A Look At The Intellivision 

The Intellivision was the centerpiece of my childhood. We had over 70 games for it and I loved the thing. I first saw it at Gimbals in 1980 right before Christmas. They had 12 machines lined up and I was hooked from the get go. We had 7 kids in the family, so it was big stretch for our parents to get us the thing. But man, what memories! We went through two machines and were still playing the thing years later.

To me as a kid, the intellivision was equally amazing and spooky and mysterious. My first contact with that console was with Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin (First person). Later on, I once picked up one console that someone tossed in the trash (with a DnD cartridge!!!!). It worked for 5min then it started to smoke. I will never forget that loss. :( It died on my watch.

One of my friends in the 80s had an Intellivision, and we used to get our "group" of friends over to play "Sea Battle" all the time. It's a 2-player only strategy game, and it's fantastic. I have two Intellivision systems now, one working and one in semi-working condition that I can purge parts from if the working one fails.

Intellivision did have "Shark Shark" & the best port of "Night Stalker", so I'll give them credit for that. Stores usually had the Intellivision & Colecovision side by side each hooked up to a small TV & it was always the Colecovision that everyone wanted to play. Even those that were patiently waiting for a chance to play on the Colecovision would just stand & watch others play, they didn't even want to kill some time on the Intellivision while waiting. That said a lot for Colecovision.

My favorite game on Intellevision was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - Treaure of Tarmin.

I've owned an Intellivision since the late 90s, but only JUST learned from watching this video the power cord can thread INSIDE the case! It's a bit tedious pushing it in but so much nicer on my shelf sitting between my heavy six 2600 and Colecovision now! Thanks! Love the console, very underrated. Wish I owned one back in the 80s.

I grew up in the 80s and I had friends with Intellivision and Colecovision and even another similar system that I don't remember what it was. These non-Atari systems were fairly common for me to see as a child. I did have a neighbor that had a 2600 as well, but yes these other ones were common, at least for me.

Excellent video, your production deserves more subs...So I added a +1. I particularly like your use of synthwave and synthwave type backgrounds.

Great video just found your channel I've been gaming since Pong came out owned almost all consoles & home computers and still have them all. While today's consoles are great and have some fantastic games there is just nothing like the old retro systems and their games, there something about them that makes them classic. Keep up the great work 👍🏻.

You said everyone around you played Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 until the NES came out. But the 7800 didn’t come out until after the NES.

Nicely documented :)

Another great video! I never knew anyone that has this one. I actually knew more Bally Astrocade owners (2) than people who had the Intellivision. Great job buddy!

Thanks for this video...keep making stuff! I want to see your channel succeed!

Frog bog is my absolute favorite game even to this day. Always super fun to play with friends

humble dude doing solid retrogames reporting without trying to be bombastic or cute. Only have 114 subs. I'm subscribing purely based on principle. keep it up. honestly hope your channel blows up with you eventually making a living with it. God bless

My family had the Intellivision my dad got it back in 1979, and we still have it and still works. And are favorite game is Advance D&D. And we had Colecovision as well. 🙂❤

I found a couple of crates full of Intellivision games in an apartment my brother rented back in the '90s. There were two Intellivision 2 consoles and a bunch of accessories. Unfortunately, neither worked, and this was before a lot of info was available online for service or DIY repair, not to to mention that the retro game craze hadn't really started, so those stayed at the family home when I left. Wish I still had them now. I have a VCS and most of the game systems my family and I owned from the NES to the Wii, with my wife contributing her Genesis and Saturn.

got the intelevision when i was four. my favorite game was B-17 Bomber. remember when i was five my older sister and my father was watching me play it, and when i shot down a nazi plane, i loudly said "i got you, you nazi bastard". their reaction was priceless, because it was the first time that i had ever cussed.

had one as a kid had some awesome games.

Nice video. Brings back memories of a time as a kid wishing we had one. That's what kids do. 😁🤛

I had two consoles, one for home and one I took to the fire station for play during down time. Most popular at the station was the football game. For my game time, I had the intellivoice module for the B-17 Bomber game. I spent hours on that as you had to wait as the plane flew its mission over Europe. Other favorites include Shark Shark!, Star Strike, Night Stalker, Frogger, Pitfall, and Space Spartans.

