Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are You? So this past weekend and I'm recording
Speaker 1: this June twelfth, twenty twenty four, But this past weekend
Speaker 1: was the Summer Games Festival, which is kind of a
Speaker 1: marketing extravaganza for the video game industry. The festival has
Speaker 1: grown in importance, especially since the dissolution of E three
Speaker 1: May at Rest in Peace, and while several of the
Speaker 1: big companies in the space now tend to hold their
Speaker 1: own events that are completely independent, the festival still remains
Speaker 1: a really important tool for tons of developers who might
Speaker 1: otherwise find it difficult to get their work showcased. But
Speaker 1: one thing I did see during the festival was news
Speaker 1: on the long awaited piece of retro hardware called the
Speaker 1: Intellivision Amiko, and that reminded me that I've never really
Speaker 1: done an episode dedicated to in television either. So we're
Speaker 1: going to address that today. And before I get to
Speaker 1: all of that, if you're really, really really into in television,
Speaker 1: well chances are you already know about the Intellivisionaries podcast,
Speaker 1: which I have no connection to, by the way, but
Speaker 1: it's a show that has episodes that dive super duper deep, deep, deep,
Speaker 1: deep down into all things in television. I listened to
Speaker 1: about a third of one episode in which they interviewed
Speaker 1: authors Braxton Soderman and Tom Belstorf. Those two wrote a
Speaker 1: book that's titled in Television, How a Video Game System
Speaker 1: Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie. That book actually comes
Speaker 1: out later this year, so sadly I wasn't able to
Speaker 1: use it for this episode. Maybe I'll reach out to
Speaker 1: them and we'll do an episode later in the year
Speaker 1: when the book comes out. But I really did listen
Speaker 1: to like a third of the episode they were on
Speaker 1: because that interview is about an hour long, but the
Speaker 1: whole episode is five and a half hours long. So
Speaker 1: y'all thought my shows get lengthy, I got nothing on
Speaker 1: The intellivision Areies. Turns out like the more I think
Speaker 1: focused your podcast is, the longer the episodes tend to get. Anyway,
Speaker 1: for those of us of a certain age, the brand
Speaker 1: in television conjures up memories of very early console wars. Technically,
Speaker 1: the second generation of video game consoles. So in television,
Speaker 1: along with things like I would say Kalico and Atari
Speaker 1: would compete in the burgeoning home video game system market
Speaker 1: more than forty years ago at this point. So let's
Speaker 1: talk about where in television came from, what happened to it,
Speaker 1: and how recent efforts to resurrect it have in countered
Speaker 1: new road bumps along the way, as well as the
Speaker 1: tale of an old enemy coming back to pick over
Speaker 1: the bones of its former competitor, which is foreshadowing. So
Speaker 1: let us set the scene now, before home video game
Speaker 1: consoles or video game arcades, there were nerdy computer science students,
Speaker 1: and these students were some of the only folks to
Speaker 1: have regular access to computers. Computers in those days were huge,
Speaker 1: they were expensive, they were super complicated. You know, a
Speaker 1: small computer might be the size of your typical refrigerator,
Speaker 1: and many of them were much much bigger than that.
Speaker 1: And while the computers were meant to do all sorts
Speaker 1: of important number crunching things, creative students would naturally begin
Speaker 1: to experiment with them in order to make them, you know,
Speaker 1: do other stuff like games, for example. And so in
Speaker 1: the early days, and we're talking like the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Here the only folks who even knew that video games
Speaker 1: could be a thing where college students working in computer labs.
Speaker 1: But eventually these ideas were able to creep their way
Speaker 1: into the mainstream. Nolan Bushnell, who will mention a few
Speaker 1: times in this episode because he did not work in
Speaker 1: television at all, he would be a co founder of Atari,
Speaker 1: the other really huge important video game console company in
Speaker 1: the late seventies early eighties, and he took an idea
Speaker 1: that began in computer labs. It was a game that
Speaker 1: was called Space War, and he adapted this into a
Speaker 1: coin operated arcade cabinet called Computer Space. This was back
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one. However, this game failed to take
Speaker 1: the world by storm. It was a complicated game. It
Speaker 1: was very difficult. It did not get much traction, but
Speaker 1: it was a start. The first home video game console,
Speaker 1: and at least this is what the general agreement is on,
Speaker 1: was the Magnavox Odyssey. This launched way back in September
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, and it was Pong before there was
Speaker 1: a Pong. Quick side note, the aforementioned Nolan Bushnell, who
Speaker 1: again co founded Atari, would actually assign his brand new engineer,
Speaker 1: Alan Alcorn, the job of building a table tennis arcade cabinet.
Speaker 1: So essentially what Bushnell did was he described to Alcorn
Speaker 1: all the elements of the table tennis game on the Odyssey,
Speaker 1: like he knew of that version, the home video game
Speaker 1: console version, but Alcorn had never seen it. He had
Speaker 1: never played that, and this was a test of Alcorn's abilities.
Speaker 1: He essentially said, hey, I need you to build this game,
Speaker 1: and he was able to describe specifically what he wanted
Speaker 1: because he was describing a game that already existed. It's
Speaker 1: just that Alcorn didn't know about that. And Bushnell claimed
Speaker 1: that this was all part of a contract job with
Speaker 1: General Electric, which turned out to be a total fabrication.
Speaker 1: So Alcorn took the assignment and eventually he made Pong.
Speaker 1: Pong ended up going on to be a huge hit
Speaker 1: arcade cabinet for the fledgling Atari company. In fact, you
Speaker 1: could argue it was the first like mega hit as
Speaker 1: far as arcade cabinets go. Anyway, my point is that
Speaker 1: the home video game console market got its start in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen seventies. The Magnavox Odyssey was a dedicated console.
