Before the days of Venture Capital, Nolan Bushnell had secured a $20 million loan from Merrill Lynch using his Atari and Chuck E. Cheese stock as collateral.  Unfortunately, both stock companies went into a downward slump at the same time and Merrill Lynch called the loan, forcing Nolan to close Androbot.  However, he was still confident in his entrepreneurial abilities, so he then started five companies in parallel using a "business incubator" model, where each of the companies shared the same office space and administrative staff, etc.  One of these five companies was Axlon Toys.

 

Even on a shoestring budget, competing against Worlds of Wonder, who had just gone public on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: WOW), Nolan, Andy and their small staff were really prolific in their toy innovations.  They used some of the technology that they were already developing at Androbot.  Andy was working on B.O.B. (Brains on Board) and they transfered some of the technology to their first toy product---ANDY, a miniature version of TOPO that introduced the Petster technology, as well.  Andy was made out of leftover TOPO heads and two wheels.  He had a "bump" contact switch on front, an internal microphone to detect sound, LED's for eyes, and made delayed sound responses to external sounds that he heard.  A serial port allowed ANDY to be connected to an ATARI computer and he could be taught "turtle movement" routines with the software provided on a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk.

 

The next product was the Petster Deluxe Cat..  The protoytpe was made out of plastic salad bowl with fur applied that looked something like a cat.  The base was built and also the motion detection, dual microphone input, and other features were included.  There was a "talk back" feature on one of the buttons on the remote that was borrowed from Androbot technology.  The larger "salad bowl" Petster was also downsized to create the smaller versions.