I grew up with the Intellivision II, i remember it said "Made in Hong Kong". The young me abused it, since i didn't knew how to turn it off, i would change cartridges still powered on and just reset it, it did not have a separate on/off switch, you were supposed to press and HOLD the button for it to go off, but I only learned that much later. Thing never failed while my friends owning Ataris frequently broke them. The intellivision II has a power brick, not internal like the original, and the controllers had the 9pin plug so you could unplug them. Funny thing, i never owned any of the games shown in your video. Those did not show the true power of this beast. Just like Atari had Activision, Intellivision had Imagic. Pay attention to Imagic games, those were special, Yeah Blue Rangers also did some nice games too. Games worth mentioning: AD&D (both Cloud Mountain and Treasure of Tarmin), Sea Battle, Motocross (which lets you make your own tracks!) Autoracing, Burgertime, He-Man, Frog Bog, Nightstalker, Sub Hunt; Beauty and the Beast, Tropical Trouble, Microsurgeon, Dracula, Demon Attack, Atlantis (best port); the various other sport games (for some reason the very Baseball shown here was adapted and able to work in the Atari 2600 straight from the Intellivision cartridge). You didn't mention the intellivoice, i didn't own one but i had the Tron Solar Sailor cartridge (someone gave it to me) but without the sound module its mostly unplayable. There was also a polemic, or was it a class action lawsuit? because that very commercial shows a keyboard that was delayed for years. Sure it had low resolution compared to the Colecovision, but the games stopped being simple 5 minute affairs like those from Atari. 30min gaming session per cartridge was normal and many games had great 2 player action, some cooperative. The young me did my first all nighter playing Treasure of Tarmin, this type of game immersion experience you could only have with a (not games console) computer back then. In the Intellivision II storing the controls was easy and would fit neatly both facing you. This was important for example with Microsurgeon you could use the second controller at the same time. I wish i could have kept it, it would probably still work, parent forced me to sell it when i wanted a computer. Considering this was released in 1978, it blow everything away until Coleco in 1982, and well the crash of 1983 but that same year Japan released what would later be called "NES" to sweep the market since America thought video game consoles would not recover, and recover they did, made in Japan 🙂 Did i mention this disc controller has real hardware 16 directions? Its not 4 like an Atari, not even 8, its 16, so software could interpolate and have 32 but i doubt many games did. What other system gave you 16 directions, A B buttons + full keypad? Almost everyone else had only 4 directions and the disc doesn't hurt to use in a prolonged session, and prolonged sessions this console would make you have, unlike the others.

Sales: If you search the atariage forums, current Intellivision owner Tommy Tallarico (I know I know) said INTV sold a little over a million Intellivisions from 1985 to 1990. Also it was verified through Toys R Us that they sold 500,000 INTV 3 in 1985-86 holiday season. So slightly over 4 million Intellivisions in total.

Always liked the Colecovision System myself. I miss old Colecovison video game system. My best friend wanted the Intellivision because of the sports games. But he was glad to get Colecovision. God I miss those days!

Great video!

I remember having an intellivision growing up and playing Advanced D&D Treasure of Tarmen. I couldn't tell you how many hours I played that game.

What's up with the missing power switch cover on the Silvana an INTV System 3 Intellivisions?

This was so much fun when it came out

Good video, the Intellivision is one of my lesser used systems but I do love Snafu

The Intellivision was the first gaming console my family ever owned. It was fantastic; we were a sports loving family, so we had the football and hockey games - I also remember a Tron game IIRC. It was vastly superior to Atari, just as George Plimpton said

Ah, George Plimpton! 👍Great video! Star Strike was mind-blowing for its time. The transformer being inside the unit was a nice feature. I didn't like the input control at first, but it soon grew on me. E.T. and Atari Pac Man ended my love of the brand, and Intellivision's arcade fidelity was first-rate. (Opening commercial audio plays in only one ear... tip: Whenever I run into monaural audio assets that play only on one side of headphones, I just duplicate the track and just push the sliders to opposite channels.) Subscribed! 🕹

I love the Intellivision. Some really great games like Thin Ice, Thunder Castle, AD&D "Cloudy Mountain", Night Stalker, Tron Deadly Disks, Diner and Venture. Certainly the sports titles looked and played much better than their Atari 2600 counterparts but, unfortunately, they were all 2 players only. At least until other version much later in it's lifespan were released. When you could find another participant the Baseball game was great.

Hey glad to see another newcommer to this genre of videos! Please consider lowering the music or using songs that are way less aggressive. It was hard to pay attention to what you were saying over the background music.

My favorite retro console, hands down...

Our family had one of these growing up. It wasn't as popular as the Ataris but we enjoyed the hell out of it. The controllers look weird but the disc input was actually a nice feature.

wonderful console, the best of its generation. I still own (and play !) one today, it has wonderful games, way ahead of competition !

Awesome video can't wait for my Amico to show up and...oh wait....

Last year I bought an intellivision and some CIB games with the birthday money I received. I still love playing intellivision today. 🙂

This is the best channel I’ve found in years. Absolutely phenomenal!