Speaker 1: Now that meant you could only play what had been
Speaker 1: hard coded onto the console itself. The game was integrated
Speaker 1: into the console, so there was no cartridge slot. There
Speaker 1: certainly wasn't something like an optical drive or anything like that.
Speaker 1: All of that would come on later. So in a way,
Speaker 1: it was sort of like those retro consoles that you
Speaker 1: sometimes find that have a limited library of games pre
Speaker 1: programmed onto the device itself, right Like there's some of
Speaker 1: those for the Atari twenty six hundred or Nintendo Entertainment
Speaker 1: System or SNS, all of those old systems have like
Speaker 1: these dedicated retro consoles that have a limited library available
Speaker 1: on them. That's kind of what the first video game
Speaker 1: consoles were like, except the library often was just one game,
Speaker 1: and it was just some variation of Pong. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, the Fairchild Channel F console would introduce an innovation.
Speaker 1: It was a console that could accept ROM cartridges and
Speaker 1: therefore it was not limited to games that had been
Speaker 1: hard coded onto the console itself. BROM stands for read
Speaker 1: only memory. That means the games were physically programmed on
Speaker 1: circuit boards and there was no way to write new
Speaker 1: information to the games themselves. The circuit boards had a
Speaker 1: little electrical contacts on them, and those contexts would connect
Speaker 1: to matching contexts in the console itself. When you plug
Speaker 1: the cartridgeen, that's what would complete the circuit. It would
Speaker 1: let you play whatever game had been programmed on the cartridge.
Speaker 1: While the Channel F hit the market months before Atari
Speaker 1: launched the twenty six hundred, initially called the Video Computer
Speaker 1: System or VCS, Atari's library of games would have a
Speaker 1: much broader appeal than the Channel f's selection. The Atari
Speaker 1: twenty six hundred became a really popular video game console,
Speaker 1: and there was a huge demand for the technology. Folks
Speaker 1: who worked at Atari began to enjoy a sort of
Speaker 1: rock and roll lifestyle as the money came flooding in. Seriously,
Speaker 1: if you read the articles about Atari in its early days,
Speaker 1: it comes across as a bit rock and roll. Probably
Speaker 1: not as wild and crazy as some of the articles indicate,
Speaker 1: but it certainly presages, i would say, the startup culture
Speaker 1: that we would associate with companies in like the late
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties before the dot com bubble burst. Of course,
Speaker 1: lots of companies wanted to cash in on this growing trend,
Speaker 1: whether it was considered a fad or an actual trend
Speaker 1: at the time didn't matter. Companies saw that people were
Speaker 1: interested in video games and they wanted to be able
Speaker 1: to get in on that. So some of the consoles
Speaker 1: that popped up in the mid to late seventies and
Speaker 1: into the early eighties were pretty much garbage. In fact,
Speaker 1: the number of consoles that essentially were just Pong clones
Speaker 1: created an unstable market, and consumers grew disenchanted with the
Speaker 1: limited offerings that these consoles made and that some of
Speaker 1: them were just really poorly designed. Ultimately, this led to
Speaker 1: the first video game crash of the home video game
Speaker 1: console market. This happened in nineteen seventy seven. Now, when
Speaker 1: you hear me talk about the video game crash, typically
Speaker 1: what I'm referencing is a much larger market crash that
Speaker 1: happened in the United States in nineteen eighty three. But
Speaker 1: the first generation of consoles had its own crash six
Speaker 1: years earlier. Again, these were for consoles that were mostly
Speaker 1: dedicated consoles are Pong clones. Anyway, there's overlap between the
Speaker 1: first generation of conso and the second generation. It's not
Speaker 1: like we can just draw a line in years and
Speaker 1: say everything before this is first generation and everything after
Speaker 1: this is second generation. There was a lot more crossover
Speaker 1: than that. Really, when we say first generation and second generation,
Speaker 1: we're talking about a generation of consoles that were primarily
Speaker 1: dedicated systems where you could not change out what game
Speaker 1: you were playing. It was just limited to whatever was
Speaker 1: on the console itself. And the second generation would have
Speaker 1: more of the cartridge based approach where you could buy
Speaker 1: different cartridges and thus you could accumulate a library of games,
Speaker 1: and you know, playing a different game was as simple
Speaker 1: as turning the system off, pulling a cartridge out, putting
Speaker 1: a new one in, turning the system on again, and
Speaker 1: they're your way to go. So there is overlap between
Speaker 1: those two generations. Atari would become the dominant company in
Speaker 1: this space, but there were quite a few other competitors
Speaker 1: that also stood out with systems that sometimes had features
Speaker 1: and function that made them a more serious threat to
Speaker 1: Atari's dominance because the systems were more sophisticated and had
Speaker 1: you know, a leg up in some technical aspect. But
Speaker 1: Atari had a really big head start and that was
Speaker 1: a huge help because they were able to establish a
Speaker 1: pretty significant customer base early on, and that's invaluable. Well,
Speaker 1: one company that saw opportunity in the video game space
Speaker 1: was the giant toy company Mattel. So Mattel got started
Speaker 1: as a little home business made out of a garage
Speaker 1: way back in nineteen forty five, and originally Mattel made
Speaker 1: stuff like you know, like dollhouse furniture and picture frames
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. But in nineteen forty seven
Speaker 1: Mattel introduced a toy ukulele as a new product and
Speaker 1: then began to make toys more regularly. Things really got
Speaker 1: moving in nineteen fifty nine with the introduction of a
Speaker 1: little toy called the Barbie Doll Hi Barbie. That Doll's
Speaker 1: massive sitcess propelled Mattel into becoming a publicly traded company,
Speaker 1: and it really took off, and flush with cash from
Speaker 1: this IPO, Mattel started doing what a lot of other
Speaker 1: companies do when they get tons of money. It started
Speaker 1: to gobble up other toy companies left, right and center.
