The Mattel Intellivision - Then and Now

the year was 1978 an Atari VCS had shown everybody the way forward into a new and burgeoning entertainment market video games while the VCS wasn't the first console out there it was the first to demonstrate that games could have mass-market appeal and suddenly everybody wanted a piece of the action enter Mattel one of the biggest toy makers of the 70s the Intellivision a combination of the words intelligent and television was test marketed in 1979 and released nationwide in 1980 it was the first serious competition for the Atari as we all called it with better graphics and sound and a bizarre but effective marketing campaign starring noted writer and all-around Smart sounding guy George Plimpton I'll try almost anything so when Mattel electronics asked me to compare their in television games with Atari I gave it a try in my opinion if you try them both there's only one conclusion you can come to in television from Mattel electronics this may very well be the first and only game system marketed specifically to smart people the Intellivision had tons of great games released for it from 1980 through 1983 both from Mattel as well as the newly created third-party development community that included the likes of Activision and a magic some of the system's most innovative and technically impressive games came from these outside developers in 1982 Mattel released the slim down more modern-looking in television - to replace the 1970s era original model and while the name suggests it was a true sequel like say the PlayStation 1 to the PlayStation 2 in fact it was more like the PlayStation 1 to the ps1 rather than a true upgrade it allowed Mattel to sell the system at a cheaper price but in 1983 the video game market crashed taking down every major console and it purged the likes of which the industry hasn't seen before or since the Intellivision wasn't spared and by 1984 remaining stock was being cleared out from store shelves but the system's story doesn't end there I won't delve too deeply into the in televisions post-crash resurrection but in 1984 former Mattel electronics vice president Terrance Valesky bought the rights to the system it's games and its customer list from Mattel for a paltry twenty million dollars with the idea being that he could make it all work on a much smaller scale he even bought the rights to most of the biggest third-party games in television Inc was born later changing its name to int V Corp selling new systems and even new games direct to consumers through catalog sales the strategy worked for a while and the Intellivision soldiered on into the early 90s as a niche product eventually the original programming team known as the blue sky rangers gained the rights to the system and its games and began releasing compilations for modern systems along with licensing the system for an entry in the popular all-in-one craze among retro gamers so while it may have been a victim of the crash of 1983 it's had at least as successful a run in modern times as its vintage competition and its legacy seems secure now the Intellivision was the first system that I ever personally owned my dad bought me one for Christmas in 1980 and I've never really looked back I've been playing games ever since even took it seriously enough that at one point I had a couple jobs in the game industry and not just working at Gamestop I've since moved on from those but I do still play games both on consoles and PCs and I credit the Intellivision for setting me down that road I love this system and that's the reason why it's the first one that I'm featuring in a video here I had both an Intellivision one and later an Intellivision two shortly after it was released these are not my original systems I guess I lost those original ones and moves or threw them away this was before retro gaming was really a thing but when I finally did get into classic video gaming of course I wanted to pick up both of these systems in the box as I originally had them and these are both the exact package that I had at the time when they were first released so let's take a look at both of them and I want to just talk a little bit about the system's themselves the games I'll show you a little bit of gameplay and then I'll sort of wrap things up by telling you whether or not it's worth it for you to buy your own I think you probably know the answer to that already or if you want to play on emulation or anything like that I'll I'll give you some options for that as well so here we have the Intellivision one this was the first model released in originally 1979 and mine was purchased in late 1980 this one here same package that I originally had different boxes you can kind of tell when they were made this one you see let's see if that focuses this one has the original keyboard component still listed on it and yeah I believe it's also on the back of the box Mattel actually got in a lot of trouble over this they advertised this system as eventually being available with a full computer this was kind of a big thing at the time a lot of a lot of console manufacturers were trying to do that Coleco of course came out with the atom later Mattel had planned to have a full computer keyboard component with the Intellivision never actually happened they got sued for that they ended up paying a lot of money that's kind of a digression a story unto itself I won't get too far into that but you can kind of tell from that that this is one of the early boxes and the early systems made this particular box came with Las Vegas poker and blackjack this is it right here and one of the interesting things about this and about all early in television games is just the way that the boxes were made and you can kind of tell from that also whether a game is early or late or anything like that early Mattel boxes had this nice plastic insert of course gatefold sleeve here instruction manual and overlays