I had one when I was younger. Shark shark was definitely a good game. It was one of those eat other fish until you get bigger type games. There was a shark that would come around periodically and try to eat you. Eventually if you could avoid the shark and eat smaller fish enough. You would get big enough to eat the shark.

That was a great intro! The only thing that made us cringe a little bit was the Coleco version of Donkey Kong, that is painful to see. The D2K remake shows what the 1979 platform can really do. :)

I had to take my Atari with me to to my niece and nephew's house when I came over. They asked me to because they had an Intellivision.

You need the voice module and B17 Bomber. "Flak!" "That was....close."

2:00 Clean the channel selector switch and you won't have to worry about static on the screen. That is almost certainly the problem. I used to rebuild these things and that was almost always the problem. It happens with all the old consoles with RF out and a channel selector.

I forgot i have one of these until now

Personally I have a hard time finding enjoyment from playing pre NES systems. But I enjoy watching videos on them.

I have most of one (No controls.) with a few games and the intellavoice. I didn't want to pitch it in case someone might like to have it. I don't know if it even works.

The first console war. A2600, Magnavox, Intellivision and Colecovision. Was supposed to buy a GE vectrez system but I bought an Atari400 home computer with cassette reader back then and my very first diskdrive ( ah! those black floopy disks) later

I got this before the atari...those gels that slid in on the controller were kinda crap and the little buttons on the side...were hell..but I loved playing pitfall.

I also had the Coleco ADAM computer system.

Great video, lots of information. The background music makes it hard to hear what you're saying sometimes, though.

Eric Cartman: I'm gonna be on Intellivision...I'm gonna be on Intellivision!

I loved that system growing up. I would always check it out in K-mart. Then one day my dad got me that system .

The first system that started it all for me was intellivision we where poor but my brothers best friend wasn’t so he gave us his , with like 20 games !! We played it for hours , still have it at moms some where ! Way better than Atari !! Then Nintendo and it was all over 4 me , 40 plus years later still playing games!!

NFL football was ahead of its time ! I had intellivision, coleco vision, Atari , and the Commodore 64. The intellivision and commodore were better for sports games

Such an underrated system. The Intellivision completely blocked out the video game crash of '83 for me. I still enjoy Astrosmash, Shark Shark and Tron: Deadly Disks.

I never owned the launch model, I briefly borrowed an INTVII from a friend with lock n chase for a week or so, the same model I own today, well I have an IntelliVision flashback as well.

I didn’t know that Pac-Man came out on Intellivision. However, I played the crap out of Lock ‘n’ Chase which I think was a similar but better game anyway. :-)

When is my Intellivision Amico pre order going to be shipped to me?

Three Words: Tron. Deadly. Discs.

you really should have showcased games that were exclusive to the intellivision :)

There was supposed to be a new console, the Amico, but it keeps getting delayed

I had an Intelevision II .Burger Time was the best port. Didn't these games come with a plastic overlay for the number pad on the controllers?

Hilarious intro.

Interestingly enough I had some locals with the Intelivision Having had the 2600 I can say I’m impressed with their Pac-Man 😀

Never knew anyone who had an Intelivision and never saw one working. Did have a friend who went on and on about the voice module but he no longer had the system. My family had Atari 2600 and then Colecovision. We never owned a console after that. So I grew up never having played anything from Sega or Nintendo. Weird huh.

The Colecovision must have put a huge dent in their sales… didn’t know that they’re was an AY-3-8900 and strange that the AY-3-8910 was a completely different animal. The sound chip used in many game consoles including the Vectrex.

What took me surprise is that, the Mattel Electronics Intellevision video game console; it was connected to a computer keyboard. It was used for doing tax returns, as of for an example. 🖥

ive got an Intellivision 3 brochure kicking around somewhere

I had no idea there was a keyboard

I would love some new games like Gosub over at ETSY and Intellivania wherever you get that. My system is at my Mom's and I moved away. ☹ It was a TandyVision One from Radio Shack. Oh well.

Get the sears tele games super video arcade it the same console but looks different and you can plug the controllers from the console and it have much longer wires it is a far better system I love it thanks for the very awesome video.

I had one.....I had a few games for it...My neighbor gave it to me cuz he felt sorry for me cuz I didnt yet have an N.E.S. system.....I appreciated the thought...but....DAMN...it was a FAR cry from the nintendo.

Interesting how the sports games can look so better than the Atari 2K cartridges, but arcade ports aren't much better. Maybe they didn't put much effort into the latter? The M-Network sports games for Atari (not shown) look a lot like Intellivision sports, since they were made by the same company.

