Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/23/atari-acquires-intellivision-45-years-too-late.html
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We had an Intellivision growing up, i remember having a lot of fun despite struggling with the janky controllers and the game specific inlays you’d slide in depending on what you were playing. Wish we had kept it, though realistically it’d be gathering dust somewhere.
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I still have mine from when I was a kid, dad got that cheaper than an Atari looking back. 
I think they should combine the Amico with the janky VCS whatever thing Atari was making and maybe two terrible products can cancel each other out.
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Huh. So I guess “Intellivision” is, like “Atari,” a holding company for the rights of (some of) their old games. So in this case presumably games like, "Burger Time, “Night Stalker,” “Astrosmash,” “Space Hawk,” “Buzz Bombers,” uh… “Lock ‘N’ Chase,” er… “Shark! Shark!” um… (I have to say, there’s like maybe three games of theirs that I actually remember at all.) For decades they couldn’t sell off the game rights, because no one wanted them. (Atari sold off their biggest names years back.) The holding companies sat for decades, gathering dust. I guess enough time has passed that the generation that played the games is now sufficiently old enough to be worth targeting for the nostalgia market. I can’t imagine anyone under the age of 40 remotely gives a shit about this stuff.
I feel weirdly un-nostalgic for this era of games, though. Maybe I just didn’t play enough of them - or maybe I played too much. Leaving aside that most didn’t hold up very well at the time, the gameplay elements that worked got endlessly copied and elaborated upon by subsequent generations of games that did it better. (Eventually for free, on the web.) I feel a lot more nostalgia for the '80s home computer games like Ultima, which I also find unplayable today for the same reasons.
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That era of gaming’s market has been somewhat lively, but because the games aren’t particularly enjoyable to play it’s usually going to be hardcore collectors going over the hardware. If someone gifted me an Intellivision in good condition and some games i don’t think i would ever go through the trouble to hook it up and play, if it was anything after the NES i definitely would.
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There is some upset that after decades of scrupulously keeping the Intellivision library together, Tallarico et al. have broken it up for no good reason.
Anyway, wasn’t Atari-not-really-Atari going all-in on crypto and the metaverse and so on not so long ago? Can’t seem to find the articles, aside from:
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The nostalgia market doesn’t really need this kind of age involved, 10 to 20 years will do it in a lot of cases. The unfortunate bit is the holding companies tended not to even keep non-exclusive rights or sell off a two decade exclusivity window so they still don’t have the rights to popular 1980s stuff even with nobody currently selling it.
I recently bought a “mini Atari 400” and a “mini Amiga 500” both of which have a large list of games included, but largely none of the really good stuff (the A500 had Worms, which my wife remembers fondly, but not Populious; the 400 has Star Raiders ][, but not Star Raiders…). On the plus side they both have USB ports and a documented way to package up old ROM images on a FAT(24?32?) USB stick for the devices to pick up and display in the startup menu and let you run.
In fact the only disappointing bit about the mini 400 and mini A500 is they have non functional mini keyboards. You need to add a real one via USB.
Oh, the mini devices can’t take any media from the original devices, but Atari sells a new build Atari 2600 that hooks up to HDMI TVs and takes original 1970s/80s cartridges as well as coming with a “10 games in one” with a set of DIP switches to let you pick which awful game to play ;-). Adventure is there, and the dragon still looks like a duck.
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That as a fun game!
Though I would change it up into me being a space ship flying through an asteroid field… added some variety.
My favorite game by far were the two D&D titles! Man I loved those. Especially Treasure of Tarmin!
At one time I know it was owned by former programmers. I think you could buy most of the ROMs from them, though I think people mostly pirated them.
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I have fond memories of our Intellivision system, mostly hours of playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin which could go on endlessly. ETA: I owe @Mister44 a Coke!
And I didn’t really understand who he was at the time but I liked the commercials with George Plimpton. I still joke that Intellivision was “the gaming system for the Paris Review reader”.
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Don’t underestimate that company. They’ve got some elaborate plans for a big surprise comeback any day now…
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The library was so small I’m surprised there was anything to break up - as with Atari, almost all the good games were third party. I’m also kind of surprised that anyone bothered to keep the rights libraries intact to begin with, but I guess it’s free money. Presumably it worked the same way as with Atari - random developers would make games and pay them a percentage of revenue for the rights to use the names.
Until recently, there were two Atari holding companies, one of which had (some of) the game rights, and the other basically just had the name “Atari.” Neither had any money, so they were willing to partner with anyone to stick their name on something they could make money off of. They weren’t doing anything themselves, and if the partners turned out to be flaky, then nothing happened at all.
But it seems to have, in this case, which is interesting. I think the nature of video games and their progress plays a part in it. A decade after the games came out, there wasn’t any nostalgia at all - you had (better) clones. After a couple decades the companies were licensing out the names of games for new projects that had no similarity, otherwise. It’s only recently that anyone thinks the names have any real value, that the original games are being released for new platforms, that new consoles (and hotels, etc.) capitalizing on that '80s nostalgia are being proposed. Presumably part of this is because the kids who played this stuff in the '80s have now hit a certain age, and have also forgotten just how bad the games were.
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… not to be confused with
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There were two D&D games? I didn’t know that. Never did get a chance to play Intellivision. The Amico is so much of a clusterfuck I don’t think it’s worth getting, but I’d seriously consider one of the minis if they every do something like that.
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Yeah, both Dungeon crawlers, and had varying degrees of difficulty.
Tarmin had more variety, and an early pseudo 3D graphics.
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This is an extremely relevant and funny video essay about Tommy Tallarico:
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My cousin had both D&D games and they were always interesting to me but I was too young to get too into them / didn’t have enough time to get terribly far when visiting them.
Utopia was fun…
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Utopia is great: my son and I play it from time to time.
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