to go on there kind of kind of crazy controllers here disc based controllers as you can see and these are kind of a love it or hate it kind of thing I got used to this pretty quickly of course they have the number pad very few games actually required you to use the numbers so instead you would slip in these overlays which offered various different functions and yeah it was kind of an innovative system even today you don't see this kind of thing you can do different functions on the joypad the pads themselves had four fire buttons which was quite a lot in those days remember was competing against the Atari 2600 with only one fire button and you had all these other functions which basically mimics what you can do these days with modern controllers that have you know eight ten buttons on them this actually had more than that so really an innovative controller and worked well in a lot of games allowed for a lot more complex games than the Atari 2600 now I played the hell out of my Intellivision for the first couple years but at some point it did start to look and feel a little outdated Mattel in 1982 came out with the Intellivision 2 which was designed to look and feel a little more modern and like I mentioned it allowed them to sell it at a lower price this this in television - here you can see the controllers gone a little bit yellow of course back in those days you know everything had to use this fire retardant bromine which that is the reaction that causes the yellowing oddly enough on my system only one controller has that problem and the system itself does not which suggests to me that probably this was replaced at some point maybe with an even cheaper controller they probably made them even more cheaply as time went on that's my guess anyway the system itself went from having a power switch to this combination power and reset button there's various other things that they sort of streamlined one improvement that they made which I would actually recommend getting it in television - just for this is the controllers became detachable see if I can do this it's not that easy but here you go that is the detachable controller and it has sort of the same connector as other joysticks of the time so the pin outs different but same connector so you can make your own cables if you want but yeah the controller otherwise stayed basically the same does have a little stiffer feel and the number pad has gone kind of nasty it no longer has any sort of tactile feedback at all but again with an overlay in there you kind of lose the tactile feedback anyway so it's kind of a wash but it is nice to just have the detachable controllers especially today because you can fairly easily find these separately if you need to replace one again I loved my Intellivision too I played this this made it feel to me like an entirely new system again and I played this probably for the next few years at least up until 1985-86 here I have my in televised connected to my Intellivision to the intelafone only came styled like the Intellivision one but it would work with either system Mattel did show some mock-ups of a restyled and televised with some advertisements in the later years but they never actually released that model in fact if you see those advertisements now you should know that what they are showing in those advertisements is made of wood it's not actually even a component the Intel 'voice was designed to provide synthesized voice to certain games you had to buy specific Intel avoid games but if you did you were treated to some pretty complex vocalizations and this was a big deal at the time not many other systems offered this the Atari 2600 certainly didn't at the time although I believe there were one or two very late Atari 2600 games that would give you maybe one or two words but for the most part you had to buy an actual computer to get any sort of voice and even then that was an advanced feature on computers to have it on a home console was a pretty amazing thing now here's my personal collection of games the Intellivision only had about a hundred and fifty games total made for it and so it's not impossible to collect them all although some are quite rare and of the ones that I have you can probably see if you know anything about the Intellivision I have pretty much all the common ones and nothing else I just want to talk a little bit about some of these games and the cartridges themselves and then I want to give you a little treat I'm going to open a brand new never opened game before live on camera so let's take a look at some of these right now now let's say you're just getting into in television for the first time and you want to know what to look for are there any particular games or anything else that you should look for well I'll leave a list of my personal favorites down in the description I'm not going to go through them all right now you see what I have here this is sort of the staple collection for any collector of in television you want to get probably a good selection of these games these are all pretty good games but I do want to talk a little bit again about the packaging I prefer the early packaging foreign television and I think most people do so when you do buy games look for the early packaging if you can and that's tip defied here by the plastic insert of course the gatefold sleeve the first thing to go under Mattel was that plastic insert this is sort of how a lot of mid-period Mattel games were packaged you see no plastic insert there otherwise pretty much the same those are still okay this is an in television ink re-release of what was originally called NFL football in television ink did not renew the licenses for NFL or MLBPA or anything like that so just released as football and of course no gate coat-sleeve anymore in fact you can't really open it from the top you can't even get to the cartridge in there so you actually have to open these from the bottom which I