. Well-known names among these investors included Merv Griffin, Quinn Martin and Cassandra Peterson.

Ironically, Dragon's Lair was not part of Halcyon's initial content repertoire. The Secrets of the Lost Woods footage was used to develop firmware for the unit prior to Fred Wolf's production of the Thayer's Quest animation.

-Wikipedia