Speaker 1: And not just toy companies. Mattel would also acquire everything
Speaker 1: from the Wringling brothers in Barnum and Bailey Circus to
Speaker 1: industrial companies specializing in everything from plastic production to die casting.
Speaker 1: So by the nineteen seventies, Mattel was a really big deal,
Speaker 1: despite some missteps along the way, Like there were some
Speaker 1: times where Mattel was in some financial trouble, but the
Speaker 1: company had managed to survive all of that. In the
Speaker 1: early to mid nineteen seventies, Mattel leadership was reluctant to
Speaker 1: get into the video game console space because remember, in
Speaker 1: this time, the market's still very young, right, it's unproven.
Speaker 1: This is also really still the era of the first
Speaker 1: generation video game consoles, so tell executives weren't entirely sure
Speaker 1: that this was going to be a sustainable business. So
Speaker 1: it should come as no surprise that the company kind
Speaker 1: of held back at first. And to be totally fair
Speaker 1: to Mattel, the corporation had some rocky financial situations earlier
Speaker 1: that decade, so you know they were a little gun
Speaker 1: shy as well. But then enter Richard Chang, Mattel's head
Speaker 1: of toy design and development. In the mid to late
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, he began considering the possibility of getting into
Speaker 1: home video games. There were some competing ideas within Mattel
Speaker 1: at the time. Some engineers wanted to focus on handheld games.
Speaker 1: These would be similar to the dedicated consoles in that
Speaker 1: they would have a game hard coded onto the circuitry
Speaker 1: of the system itself. Others wanted to make an actual
Speaker 1: video game console for hooking up to your television. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: Mattel would do both, though at first the company would
Speaker 1: produce and release the handheld systems while some within the
Speaker 1: company worked on what would become the in television. Okay,
Speaker 1: we've got a lot more to this story, but before
Speaker 1: we get to that, let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: think our sponsors. We're back. So Chang, the head of
Speaker 1: development over at Mattel's toy division, reached out to a
Speaker 1: company called APH Technology Consultants to help with the various
Speaker 1: video game projects within Mattel and Mittel would actually spin
Speaker 1: up a kind of a subsidiary called Mattel Electronics to
Speaker 1: oversee this stuff. So this consulting group would ultimately do
Speaker 1: a lot of the programming for the handheld systems. Mattel
Speaker 1: worked with a company called General Instruments to tweak the
Speaker 1: design of a platform that General Instruments or GI had
Speaker 1: created called the Jiminy sixty nine hundred. I guess it's Jimminy.
Speaker 1: It's spelled Gimni, and I know that some astronauts referred
Speaker 1: to the Gemini spacecraft as the jim and E spacecraft,
Speaker 1: so I'm guessing it's the same here. Anyway. The whole
Speaker 1: concept was to take this platform, this Jiminy sixty nine
Speaker 1: hundred and tweak it so that it would be easier
Speaker 1: for programmers to use the same basic foundation to program
Speaker 1: different games that would speed things up and bring costs down.
Speaker 1: And GI was eager to do this because they saw
Speaker 1: this as an opportunity to really have a profitable business
Speaker 1: working in chips meant for specific applications like this. Mattel
Speaker 1: began to release the games these handheld systems, and they
Speaker 1: did well, and this helped build some momentum toward pushing
Speaker 1: out a fully fledged home video game console system. So
Speaker 1: this was around nineteen seventy eight or so. Atari had
Speaker 1: released the VCS in nineteen seventy seven. And the dates
Speaker 1: get a little fuzzy when I talk about this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, because, as it turns out, no one was
Speaker 1: really acting like an historian during the whole process. Like
Speaker 1: that's true for a lot of the technologies that came
Speaker 1: out in the seventies and eighties. The documentation is limited.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it doesn't even exist, or no one knows about
Speaker 1: where it might exist, because the company is responsible may
Speaker 1: have gone out of business decades ago. So the book
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier in this episode, the one that was
Speaker 1: featured in that interview of the epic podcast, that book
Speaker 1: isn't out yet. It comes out later this year, the
Speaker 1: fall of twenty twenty four, so I can't reference it,
Speaker 1: so I can't look to see what the more heavily
Speaker 1: researched bits actually say. Maybe again, I'll revisit this when
Speaker 1: that book comes out to see if it clarifies things.
Speaker 1: But within Mattel, there was a guy named Dave Chandler
Speaker 1: who also got the nickname Papa in television, who led
Speaker 1: a team to develop the actual physical hardware. The software
Speaker 1: side went to the APH Technology Consultants Group, and the
Speaker 1: operating system for it in television would receive the code
Speaker 1: name the Executive or sometimes the exec. The team was
Speaker 1: sticking with General Instruments for the chipset that would ultimately
Speaker 1: be used within the intelevision console. Reportedly, Texas Instruments at
Speaker 1: one point pushed to have Mattel jettison the GI chipset
Speaker 1: in favor of a chipset from Texas Instruments, but ultimately
Speaker 1: Mattel stuck with their previous partner for those handheld systems,
Speaker 1: partly because changing course would have set the whole project
Speaker 1: back by at least half a year, and the home
Speaker 1: video game market was really getting red hot in the
Speaker 1: late seventies, so a six month delay could have been
Speaker 1: very costly because who knew how long this video game
Speaker 1: fad would actually last. Well, the hardware was interesting, and
Speaker 1: Mattel would introduce some add on components to make it
Speaker 1: even more interesting and introduce or developed some that did
Speaker 1: not get widespread adoption, but probably would have made the
Speaker 1: system pretty incredible if Mattel had been able to get
Speaker 1: a handle on some very tough problems. But first off,
Speaker 1: the initial console bore at least some so samilarities to
Speaker 1: the early Atari twenty six hundred console, complete with faux
Speaker 1: wood paneling on the edges, because well, because it was
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and we were all crazy for wood paneling.