Wow, the sound is so annoying on the Intellevision! DKJr, how the theme starts over EVERY single time any other sound happens on screen is just awful! Graphics wise, it definitely does destroy the 2600 though. And those George Plimpton commercials are hilarious! I remember the first one was actually a parody of an old Atari commercial where this kid tries to compare Atari games to other systems, which subsequently do not have the same games. Keep up the great work! You’ll hit 1000 subs real soon!

And people say the Genesis controller is awkward.

One of the major problems with the intellivision is the built in bios routines (the exec). It's great for fonts, for example. Unlike the 2600, the Intellivision has an alphanumeric font built in. Every 2600 cartridge has to have its own fonts and display routine for generating those fonts. But the EXEC goes further, much further than that. All the routines in the EXEC save cartridge space on each cartridge. But it is slow as all hell. The routines are slow. Intellivision games are usually not 60fps because of that.

Having one myself I'd say it was a pretty decent console for the time ,but as soon as Nintendo 1 came out all other consoles were obsolete ..you had to go to a computer to get something with anything better than the Nintendo had like a Commodore 64 which had flight simulator games and things like that

brings back some good times! Hell , this was a GODSEND , compared to Pong , Atarivision , Colecovision ,& another fartblower of the times. This was cool as hell. i knew a rich kid that had one , who i would hang with , just to play on the system.

There are MUCH better conversions of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr which have been released in the last few years for the Intellivision.There is also a DK 2 game roughly based on a DK2 unofficially released for the arcade cabinets via a new ROM that is also excellent. The homebrew scene for the Intellivision really shows off the hardware. There is a lot of it too. The original library has a lot holding it back. For one, no flickering was allowed by Mattel. I'm pretty sure that rule remained in place for all M-Network 2600 games and all Mattel Intellivision games right through til the end. Secondly, they were stingy with the ROM size and forced programmers to use the exec routines. Both the small size of the ROM and the exec held back the original library a lot. They also had a hard time securing arcade licenses. Overall, I would say the Intellivision comes in 3rd place behind Coleco and Atari. The Colecovision was 3 years newer, so I suppose it's not a fair comparison. But even the 2600 in many ways outshines the Intellivision. Sadly, this has held up today. Even though Intellivision homebrew is, in many cases much better than the original games, the 2600 has benefited from its ability to use co-processors in the cartridge and so the 2600 upped its showing even more. Even without the co-processor, games like aardvark, released on both systems really shine over the Intellivision release.

Back in those days when a computer were supposed to change your life.

1:29 You could've at least made the mono audio for both ears ...

We had it. The graphics were far superior to my friends who owned Atari. However, Atari had what I consider "better" games -- even though they sucked: Pac Man, Meteoroids, Space Invaders, etc. However, Intellivision offered similar games, like Astrosmash and Space Hawk. Space Battle (though easy) was pretty awesome for the time. I actually owned Intellivoice, and got the games on clearance at Target. Now THAT was pretty awesome.

Notification Squad! :)

Check out Venture Reloaded for the 2600. It's a Rom hack, but also basically a rewrite of the game. No modern hardware, just a larger ROM. By far the best port of the game. Blows away even the Colecovision version. Even has the screen scaling.

Why did you start with Donkey Kong when Coleco intentionally made it suck to sell more ColecoVisions? There were so many great games on Intellivision you could have used instead - like BurgerTime, The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Games, Astrosmash, Night Stalker, etc.

So the Intellivision was like a TRS-80, but dedicated to video games...

I saw something about amoco

It was a dark time. 😃

SALUTE INTELLIVISION ME AND MY BROTHERS PLAYED FOR HRS

I was always disappointed that Intellivision lost to Atari.

toen was gamen nog leuk.nu zijn die spellen veel te realisties.of hoe je dat ook schrijft.😀

I would listen to George Plimpton.

Coleco (Connecticut Leather Company!) owned the rights to Donkey Kong for consoles and so made sure everyone else's version was terrible compared to the Coleco version!

As bad as the Atari 2600, the only decent machines in the early 80s were the Colecovision and Vectrex.

George Plimpton rules.

I had Atari 2600 as a kid and my next console after that was the NES. But I did have Pac-Man for my Atari and what amazed med seeing Pac-Man here on the Intellevision is that it was way better for one and two it was even made by Atari. Why couldn't Atari have made Pac-Man for the Atari as they did for Intellevision. Because Pac-Man for the Atari sucks in comparison just seeing it on the Intellevision and comparing it to Atari.

Hey I remember that thing. Those num pads suck

SNAFFU ,anybody remember ?

If it is Mattell it smells.