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

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