Speaker 1: I actually think it's pretty amazing that the Intellivision didn't
Speaker 1: also have orange brown shag carpet on it, if I'm
Speaker 1: being honest. The controllers for the Intellivision were a major
Speaker 1: departure from the Atari twenty six hundred. So while the
Speaker 1: faux paneling made it kind of look a little bit
Speaker 1: like an Atari system, the controllers were their own thing.
Speaker 1: Kalika Vision had its own controllers that were kind of similar,
Speaker 1: but in television man so, the Atari controller was just
Speaker 1: a basic joystick that had a single red button on it.
Speaker 1: The Atari twenty six hundred joystick was digital, which meant
Speaker 1: moving the stick in one of the four primary directions
Speaker 1: would just complete a circuit and send a command to
Speaker 1: the console. It's not like you could press harder or
Speaker 1: softer to make your character move faster or slower. It
Speaker 1: was either moving that way or it wasn't. Now, you
Speaker 1: could also move the joystick on the diagonal and thus
Speaker 1: complete two points of contact, and that would allow the
Speaker 1: system to let you move characters on a diagonal path
Speaker 1: if the game supported that, so which meant that ultimately
Speaker 1: with an Atari joystick, you had up to eight directions
Speaker 1: of movement possible. Now, the in television controller looked kind
Speaker 1: of like a remote control with a direction pad disc
Speaker 1: that was set either above or below a number pad.
Speaker 1: Whether it was above or below dependent upon the generation
Speaker 1: of controller. You had but yeah, think of like a
Speaker 1: remote control with a number pad that's three numbers wide,
Speaker 1: so you get the you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
Speaker 1: eight nine, maybe some other little command buttons, and then
Speaker 1: would have this disc either at the base or at
Speaker 1: the top, and the disc was a direction pad where
Speaker 1: you'd press on the edge of the disk and you
Speaker 1: could make stuff move that way. This had sixteen different
Speaker 1: points of directional control, and the number pad meant that
Speaker 1: the Intellivision games could have a much more complicated interface
Speaker 1: than your basic Guitari games. The pad itself, I would say,
Speaker 1: was a real thumb killer. It was just the circular
Speaker 1: disk and you would press along the edges to give
Speaker 1: commands to the game. You could eventually buy little joystick
Speaker 1: adapters that clipped on over that part of the controller.
Speaker 1: The joystick would just manipulate the disc underneath. That's actually
Speaker 1: how I played most of my intelevision games, because otherwise
Speaker 1: my hands would really cramp up pretty fast just trying
Speaker 1: to manipulate the disc. Just holding the controller could be
Speaker 1: pretty uncomfortable. There were also, as I would call buttons
Speaker 1: along one side of that gave you some more input options,
Speaker 1: and it meant that you had to hold the controller
Speaker 1: a specific way because the buttons would be inaccessible if
Speaker 1: you held the base of the controller, say in your
Speaker 1: left hand instead of your right hand, which could be frustrating,
Speaker 1: you know, if you were you know, if you weren't
Speaker 1: right handed, it could be a little difficult. I'm not
Speaker 1: right handed, so I guess what I'm saying is, I've
Speaker 1: personally found it very difficult. But interestingly, because of that
Speaker 1: number pad, game developers could create little plastic overlays, and
Speaker 1: these overlays would slide into a slot on the face
Speaker 1: of your controller and would fit over the number pad,
Speaker 1: and the overlays could indicate to gamers what each button did,
Speaker 1: if they did anything at all within the game. So
Speaker 1: rather than just having to remember that you would need
Speaker 1: to push I'll give you hypothetical you needed to push
Speaker 1: the number two button to pull up an inventory or
Speaker 1: something like that, instead of that, you would have this
Speaker 1: overlay and you would see like there'd be a little
Speaker 1: marking that represents inventory, and it's over top the number two.
Speaker 1: But it meant you didn't have to remember you needed
Speaker 1: to press number two. You just pressed the picture that
Speaker 1: made it look like a backpack or whatever it might be,
Speaker 1: and so you could just look at the overlay to
Speaker 1: see what you needed to push in order to do
Speaker 1: a specific action within the game. Of course, each game
Speaker 1: would have its own overlay, which meant you had twice
Speaker 1: as many components you could misplace and thus make it
Speaker 1: hard or impossible to play the game, because I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: if you misplace the cartridge, well then you don't have
Speaker 1: a game to play. If you misplace the overlay, well
Speaker 1: then you don't have the indicator for what the controller does,
Speaker 1: and you would be down to trial and error, and
Speaker 1: then you'd have to try and remember from that point forward.
Speaker 1: But still, the overlay thing was a really cool idea.
Speaker 1: It was a little challenging for folks like me because
Speaker 1: I inherited my in television game system and all the
Speaker 1: games for it and all the overlays, and it meant
Speaker 1: that I had maybe overlays for about half the games
Speaker 1: that came with the box that I got, So I
Speaker 1: had overlays for games that were not in the box,
Speaker 1: but sounded really cool, like I'm like, oh man, I
Speaker 1: wish I had the game that went with this overlay.
Speaker 1: And then I also had games where there was no
Speaker 1: overlay whatsoever, or at least I didn't have the overlays,
Speaker 1: so whether one was never made or it was lost
Speaker 1: or whatever, I don't know. Still, I mean, I had
Speaker 1: an intelevision, gosh darn' it, so I guess I shouldn't
Speaker 1: look at a gift horse in the mouth or anything.
