Page 6 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #41 FREE Edition

It was the mid to late 1980s, and I was an 8-year-old kid in a middle-class family in the
suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents took us to the local Sears Roebuck store and bought us a video game console. I remember it well, or at least a couple of moments of it, when we went and bought
an Intellivision. At the time, the Intellivision was the underdog console to the Atari VCS (later to be renamed to the 2600 upon the release of the 5200 in 1982). My dad had done the research, and just like how he determined that the Betamax would be the better technology over VHS VCRs, he purchased us an Intellivision.
At that time, I don’t remember if any of my friends had video game consoles, but I do remember us playing Intellivision a ton during those first couple of years. That
was before Mom and Dad’s next big purchase of a Texas Instruments TI99-4/a computer that I spent even more time on than the Intellivision... but video games, here we come!
I remember previously playing arcade games, but this was my first experience at home, and I loved it; Lock and Chase, Night Stalker, Frog Bog, and more great arcade-style games, plus I had a blast playing two-player MLB Baseball... Hold on though, we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Intellivision: Where It Came From
As chronicled elsewhere in more detail (such as David Craddock’s Space Battle and the upcoming MIT Press Intellivision book by Tom Boeellstorff and Brandon Soderman), Intellivision came from Mattel, the creators of Barbie and Hot Wheels.
The Intellivision was initially developed by APh Technical Consulting between 1977 to 1979, and was a collaboration between both the APh group and internal Mattel staff. Mattel’s Electronics group had previously produced handheld units and had some success. When Atari released its
VCS in 1977, they started a similar group to develop in the same area.
Mattel introduced the Intellivision to the market during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January of 1979, and
by the end of 1979, it was widely available in stores across the United States. In the battle of the second generation of consoles,
the first to use interchangeable game cartridges, the Intellivision quickly became the second-place player. Its sales were well above the Astrocade, Channel F, Odyssey 2, and Emerson Arcadia, second only to the Atari VCS. Of course the third generation of consoles, including the Nintendo Entertainment System, far surpassed these second generation systems, but that’s when the video game boom was really starting to take off.
Back to the Intellivision, and how several years of technological improvement boosted it
above the Atari. Through its marketing, it made some very
THE INTELLIVISION WHERE IT CAME FROM
by Ryan Burger
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