It was an Atari world back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, but
Mattel’s Intellivison staged a pretty good coup. The Atari VCS
(a.k.a. the 2600) was the untouchable juggernaut of the home video game
world, with hundreds of titles under its championship belt, but
Intellivision banked on an old truth: Make it better, and the people
will buy it. Fans of both systems may argue about their relative
merits, but passions aside, the Intellivision was enough to send
Atari-owning neighbors home with at least a teensy bit of
graphics-and-sound envy.
When the VCS first broke out in a big way,
Mattel was hesitant to challenge the new king of the hill head-on.
The company decided instead to focus on hand-held games like Mattel
Electronics Football. When that game and its electronic kin sold through
the roof, Mattel decided to move into the video game big leagues.
Taking the name “Intellivision” (for “Intelligent Television”), the
company sent its newly-designed machine out to the world in 1980.
Initial ads promised that the
Intellivision would soon be the basis of a complete home computer, but
for the moment, it was a pure game system. A compact, wood-grain
cabinet formed the console base, and wired out from that base were a
pair of unique controllers. Instead of the standard joystick/button
configuration, the Intellivision’s long and thin controllers were
operated with a 16-direction golden disk, four “action keys” and a
12-key numbered keypad. Colorful overlays came with most games, placed
over the keypad to show what each button did in that game.
Funky controllers may have drawn in the
curious, but as any kid can tell you, it don’t mean a thing if it
ain’t got the games. To that end, Mattel hired a group of programmers
dubbed The Blue Sky Rangers (their names were kept secret to
discourage them from joining the enemy or striking off on their own).
The Rangers turned out 12 games for the system’s launch, including the
pack-in title, Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack. As if
Intellivision-buying kids didn’t have enough to lord over their Atari
neighbors, now they could engage in underage gambling in the privacy
of their own dens.
Over the course of the Intellivision’s
lifespan (surprisingly long, but we’ll get to that), over 125 games
were produced by The Blue Sky Rangers and by outside companies. There
were, of course, the obligatory arcade conversions—Donkey Kong,
Frogger, BurgerTime, Venture, Q*bert and others—but the Intellivision
also produced its share of original hits. Among the more popular:
Astrosmash – A fast-action game of falling
meteors and other space debris. One of the Intellivision’s biggest
hits, and a success on the Atari VCS/2600 as well.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons – Adapted
from the role-playing game, this game took players on a
treasure-seeking, monster-slaying quest. A sequel, Treasure of Tarmin,
was also popular.
Major League Baseball – The
Intellivison’s first and only million-seller. A baseball adaptation
that blew Atari’s out of the water (and Mattel wasn’t shy about saying
so).
Night Stalker – A horror-themed maze
action game, with your lone man trying to survive an onslaught of
robots, spiders and bats.
Tron Deadly Discs and Tron Maze-A-Tron –
Two games based on the 1982 Disney film Tron. The first was a deadly
version of jai-alai (like the arcade’s Discs of Tron), the second a
platform action game.
Space Spartans – A starbase defense game
of skill and strategy, aided by the new “Intellivoice” peripheral
(more on that below).
The long-promised home computer add-ons
failed to materialize during the Intellivision’s formative years, but
Mattel tried to keep the people happy with other innovations. 1982’s
Intellivoice added speech to games like Space Spartans, though only
games made for the Intellivoice benefited (including yet another Tron
game, Tron Solar Sailer).
1983 brought the release of the
redesigned Intellivision II, and with it, the Intellivision System
Changer. Plugged into the cartridge slot, the System Changer allowed
Intellivision owners to play every Atari 2600 game on the market,
giving the Intellivision the biggest library of any home video game
system at the time.
In 1983, Mattel finally delivered its
Entertainment Computer System, a series of peripherals—computer
keyboard, an extra set of controllers, and even a musical
keyboard—that could be connected to the Intellivision. It wasn’t quite
a home computer, but it was close enough to satisfy the FTC, who had
been fining Mattel Electronics once a month over its
yet-to-be-delivered advertising promises.
As it turned out, 1983 was the start of a
bad time for everyone in the video game business. The Intellivision
had been booming, selling millions of consoles and presenting the first
real threat to the VCS/2600, but a glut of product and dwindling
interest in video games was building up to a total video game market
crash in 1983/84. Mattel Electronics (the company’s video game arm)
went out of business, selling the Intellivision rights to
Intellivision, Inc. (later renamed INTV, Inc.).
Surprisingly, the resilient
Intellivision survived the slump. INTV released a revamped INTV System
III (a.k.a. the Super Pro System) in 1985, and new games continued to
be produced and sold until the Intellivision finally stopped
production in 1990. Even then, the spirit of this plucky machine
wasn’t broken. A group of Blue Sky Rangers eventually formed
Intellivision Productions, Inc., bought the rights to several classic
Intellivision games, and released PC and Mac versions to the
public—some for sale, others just for the joy of low-res video game
glory. And while video games have certainly grown more graphically and
sonically impressive since the early 1980’s, there’s something about a
good, frantic game of Astrosmash or Night Stalker that keeps devotees
of this classic system coming back to their keyboards for more.