Speaker 1: The cartridge slot on the original intelevision was on the
Speaker 1: right side of the system, so it wasn't in the
Speaker 1: top or the face of it. It was on the
Speaker 1: right side, and the cartridges themselves were narrower than Atari
Speaker 1: twenty six hundred games. They also didn't have any artwork
Speaker 1: on the face of them, Like if you look at
Speaker 1: an old Atari twenty six hundred game, a lot of
Speaker 1: them have this cool artwork on one side as well
Speaker 1: as the title typically along the top of the cartridge.
Speaker 1: In television cartridges, you just had the title on the end. Really,
Speaker 1: as I already mentioned, the APH consulting firm designed the
Speaker 1: operating system that would run on top of the hardware.
Speaker 1: They also would provide the platform for developers who wanted
Speaker 1: to make games for the Intellivision, and the initial games
Speaker 1: for the Intellivision almost exclusively came from APH Mattel did
Speaker 1: a kind of a soft launch for the system in Fresno,
Speaker 1: California in nineteen seventy nine in order to which how
Speaker 1: receptive consumers would be to a new video game console,
Speaker 1: because you know, the Atire twenty six hundred had been
Speaker 1: out for two years at this point. The Intellivision would
Speaker 1: initially retail for two hundred ninety nine dollars, which was
Speaker 1: more than one hundred dollars more expensive than the initial
Speaker 1: Attari twenty six hundred cost when it launched two years earlier.
Speaker 1: So if we adjust for inflation, get ready for this one, y'all,
Speaker 1: it would mean that if you bought a brand new
Speaker 1: in television in nineteen seventy nine, that would set you
Speaker 1: back the equivalent of around one thousand, two hundred dollars
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four. Like it's it's the equivalent amount
Speaker 1: of buying power. So imagine going out and buying a
Speaker 1: video game console for one thousand, two hundred bucks. That
Speaker 1: really puts things in perspective, doesn't it. I mean, video
Speaker 1: game consoles are an absolute steel these days if you
Speaker 1: compare it to how much the old ones cost. By
Speaker 1: taking buying power into consideration, in that initial launch, Mattel
Speaker 1: offered just four games. Again, this is a test market
Speaker 1: in Fresno, California, and those four games aren't exactly titles
Speaker 1: that you would expect to be a huge success. They
Speaker 1: were Math Fun, Armor Battle, Backcabin, and then Poker and Blackjack.
Speaker 1: So you've got two video game versions of card or
Speaker 1: board games, You've got one game that's desperately trying to
Speaker 1: convince you that Math is in fact fun, and then
Speaker 1: you have a more standard video game in the form
Speaker 1: of Armor Battle. Now, remarkably, folks still found the system
Speaker 1: to be intriguing, and the response was enough to convince
Speaker 1: Mattel to push into mass production for a nationwide effort.
Speaker 1: One thing that would set in television apart from Atari
Speaker 1: was the chip set in the in television allowed for
Speaker 1: higher resolution graphics. Now, keep in mind, the graphics of
Speaker 1: Atari twenty six hundred games were really primitive, so in television,
Speaker 1: when you get down to it was slightly less primitive.
Speaker 1: It's not like they were super high resolution games or something,
Speaker 1: but it was definitely an improvement over the Attari twenty
Speaker 1: six hundred. Mattel would brag that the characters in their
Speaker 1: games would actually have stuff like arms and legs, for example,
Speaker 1: which is not exactly a high bar to clear. The
Speaker 1: sound chip in the Intellivision was actually pretty limited to
Speaker 1: beeps and buzzes, but Mattel would develop and release some
Speaker 1: hardware that would improve things for specific titles. Again, the
Speaker 1: actual chips would come from General Instrument GI had developed
Speaker 1: a voice synthesizer chip in the late nineteen seventies. It
Speaker 1: was called the SP zero two five six. The team
Speaker 1: at Mattel responsible for taking that chip from GI and
Speaker 1: then incorporating it into a module for the Intellivision would
Speaker 1: include Ron Carlson who led the hardware team, Ron Sarrat
Speaker 1: who was there to write software for this thing, and
Speaker 1: Patrick us to help with the voice analyzation and voice
Speaker 1: data for the games. The result was the Intella Voice Module.
Speaker 1: This was an add on. It would plug into the
Speaker 1: cartridge slot on the right side of the Intellivision. On
Speaker 1: the right side of the module was another cartridge slot.
Speaker 1: That's where you'd put the relevant game so that you
Speaker 1: could get the synthesized voice action. And that module would
Speaker 1: come out in nineteen eighty two, just a year before
Speaker 1: things would get really hairy for the entire home video
Speaker 1: game market in the US. Only a couple of games
Speaker 1: ever came out that supported this feature. Just five titles,
Speaker 1: in fact, came out that supported it. I owned one
Speaker 1: of them because the Intellivision I inherited also had the
Speaker 1: Intelli Voice module, and one of the games, notably B
Speaker 1: seventeen Bomber, which I remember having a narrator with an
Speaker 1: over the top Southern accent, came with it. That accent
Speaker 1: it would sound I'll never forget this. I would boot
Speaker 1: up the game and the game would just spout off
Speaker 1: to me by seventeen Balmer like. It was way over
Speaker 1: the top, very slow. I think it was slow so
Speaker 1: that you could understand it more easily, because obviously it's
Speaker 1: like listening to someone speak through a vocoder, Like it's
Speaker 1: really digitized and odd. But I thought it was pretty
Speaker 1: darn rad at the time. However, the Intelli Voice ultimately
Speaker 1: didn't sell very well, despite early excitement for the add on.