find quite annoying in television ink games white label you see there that that's kind of one way to know you're looking at it in television ink game and as far as the games themselves go they're fine they they play exactly the same for the most part and you know no reason to avoid them there but what does happen with these is let's see you can see here they do crush quite easily and they don't stack well if you're into stacking as you can see I everybody stacks their games I mean I know we shouldn't but we do so that's what happens with those the in televised had its own sort of variant of the packaging no plastic insert and a slightly different sort of instruction area over here these boxes though seem to be made of slightly heavier cardboard it's very rare to find these worn out and then here we have one of the sort of later after Mattel went away from the sort of block lettering for everything they did try to get some arcade games and they used the arcade logos whenever they could this is also a in television ink production kind of surprising that they did carry over some of the arcade logos what they did at least for a while so yeah now some of my favorite packaging actually came from in magic a third-party brand all of their games came in these nice silver boxes plastic slide-out tray everything felt like really high quality even there even there sort of instruction manuals I mean full-color instruction manuals look at that that is pretty amazing and there overlays were made of this textured material I don't know if you can see that on camera there but it's it's kind of a little bit shiny has a nice quality feel to it and the cartridges themselves had sort of their own distinctive shape and more of the silver detail you know magic always positioned themselves as kind of a I don't want to say higher end but sort of a quality third party developer they didn't want people to see them as sort of knock off and people didn't we thought they were a great developer and we all looked forward to their games especially because their games were some of the best ever made for the system I'm going to show you a little bit of gameplay from microsurgeon in just a few minutes but first let's take a look at a brand new in television game I actually received this game for Christmas and I believe 1983 so this would be my second time opening this up brand new this was a later Mattel release and actually never came in a gatefold package always came in the same box so this should be the same exact experience that I had or anyone would have had back then so let's rip it open right now and I hope I hope there are no technical problems with the camera because I got one shot with this here we go here goes that shrink-wrap Oh feel that that is thirty-year-old shrink-wrap right there by the way you can buy these on eBay they're not too expensive there are still quite a few real new unsealed mattel intellivision games out there so there it is box is open by the way a lot of in television games didn't even come with shrink-wrap the later ones did but many of them did not so don't worry too much about that but that is one of the reasons why I picked this one up because it did come with shrink wrap I distinctly remember that when I was a kid so let's open it up Oh feel that not even bent yet I just bent it but there it is now it's bent and there's the cartridge popping out and a little shelf where there but yeah a little shelf where a little bit of dust and a little bit of the label itself sort of popping off that's not unexpected and here you also have the shrink wrapped instructions let's open that up see if there's any nice little goodies like any kind of catalogue or anything that comes with this there's your overlays and this is how they came and later releases peeling apart and yeah look at that nice catalog along with it just love these full-color look at that what's this 90-day limited warranty yeah hopefully we won't have to take advantage of that and these catalogs feature pretty much all the staple games and if you happen to get one of these just pretty much buy every game in here because these are all really good maybe not frog bog maybe not triple action but the rest of these yeah interesting that they're still advertising some of the sports licenses that they no longer had so here is that copy of Burger Time that I just opened this is a brand new copy of Burger Time I'm playing this on my Intellivision too and shooting directly at my TV screen with my camera so any kind of reflections or anything like that please excuse me for that also excuse me if I happen to suck playing this game it's been quite a while I used to be pretty good at this but who knows now so just be gentle don't laugh at me but here we go let's turn the sound up you can hear the theme song that you will never get out of your head as soon as this video is over come on guys get on the bun there you go ah and that's one of the perils of the disk-based control I actually was pressing down there but I kind of you kind of roll your thumb around and sometimes it doesn't quite register the way you want it to at the time this was released in 1982 this was probably the best home version of this game that you could get there was a pretty good IBM IBM PC CGA version of this game as well in fact it was superior to this and all but sound but it's kind of obscure now but I'm sure you can find some YouTube videos of that around as well in terms of home consoles though it really didn't get much better than this anyway so yeah that's that this was about probably my favorite game of 19 late 1982-83 I'm not sure exactly which year I got this in but that's the first game I want to show you and here is microsurgeon bio magic this is one of my favorite games for the system and actually the existence of games like this is one of the things that I love about the Intellivision I mean you play in this game as a little a little robot