The Story of The Mattel Intellivision - How to SCARE Atari - Video Game Retrospective 

BurgerTime!

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, TRON Deadly Discs & Solar Sailer, Burgertime, Bump 'n' Jump, Beauty & the Beast, Dreadnaught Factor, Mind Strike

Worm Whomper!

AD&D, burgertime, lock'n chase, b17 bomber, utopia, and microsurgeon; honorable mentions to night stalker, space hawk, and astrosmash.

Commando, Demon Attack, Lock N Chase, Space Armada, Astrosmash and Chip Shot Pro Golf

I loved that system. My friend Will Play Horse Racing while making bets! Lol

I was born in 1971. We did not have much money, but somehow my dad saved and surprised me with an Itellivision. Like you, I was hooked. I can’t tell you how many countless hours we spent playing Sea Battle and Utopia. Maybe my favorite games on the system followed by Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. So many great titles.

When we went to the mall shopping with my parents, my brother and I would disappear into Sears for hours at a time playing the demo game they had set up. My Mom and Dad were standing there watching us play end I still remember them looking at each other and smiling. They saw the potential of that beautiful game right then and there.

I love it! You could just say "Dad we must have an intellivision" and he just goes and buys one! Christ, I asked my mum for a 50p Dr.Who paperback in about 1976 and my dad clipped me round the ear. Good old days for some!

@@douglasfreeman3229 yeh we got lucky at times we didn’t get everything we wanted of course but we did OK with a lot less than kids have now

That thing annoyed the living shit out of me... 😒

Uh oh! That was not a target!

@@R.B. Watch out for flack!!

@@Ploobstill Bandits 3 o'clock!

B17 Bomber & Intellivoice made my house the place to be everyday after school

Bae-seventaen Baohmer!

B17 Bahhhhhmmmaarrr. I can still hear it today.

Fighters 3 o'clock....bombs away!!!

@@timstappler5522 "That was close!" LOL

Intellivision had better graphics than the Atari 2600.

I'm a bit surprised at that. I never owned either, but trying the Intellivision on display in shops, it was impressive compared to the Atari, which was already starting to look old fashioned. Mind you, the Atari 2600 died much faster here in the UK than in the USA, swept away by home computers. I've thought for a long time that the American Video Game Crash was that moment in a bubble when everyone suddenly realised the Atari was old cr*p, and the contribution of Pac Man and ET was just to make everyone realise that. Anyway, the Intellivision had way better graphics and sound, and even those weird controllers seemed more advanced than the Atari's wrist-breaking joystick.

@@ian_b pac-man was brilliant, as pure gameplay. In those relatively early days, that was enough for me. I was about 3 and 4 years old at the time and was unschooled in graphic comparison. ET as a game was even worse than anyone has heard. Awful graphics atrocious slow pointless gameplay. I had friends who had Intellivision. While I absolutely recognized it was better than Atari, I was not the slightest bit jealous. Somewhat oddly, in retrospect. 😃

I think that the Atari issue for me as a kid was more related to the fact that everyone around us had an Atari hence it was the system to have. And kids will find and exploit things that are different. I liked the game choice and controller for the Intellivision better than Atari....but once the NES came out, it was the Atari kids versus me again and this time they had a point. I still enjoy my Intellivision and got a NES about 15 years ago. I enjoy both immensely and have my kids play them.

@@ian_b actually Pac Man was hugely popular and successful for Atari. It was Atari’s version of the Super Mario Brothers game franchise, albeit only featuring the single game, plus Ms. Pac Man. I was extremely young, as I have said. But even so, I believe the ET game was the most efficient contributor to Atari’s demise in The States. It was absolutely rancid.

My parents bought mine from Sears. It was exactly the same except it was white. Much cheaper as well.

I played Utopia all summer long. Now I play Minecraft all the time. Minecraft is sort of the great-great-great-grandchild of Utopia (Sim City is also down the line related)

@@Scotty-Z70 I still recall one game of Utopia where I was playing my brother and I was winning by developing my country and he knew he could never catch me so he started planting rebels is my country. Made me so mad. I felt like it was cheating. To this day I hate when the US tries to sabotage other nations. Loved the hurricanes that popped up too. It was such a cool model of real world.