Speaker 1: Perhaps part of the issue was the industry as a
Speaker 1: whole was rapidly approaching a precipice that ultimately it would
Speaker 1: plummet off of, and it was just bad timing. But
Speaker 1: it was also a really expensive add on, right, and
Speaker 1: it was only working with a couple of games. It's
Speaker 1: not like somehow it retroactively gave better sound effects to
Speaker 1: all the games that were ever made for the Intellivision.
Speaker 1: It didn't, So maybe those were other strikes against it. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we're going to get back to the games. We got
Speaker 1: more to talk about with them and the fate of
Speaker 1: the Intellivision system and the brand. But before we get
Speaker 1: to all that, let's take another quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsors. So in television games, let's talk about them
Speaker 1: for a second, Like how much they cost, because of
Speaker 1: a new cartridge would typically cost around thirty nine ninety
Speaker 1: five or around forty dollars in the United States, So
Speaker 1: that's less than what you would buy a Triple A
Speaker 1: title for today, right Like you're talking about Triple A titles,
Speaker 1: they're probably sixty or seventy dollars. However, that's before we
Speaker 1: adjust for inflation, and when we do that, forty dollars
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty would be close to spending around one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty seven dollars on a new game today. Again,
Speaker 1: it puts things in perspective, and keep in mind the
Speaker 1: in television games well really innovative at the time. I
Speaker 1: don't want to take anything away from the people who
Speaker 1: made these games, because they were the foundation for everything
Speaker 1: that would follow. But those games would be considered almost
Speaker 1: too primitive to play by today's standards for a lot
Speaker 1: of gamers. And I say that as someone who actually
Speaker 1: really loves these games and television would sell, but it
Speaker 1: wouldn't topple the dominant Atari twenty six hundred. They wouldn't
Speaker 1: come close. Also, Mattel executives realized that they could make
Speaker 1: more money if they brought more video game development in
Speaker 1: house rather than outsourcing it to a consulting firm like APH,
Speaker 1: and to that end, Mattel assembled a team of programmers.
Speaker 1: They poached some of them from competing companies. That group
Speaker 1: included Don Daglow, John sol Rick Levine, and Keith Robinson.
Speaker 1: Robinson would oversee the group as manager. He would also
Speaker 1: become very important to the Intellivision brand later on. So
Speaker 1: Mittel would try to keep those names and identities under wraps.
Speaker 1: And the reason for it was because Atari was notorious
Speaker 1: for luring away talent, and Mattel did not want Atari
Speaker 1: to know who was developing games for the Intellivision, so
Speaker 1: the group was only referenced as the Application Software Programmers
Speaker 1: until TV Guide published a piece about the group in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two. The writer of that piece found the
Speaker 1: official terminology kind of stodgy and boring, so that writer
Speaker 1: renamed the developer team the Blue Sky Rangers, which is
Speaker 1: way more cool. I mean, it gives me kind of
Speaker 1: Disney vibes, but way more cool than Application Software Programmers,
Speaker 1: and that nickname stuck. They became known as the Blue
Speaker 1: Sky Rangers. One thing Mattel planned and worked on but
Speaker 1: it never got a nationwide release was a keyboard peripheral
Speaker 1: for the Intellivision, and so the idea was that this
Speaker 1: would help turn the video game system into a somewhat primitive,
Speaker 1: but working personal computer system. The keyboard module itself had
Speaker 1: an additional eight bit six ' five ZHO two processor
Speaker 1: built into it, and that would boost the Intellivision's processing capability,
Speaker 1: so it would technically become a dual processor computer. Way
Speaker 1: back in the early nineteen eighties, but the development of
Speaker 1: the keyboard was really difficult. It was it was hard
Speaker 1: to make something that was going to work with the
Speaker 1: base system and turn it into a computer. It was
Speaker 1: very hard to do it in a way that was
Speaker 1: going to be cost effective because it was so expensive
Speaker 1: to produce that it would mean Mattel would have to
Speaker 1: charge a lot of money for this keyboard peripheral. In fact,
Speaker 1: ultimately the company would offer the keyboard in a very
Speaker 1: very small, limited market for a whopping six hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: Six hundred dollars is twice as expensive as the base
Speaker 1: console when it first launched. And keep in mind Mattel
Speaker 1: actually marked down the price of the in television, you know,
Speaker 1: six months in a year after it came out. But
Speaker 1: when it first launched it was three hundred dollars. This
Speaker 1: keyboard peripheral was six hundred. And you could only find
Speaker 1: it for sale in a couple of cities in the
Speaker 1: United States, like I think one was, I want to say,
Speaker 1: like New Orleans, and the other was Seattle or something. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: the only way to get it was to purchase it
Speaker 1: by mail order. You couldn't find it at your local
Speaker 1: hobby store or whatever. This ambitious project, unsurprisingly turned out
Speaker 1: to be a big failure. Like part of it is
Speaker 1: that you know, it's so expensive, and the other part
Speaker 1: is that it just was impossible to find, and it's
Speaker 1: a shame that it failed, because who knows, maybe in
Speaker 1: Television might have weathered the video game crash of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three a little better if consumers had seen the
Speaker 1: system as a viable personal computer. That's how Neees was
Speaker 1: able to convince toy stores to carry the Nintendo Entertainment
Speaker 1: System because Nees marketed it as a type of home
Speaker 1: computer system, not just a video game console. Because after
Speaker 1: the video game crash of nineteen eighty three, toy retailers
Speaker 1: did not want to get back into video games because
Speaker 1: it had been such a terrible experience. At the end
Speaker 1: of the crash, when you had all this merchandise that
Speaker 1: wasn't moving, you were marking it down to practically nothing,
Speaker 1: and half the time you just had to throw it out.