being controlled by a doctor somewhere inside inside this patient killing these diseases and other things I'm not doing too well here actually but I used to be really good at this game well this patient's going to die as you can see there I'm being attacked by white blood cells and I don't know what I'm doing but anyway you get the idea this is one of the more innovative games for this system or really for any system one of the problems here is I don't have the overlay on my controller so I don't really know what I'm doing that is ah there's something that is one of the things about the Intellivision is you really do at least at first you need to have the overlays to know to know basically what you're doing in any game after a while you kind of get used to the game and you don't need the overlays anymore but I haven't played this game in quite a while now like pretty much all my Intellivision games so yeah I'm sure I'm not doing too well let's see well his kidneys upgraded to fair there were a lot of innovative games for the Intellivision like this one I mean you don't really see games like this too much anymore for any system when you get down to it it's basically kind of like a shooter but you do need to stay inside the lines which are the veins and arteries and you need to use different weapons for the different diseases I actually don't again don't really know what I'm doing I don't have the overlay so I don't know how to select the different weapons but that's just me being stupid ideally you would want to clear out every single one of these things and when you do that your patient would be upgraded to good and you would basically win and collected the game is basically as any good doctor would tell you the game is all about collecting the most money anyway let's move on now here we have space battle this was one of Mattel's early system sellers for the Intellivision you see the copyright 1979 down there this is your average sort of Battlestar Galactica ripoff and that was intentional on the part of Mattel from what I've read let's just get into it here and one of my earliest memories of this game actually was I was living in San Francisco at the time and WPIX TV actually KPIX I am forgetting this was west of the Mississippi KPIX TV ran sort of a children's program they showed cartoons that kind of thing after schools around 3:30 4:00 o'clock they had a host who would take callers and over the phone they would play space battle they never called it that but they would show this on the screen and as the sort of gun sight was moving around the kids would have to call out picks picks picks to shoot it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever seen but but it did kind of get me into the Intellivision I believe this might have even been before I got the system and I made me really want it this game it is actually quite intense there's actually stuff going on in the background while you're doing this the Cylons or whatever they're actually called are still attacking and moving closer to your base as we're getting in here and you might at some point start hearing sort of alarms going off and if you do you better get out of that battle quick either by winning it or just by leaving and hoping your AI can take over and it is kind of a strategy game in that way also I still really like this game it's really easy to sort of pick up and play but it's quite difficult to win especially in this version of the game which I believe this is the hard version they they made several different versions of this game there wasn't easy and a hard version and there may have been kind of a normal version as well and I believe this is the hard one but let's get back out here to radar see what's going on I probably could win this but let's move on now I had wanted to show you some Intel 'voice games in fact I had set it all up tried all of my games out but unfortunately it seems like something's wrong with my Intel 'voice and I do remember that from when I was a kid as well the Intel 'voice is kind of a finicky machine and would sort of require a lot of jiggling around to get it to work right even when it was basically new I couldn't get mine to work right at all today so unfortunately that's going to have to wait maybe I'll do another video in a little while and show you nothing but Intel avoid games so I hope you've enjoyed this look at the Intellivision and it's games if you want to get into the system for yourself of course there's the various standard ways of doing so eBay and that's where I picked up my current two systems it's not very expensive to pick up and intellivision there or the games the games are quite cheap by eBay standards of course you can always get into the Intellivision flashback which comes with various games most of the systems staple games will be included with that and then there's emulation for your PC or even your smartphone this isn't going to be an exhaustive list but a couple of the PC emulators to look at would be jay-z intv or a nostalgia those are the big ones that I've heard about a lot and there's also a great version of jzi and TV for Android phones it will even show the overlays along with the game you're playing if you have the right files that said I do recommend playing on the real Hardware mostly because of the controller the controller is just very difficult to emulate and you really need to have the feel of it in your hand as you're playing along with the overlays in your hand as you're playing as you saw earlier with me playing microsurgeon anyway that's it for now I'll be doing more of these console videos pretty soon so watch for those until then see you later

Channel: Modern Classic

Views: 184,911

Keywords: intellivision, mattel, atari, retro gaming, classic gaming, classic consoles, game console, video games, classic games

Id: bZbrgOUgtp0

Length: 28min 58sec (1738 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2016