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Last Modified November 28, 1997
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Chapter I
"Intellivision History"
Foreword
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The Mattel Electronics Intellivision in the early 1980's was one of the
most popular video game systems in the world. Despite being a huge success
in its own right, the Intellivision never quite sold as well as the more
popular Atari Video Computer System and its clones.
Each Intellivision had copyrighted software in it, unlike the Atari VCS
which utilized off the shelf parts. As a consequence, no unauthorized clones
of the Intellivision ever appeared. Utilizing a 16 bit microprocessor, even
the ROMS were a "non standard" 10 bits wide.
This fact made it very difficult to know what made it tick. There was
very little documentation detailing how the system worked. Companies
such as IMAGIC who reversed engineered the Intellivision and documented
the internal Executive Rom made quite an investment to find out how it
worked. The chip set in the Intellivision was not a popular one, and not
used in very many other devices. Therefore, very few people knew anything
about the heart of the Intellivision, the General Instruments CP1610.
When Carl Mueller decided he wanted to make an Intellivision emulator for
the IBM PC, he faced a daunting task. No one seemed to be able to dump even
ONE game cartridge for the system. Eventually, he did find two, and began
to piece together a program to run the said Intellivision cartridges. When
I saw this program, I was amazed. With only some technical overviews and a
listing of the OP codes he obtained from an Osborne book, here was the actual
code of an Intellivision game being executed on a PC!
Carl however, had a problem. He had only two cart dumps, and lacked the
Executive code. Without this code, he had to literally GUESS what each
program was doing when it made a call to the Executive program. Being a
software person, he needed help getting dumps of game programs and
both the Executive and Graphic Roms. Without the Executive and Graphic
Roms, development of the Intellivision emulator would soon come to a
screeching halt!
This is where I came in. Since I knew a very talented programmer by the
name of Scott Nudds, I asked him about dumping the Executive Rom. He
claimed this would be "trivial". I asked him to prove it!
A trip to the library resulted in an Osborne book chapter dealing with the
General Instrument CP1600. Some time later, Scott made good upon his claim
and designed, built and programmed a GI Rom reader. By delivering the Exec,
numerous game programs and Graphic Rom, development continued on the
emulator. As information was collected for the purpose of dumping Intellivision
Roms and the programming of the emulator, it was decided to collect this
information in one document. This Book is the result.
De Re Intellivision means simply "All about Intellivision". It was my
intention to gather into one document everything I could locate about the
Mattel Intellivision and its peripherals. This includes its history,
information on game programs and the programmers, programming information,
hardware information, repairs/modifications, and collecting guide.
Simply "EVERYTHING" there is to know about the Intellivision!
It is hoped that the technical information included in this document will
enable the continuation of development of games and/or hardware for the
Mattel Electronics Intellivision.
Much of this information was collected verbatim from various souces
(many on line). This file has been assembled from components from
various Intellivision text files as well as new information from direct
experimentation.
Documentation on the construction and programming of the Cart reader are
also found in this package, however, this chapter will be made available
AFTER the Intellivision CD ROM is released.
Many people have made the revival of the Mattel Intellivision possible.
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to this document knowingly
or not. However, I would like to especially thank first of all, Carl Mueller
who has written an extrodinary emulator. It was an honour to have been
involved with his project. Scott Nudds, who was pivotal in providing Carl
with technical information. Ron Carlson, the designer of the Intellivoice
for providing technical information. Gary Kato, formerly from Imagic, who
provided me with information on Intellivision development there. And,
finally, I would like to thank the "Blue Sky Rangers" for bringing me all
the wonderful games I remember playing as a youth.
William M. Moeller
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Intellivision History ��������������������������������������������������
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Intellivision Master Component #2609 Development History �
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In 1976, the head of Mattel Toys Design and Development department,
Richard Chang, hired a small Pasadena, California company called APh
Technology Consultants to investigate the possiblity of producing a home
video game system.
In the General Instruments integrated circuit catalogue, they discovered
a video game system called the Gimini 6900 which could be assembled from
off-the-shelf GI chips. Unfortunately, the design of the Gimini 6900
only allowed for a Read Only Memory chip which would contain graphics
that would be used for every game. APh artist Dave James insisted this
limitation would criple the new video game system. (Dave James was later
responsible for much of the Intellivision's on screen look, including the
famous running man animation used in many of the Intellivision's Sports
titles.)