@@tims2501 i rarely played it with other people. it was fun alone.

@@Scotty-Z70 Most games that was case too. In sub hunt my goal was to get ahead of the convoy and then just go dead stop and wait for convoy to pass over me and then I would come up to periscope depth and pick off the targets. That was really quite an advanced simulation too. Fun times.

@@tims2501 i've never played that game. interesting.

I totally forgot about Intellivoice. Yes, baseball and B-17 Bomber (I had forgotten about that game) were probably two of the most-played games for me and my brother.

Me too. And as much as I loved this machine back then, and as much fun we had together back then, knowing now, just how much it cost my parents, at the time, makes me feel so much more grateful for what they gave to me.

Now THAT is saying something! Because in 1981, a new Intellivision console cost a cool $300. That’s the equivalent of mowing 30 lawns for a kid! And the discipline in took a nine year old to hang onto that cash is noteworthy.

@@jcraigshelton I probably spent a good 7 or 8 months saving - for my Birthday that year I just asked for money towards the game, and my grandfather kicked in the last $100 after I saved up $200.

Jeeze, your story is exactly my story! Except I wish my dad had played games with me.

You were not poor.

The invisible mines were cool in Armor Battle!

my first was in late 60s it had 3 games tanks tennis / pong i had loads of martel hand held games including the footbal one on here also ice hocky basket ball baseball ok then my freinds had atari you could go to toy section of store play the atari and this new game intelvision i played boxing skiing and night stalker asked for that for christmass ever since owning it that was the consol for me

Hi, just wondering? How was the Fairchild? It's one of the few consoles I've never played. How were the controls? Any standout games? Any feedback would be awesome! Cheers from Canada

@@steveharvey2102 Howdey! It's been a LOOOONG time since I played that system, but from what memories I can conjure up, it was fun. The graphics were crude compared to even the Intellivision I got later. The controls were probably not the strong suit of the system. They consisted of a joystick-like controller, with a triangle top that you pushed in the direction you wanted to go, and pushed down on it to fire or whatever the game called for. Most games were of the pong like or tank battle like games we saw back then. Very little in the way of detail. No really true standouts, since the games were colorful versions of what we saw on other systems. Most of my memories are undoubtedly tainted from that time period, and if I had one today, I'd probably not play it much. The Intellivision was vastly superior in almost every aspect compared to the Fairchild AND the Atari 2600. What's ironic, is I have an Atari 2600 and must say, there is a kind of charm to those games I do have for it. I have an Intellivision Emulator for my PC, and the games are true to their cartridge counterparts, but the keyboard just doesn't "do it" for those games like the controller that the Intellivision had. I DO want to get one of these one day. Then I'll have both systems, the Atari 2600 and the Intelivision that I grew up with as a kid! Cheers from Texas! Hope I was able to answer your questions as best as I could! 🙂

I still have one (not my original one, that is a painful story for which I will not go into) with about 115 cartridges and it works well still. I did buy the new classic machine to save wear and tear on the old machine, but all the Imagic games aren't included, so still have to fire up the original sometimes.

Just pick yourself up one. Pity I cant find a multi cart for mine though (I also bought the flashback which does the trick as well)

Great sports games.

I remember an Odyssey II game like Dungeons and Dragons that kept me enthralled. hah, to be so innocent again...

Hi, are you talking about The Odyssy 1 or 2? I'm assuming it's the 2nd one, but you know what they say about assuming. Lol Cheers from Canada

I think you are correct. I would have to ask my father. He was an Engineering Manager at Mattel Electronics. He was in charge of moving production of Intellivision from GI on the East Coast to Hong Kong. BTW Of course our family had most of the games and the keyboard unit with 6502. Sidenote many of the Engineering Managers were from Rockwell Microelectronics which second sourced the 6502 and also built the earlier handhelds.

@@martinmartinez250 Consider interviewing your father for a video, or get him on one of these RU-vid shows. Show off hardware you may have.

IIRC intv was a rare cpu architecture, 16 bit but using 12 bit instructions, running at half a megahertz. I only saw a single Odyssey2 in my life, a friend had it, wasn't too bad but almost no games for it.