Speaker 1: You never get your money back, so retailers did not
Speaker 1: want to deal with video games anymore. If in Television
Speaker 1: had been able to position itself as a computer system
Speaker 1: more than a video game system, then it might have
Speaker 1: had an easier time of it. But as it turned out,
Speaker 1: this keyboard peripheral was just too darn expensive, so it
Speaker 1: was not really a viable option. Mattel did produce a
Speaker 1: lot of games for the Intellivision. By the end of
Speaker 1: the system's life cycle, which actually extended beyond Mattel's operation
Speaker 1: of the brand in television would boast around one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five titles. Now in Television didn't have the
Speaker 1: same number of licensed games that Atari did. That was
Speaker 1: a bit of a strike against the Intellivision system. Gamers
Speaker 1: wanted to be able to play their favorite arcade titles
Speaker 1: at home, and while that didn't always work out so
Speaker 1: well see also the Atari twenty six hundred version of
Speaker 1: Pac Man, one of the worst games I ever owned,
Speaker 1: it still gave Atari a leg up on Intellivision because
Speaker 1: Atari did have more licenses. That's not to say Mattel
Speaker 1: didn't secure a few licenses itself. It did, but a
Speaker 1: lot of the games that in Television produced were kind
Speaker 1: of like these independent titles. These original ideas. Original ideas
Speaker 1: are just harder to sell to gamers who were hoping
Speaker 1: to bring the arcade experience to their home. Mattel also
Speaker 1: produced a more compact, cheaper version of the Intellivision in
Speaker 1: early nineteen eighty three, just as the whole market was
Speaker 1: starting to crumble. This was called the Intellivision two, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't like a huge improvement over the Intellivision. It
Speaker 1: was really the same system, but with a few quality
Speaker 1: of life improvements, right Like it had longer chords for
Speaker 1: the controllers, so you didn't have to sit right next
Speaker 1: to the console. The original Intellivision, those chords were super short,
Speaker 1: so it's not like you could have the Intellivision saying
Speaker 1: on a coffee table and you're kicking back on the couch.
Speaker 1: You'd be like hunched right up over top the system
Speaker 1: in order to play it well in television. Two improved
Speaker 1: that a little bit. It was also more compact, smaller,
Speaker 1: it's less expensive, but it also was not compatible with
Speaker 1: every game that had been made for the original Intellivision,
Speaker 1: and the reason for that turned out to be that
Speaker 1: Mattel had made some tweaks to the operating system, allegedly
Speaker 1: specifically so that they could prevent certain third party games
Speaker 1: from operating on it, which is pretty darn sneaky Mattel.
Speaker 1: The company had also started to id eate an engineer
Speaker 1: around actual updated versions of the hardware, like real successors
Speaker 1: to the original Intellivision, so and Intelevision three was in development,
Speaker 1: and also plans were in place for yet another console.
Speaker 1: It was code named Decade. It might have been the
Speaker 1: Intelevision four, but the video game crash would sideline all
Speaker 1: of those plans. Interestingly, the Intellivision would technically survive the
Speaker 1: video game crash. In fact, it was the lone video
Speaker 1: game console for sale in the holiday season and nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four here in the United States, it was the
Speaker 1: only one still being produced and sold in store. All
Speaker 1: the other competitors had either completely gone out of business
Speaker 1: or they had changed their focus to some other technologies.
Speaker 1: But at that point it wasn't Mattel calling the shots,
Speaker 1: because in nineteen eighty four, Mattel actually shut down the
Speaker 1: Mattel Electronics division of the company and started to sell
Speaker 1: off assets, and one former marketing executive for Mattel, a
Speaker 1: guy named Terence Veleski, formed a new company that was
Speaker 1: ultimately called IINTV Corporation. He purchased the Intellivision IP from Mattel,
Speaker 1: so he got the brand and the technology and all
Speaker 1: the games and everything, and so I INTV Corporation would
Speaker 1: take over the production and development of the Intellivision systems
Speaker 1: and brands, and so the console stayed in production, although
Speaker 1: now produced by ITV as opposed to Mattel, so it
Speaker 1: was doing so with a new corporate overlord. This meant
Speaker 1: the Intellivision would actually survive throughout the entire nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: but despite efforts to build out things that would allow
Speaker 1: in television to continue beyond that, everything started to fizzle out.
Speaker 1: Right around nineteen ninety, Intellivision secured a deal with the
Speaker 1: World Book Encyclopedia to produce an educational system that was
Speaker 1: based off the Intellivision console, but that all kind of
Speaker 1: fell apart and in television or IONTV Corporation and Worldbook
Speaker 1: would end up suing the pants off each other proverbially speaking,
Speaker 1: and ultimately IONTV Corporation would go into bankruptcy toward the
Speaker 1: end of nineteen ninety and folded in nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: partly as a result of these lawsuits, but even then
Speaker 1: the Intellivision was only mostly dead. Keith Robinson, you know,
Speaker 1: who was the former manager of the Blue Sky Rangers,
Speaker 1: actually obtained the rights to many of the Intellivision games
Speaker 1: that were made by his group in the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen ninety seven he started to make these
Speaker 1: games freely available with an m yes DASS based emulator.
