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The Intellivision was a gaming console released in 1980 to compete with Atari. It was successful until the video game market crashed in 1983. The system featured games made by APh and later in-house developers called “Blue Sky Rangers”. The Intellivision had innovative features such as the Intellivoice, which produced synthesized speech for some games. The company closed in 1991, but vintage games have become popular again and compilations have been produced for modern systems.
The Intellivision was a computer game console built to compete with the popular Atari 2600 system. The Intellivision was released in 1980, priced at $200 US Dollars (USD.) The console was hugely successful until 1983, when a market crash for video games and newer and more advanced systems caused huge damage to sales.
Less than a year after the release of the revolutionary Atari 2600, Mattel set to work developing a more advanced gaming console. While the Intellivision was originally slated to have an additional keyboard to rival a personal computer, the technology was never perfected and was eventually scrapped. The system was aggressively marketed as better and more realistic than the Atari, adopting the advertising slogan “the closest thing to the real thing”. In its first year, the system sold over 100,000 units with 19 games available.
Originally, all games for the system were made by an outside company called APh. The company produced popular games that would later become classics, including Sub Hunt and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Cloudy Mountain. Eventually, Mattel realized they could make more profit by making games in-house, and hired handheld game developers to take over the job.
Fearing that Atari might steal their development team, Mattel kept the identities of the developers a secret, referring to them only as “Blue Sky Rangers”. Rangers produced dozens of games for the system, and many original members went on to have successful careers after the fall of Intellivision. Some of their most popular titles include River Raid, Shark! Shark! and Utopia, considered the first simulation game.
The original Intellivision was a flat rectangular box, with two controllers and a cartridge port on one side. The controllers featured a telephone-like number pad, a circular directional pad, and four side buttons that could be used for various game functions. A smaller, sleeker version called the Intellivision II was released, which was designed to be cheaper to manufacture.
One of the system’s major innovations was the release of the Intellivoice, a revolutionary peripheral device that produced synthesized speech for some games. Due to the limited amount of voice memory space available on a cartridge, games with Intellivoice were difficult to make. Only four titles were released with this capability Space Spartans, Bomb Squad, B-17 Bomber and Tron: Solar Sailor. The technology was a few years ahead of its time, but is recognized as a revolutionary invention.
In 1983, the video game market suffered a slump as new companies rushed to create consoles and personal computers that gained popularity. Intellivision, unable to build a technologically advanced system that kept pace with the market, eventually suffered the effects of the crash. The company closed in 1991.
In the 21st century, vintage games have become a fad and Intellivisions are often found at the center of bidding wars on auction sites like eBay. In the late 1990s, members of the original Blue Sky Rangers obtained the rights to the games and produced compilations for the Sony Playstation, Nintendo DS and for use on personal computers. Despite the limited availability of the original system, the world of Intellivision is alive and well again.