The Aquarius, while kind of interesting, showed up in the market for a few months in 1983 and happened during the great video game crash. It really is just a footnote to the Intellivision story in my opinion.

Thank you very much for watching the video. Sharing the video would be awesome! We pre-ordered an Amico (of course in Vintage Woodgrain) and are really looking forward to it. Also, I just watched your office tour video and really enjoyed it. Your office is really cool!

@@danielrjones Thanks Daniel! I'll be promoting your video this week!

I can't wait for the Amico Tommy, I have one on pre-order, the classic wood grain model.

I remember it got very warm in the upper right corner I think.

Wow! Never heard of this before. So are you saying this was an Intelliviion system that played only those 16 Educational games? Was it ever available for retail? Any info or links to informative videos would be greatly appreciated :) Cheers from Canada

@@steveharvey2102 Yep. It was a last-gen Intellivision console that had a few modifications: 4x Graphics RAM, additional 16-bit RAM, expanded Executive ROM, a slightly modified graphics chip, and a new system font. INTV ran out of money just after it was showcased at the Summer 1989 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, and 3 or 4 prototype units were found so far. One of those units ended up in the right hands to be fully reverse-engineered, and as a result, jzIntv now supports Tutorvision emulation. That's why I wrote a program that supports the extra hardware features.

I was 4 years old in 1981 and I got Intellivision for Christmas. My birthday is January 1 so when I turned 5 I met a girl that became my first Girlfriend because Kimberly had an Atari 2600. I remember being 5 years old playing Pac Man on her Atari and thought to myself this is nothing like the Pac Man at the Bowling Alley and these games don't even look nearly as good as my Intellivision games. Funny thing was during the video game crash of '83 my father brought us home the motherload and we got an Atari 2600 with about 12 games and then for Christmas the holy grail a ADAM Colecovision Computer. Coleco was smart and made Donkey Kong the pack-in game. Much better than Poker/BlackJack my intellivision came with. After we got the ADAM Colecovision all of a sudden my Intellivision and Atari2600 started gathing quite a bit of dust. However in 1981 Intellivision game "Triple Action" was the game that got me hooked on gaming. Triple Action really should have been the pack in title for the Intellivision.

I did not own one when I was young, but my friend did. I remember the baseball game as being a lot of fun.

Add the voice module to the system and that game got pretty good, for its time.

Yes, Beauty and the Beast was one of Imagic gems. It was different to Donkey Kong. You gotta love reaching the top floor and then suicide to increase the game difficulty...

As long as AtGames won't be the one making it. 😰

Yes! The voice module was awesome. Lots of fun!

The Colecovision was a great console, the only thing was the unique disc controller, many people don't get how great those were, its a 16 directions control, not 4 like everyone else. Not all games made use of it, but in those games that did, like Sea Battle, its a experience you could only get later with analog controls. Instead the Colecovision wasted people's money with custom controls for like 1 or 2 games, like that driving wheel or that trackball.... But what i don't get is how they managed to make such a blunder with the Adam.

Some games I remember playing- SNAFU (kind of like Tron motorcycles concept), Burger Time (arcade game if I remember), Sea Battle (he mentioned), Astrosmash, Pitfall (Activision game), B 17 Bomber (requires Intellivoice module), and for sure sports games- I think baseball and soccer were good. Best of luck finding the gems.

There was also Tron Maze game, Tron Deadly disc's game and a Tron Light Sail game that used the voice

LOL. I love doing speedruns of DotC

@Neb6 auto racing

Well the 2600 was meant to be sort of a glorified pong with colors. The reason it had so many colors is they used a chip they made earlier for showing groovy rainbows in a TV to the sound of music. That is why it had paddles while almost no other console did.

Skiing was the best man. Watch out for that tree!!

My friend traded me his Intellevision and games for my Atari 2600.... 😳 That was HIS loss.... 😂 I was afraid to tell my dad, and he caught me coming in the house with a large box containing the system I had just traded for, and when he saw what I had done he gave me a high five, a pat on the back, and told me "good job". I was SO relieved.. 😆