Speaker 1: Just quick side note, and emulator is a device or
Speaker 1: some software that copies or emulates some other system in
Speaker 1: order for you to be able to access software for
Speaker 1: that system on some other platform. Most of the time,
Speaker 1: when I talk about video game emulators, I'm actually talking
Speaker 1: about stuff that has no official rights to emulate the
Speaker 1: other technologies. That's not the case here, which I think
Speaker 1: is pretty cool because again, typically i'm talking about like
Speaker 1: things that are related to piracy. This isn't so. Robinson
Speaker 1: formed a company called Intelevision Productions to oversee these efforts,
Speaker 1: and in fact, at one point in Television Productions even
Speaker 1: took steps to go into production with brand new and
Speaker 1: television cartridges, some of which were games that had been
Speaker 1: through development but had never been released, and others that
Speaker 1: were brand new, so these would be new cartridges that
Speaker 1: would work on legacy and television systems. Unfortunately, those efforts
Speaker 1: fizzled out, but it was cool that for a while
Speaker 1: it looked like an obsolete system was going to get
Speaker 1: a second retro life. In the late nineteen nineties, the
Speaker 1: Intellivision brand faded a bit further from memory in subsequent years,
Speaker 1: though occasionally titles would pop up in special deals or
Speaker 1: compilations for other platforms, things like, you know, like mobile
Speaker 1: devices or whatever. In twenty fourteen, a company called at
Speaker 1: Games Digital Media Incorporated licensed the Intellivision brand and released
Speaker 1: a dedicated console featuring around sixty titles. This console was
Speaker 1: called the Intellivision Flashback, So that was something that people
Speaker 1: could get again, one of those just little dedicated console
Speaker 1: retro systems. Four years after that, in twenty eighteen, the
Speaker 1: video game composer Tommy Tellerico, whom I always think of
Speaker 1: back in the days of G four TV. Any of
Speaker 1: y'all who remember that cable channel, that short lived cable
Speaker 1: channel G four I'm talking about the original G four TV,
Speaker 1: not reboot that also unfortunately had a fairly short life.
Speaker 1: Tommy tall Rico was a personality on that channel, but
Speaker 1: he also is a really prolific video game composer. Well.
Speaker 1: He announced in twenty eighteen that he had purchased the
Speaker 1: rights to the Intellivision brand. Now, at this stage, tall
Speaker 1: Rico's plan was to develop a new video game console
Speaker 1: that was inspired by the Intellivision. This new console would
Speaker 1: be the Intellivision Amiko, which I mentioned at the very
Speaker 1: top of this episode. The new company he created took
Speaker 1: the name in Television Entertainment. So initially the hope was
Speaker 1: to bring this console to market in twenty twenty, but
Speaker 1: then a whole bunch of stuff happened. You know, you
Speaker 1: had your typical delays and engineering challenges, but then you
Speaker 1: also had I don't know, a global pandemic. Maybe you
Speaker 1: remember that. Anyway, the Amiko would experience numerous delays until
Speaker 1: yet another seismic shift would hit the brand because on
Speaker 1: May twenty third of twenty twenty four, Atari s acquired
Speaker 1: the rights to the Intellivision brand and library. Now, they
Speaker 1: did not buy the rights to the Amiko console. That's
Speaker 1: still staying with Intelevision Entertainment, which is going to rename itself.
Speaker 1: It may have by the time I've recorded this episode.
Speaker 1: I didn't look into that to see if they had
Speaker 1: actually changed their name yet. But yeah, they're changing that
Speaker 1: name and it won't be the Intellivision Amiko anymore. But
Speaker 1: the plan is for the Amiko to still come out,
Speaker 1: to still have games made for it. And also to
Speaker 1: license games from Intellivision, so you would still be able
Speaker 1: to get certain intelevision titles on the Amiko. But yeah,
Speaker 1: now Atari Essay owns in television. This seems like one
Speaker 1: of those kind of ironic ending type things where you know,
Speaker 1: these former competitors are now part of the same company.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't really work because neither Atari Essay is
Speaker 1: the same as the original Atari company in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: nor is the new intelevision entertainment brand that was brought
Speaker 1: over to Atari Essay that's not directly related to Intellivision either. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the brand, it's the IP, but it's not all
Speaker 1: the people who put it together, so it's not quite
Speaker 1: the same thing. On paper, it seems like a delicious irony,
Speaker 1: but in reality it's you know, corporate maneuvering and acquisitions
Speaker 1: and divestments and all that mess. Nothing that's easy to
Speaker 1: actually outline, but still interesting. Now that Atari technically not
Speaker 1: technically Atari owns the Intellivision IP, So how that's going
Speaker 1: to manifest I don't know, Like I don't know if
Speaker 1: we're going to start seeing re releases of these classic
Speaker 1: in television titles or another like attempt at creating a
Speaker 1: dedicated console that features some of the more popular titles.
Speaker 1: I would love to play the Intellivision Dungeons and Dragons title. Again.
Speaker 1: I really had a lot of fun playing with that
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, so I would love to
Speaker 1: have that. I'm sure I could find it online. I
Speaker 1: just I wouldn't mind having a little dedicade console so
Speaker 1: I could try to relive my childhood and then within
Speaker 1: like three or four minutes, turn it off and put
Speaker 1: it in the corner and never touch it again because
Speaker 1: the games are hard and I'm old. But anyway, that's
Speaker 1: an overview of the story of in television. As I said, like,
Speaker 1: there's this full length book that's coming out later this year.
Speaker 1: It's really expensive too. When I looked on Amazon like
Speaker 1: pre ordering, it was like sixty dollars. So I'm guessing
Speaker 1: it's going to be used like a textbook or something
Speaker 1: because at that price, that's that's a hefty price tag
Speaker 1: for a book. But maybe I'll reach out to the
Speaker 1: authors and see about having them on to talk about
Speaker 1: in more detail some of the stories about the development,
Speaker 1: because I'm sure there's lots of twists and turns and
Speaker 1: interesting decisions like I didn't really touch on the corporate
Speaker 1: level of MATEL on what was going on there, because
Speaker 1: it didn't really look too deeply into that, but surely
Speaker 1: that played a part in these decisions as well. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I hope all
Speaker 1: of you are well, and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.