General Instrument, however, was excited about the possiblity of Mattel
producing a video game system based on their chips, and helped make design
changes which would allow a way for programmers to define new graphics for
each new game.
The original General Instruments off-the-shelf design included the 2K
system ROM that would contain the operating system for the unit. A
change, proposed by either APh or Mattel, was to include an additional
ROM, with a 2K library of common subroutines the programmers could
utilize. These subroutines included such things as a random number generator,
scoring routines and frequently used sound effects. Together, this 4k of
code was to be known as the Executive.
Ultimately, the Executive program was slightly larger than 4K and had to
overflow partially into the Graphic ROM, which contains the library of
commonly used graphics from which every game can draw from. These changes
resulted in a very sloppy, but functionally superior design.
Despite the changes being made to the Ginini 6900 design, Mattel executives
were still reluctant to compete with Atari in the video game business. They
put the video game project on hold, and instead began to move into hand
held electronic games. Many of these hand held games, marketed under the
name "Mattel Electronics", were programmed by APh.
By 1978, these games had become very successful and once again the idea of
marketing a video game system was being pushed. Upper Management of Mattel
was finally sold on the idea by executive Jeff Rochliss, and the Intellivision
project began to move forward once again.
The physical design of the Intellivision hardware including the infamous
hand controllers was done at Mattel by a team headed by Dave Chandler.
This work earned him the nickname "Papa Intellivision". As mentioned
previously, APh programmed the internal software dubbed the "Executive".
The original Intellivision was a stylish molded brown plastic, with a woodgrain
trim. The hand controllers stored on both ends and the top sported a gold
trim with a Painted Intellivision logo on it. A very attractive unit,
and very high tech looking for the time. The final Intellivision product
had a very high quality feel to it. The unit felt substantial in your hands
and appeared to be well built. Even the game boxes opened like a book.
The game program manuals were full colour, and each game included colourful
overlays. (Ed. I even vaguely recall getting a felt tipped pen included to
fill out the registration card)
While this work was going on, Texas Instruments contacted Mattel and
pushed hard to get them to use TI chips in the Intellivision. Despite
being offered an excellent price, Mattel stuck with GI chips as it would
have caused a six to nine month delay in the development. APh's president
Glenn Hightower fought against the TI chip set as he felt it was inferior
to the GI chip set.
The first Intellivison games were designed by Glenn Hightower, APh's
president, and programmed by graduates and students of nearby California
Institute of Technology. APh is in fact, an abreviation of Applied Physics
from CalTech's course catalogue.
One of the first programmable video game systems was the Odyssey, produced
by Magnavox. With the Odyssey they had in fact, patented the concept of
a programmable home video game system. When Atari released their Video
Computer System, they obtained a license from Magnavox for a very low
price. However, by the time the Intellivision was released, Atari was
hugely sucessful. Magnavox realizing their mistake, demanded a large sum
for each Master Component sold. Mattel lawyers refused to pay, believing
the patent would never stand up in court. Unfortunately for Mattel,
Magnavox sued and won, and Mattel ended up paying them a few million
dollars.
The Intellivision, along with Poker & Blackjack, Math Fun, Armor Battle
and Backgammon were successfuly test marketed in 1979 in Fresno, California
and went into wide release in 1980. An impressive computer keyboard add-on
was also promised for release in 1981. With APh producing all Intellivision's
programs, Mattel began to hire programmers. However, Mattel at that time,
did not even have the facilities to produce video games. The first Mattel
based Intellivision programmers had to commute to APh in Pasadena. The first
Non-APh release was Bowling, adding to the Intellivision's already
impressive Sports Network.
The Intellivision was immediately successful. In 1980, the production run
of 175,000 Master Components completely sold out. Many people preferred
the superior graphics of the Intellivision, but disliked the hand
controllers. The Intellivision was also more expensive than its main
competitor, the Atari Video Computer System. Despite many people wishing
the Intellivision had a joystick controller instead of a disc, the
Intellivision controllers actually lent themselves well to sports games.
Intellivision had a means to input complex plays, and control individual
game components. Two of the most popular sports titles, Baseball and
Football used the keypads exstensively. Baseball for the Intellivision
is still remembered well to this day, by millions of fans.
George Plimpton, a famous sports personality was hired to advertise
Intellivision on television. Side by side comparisons of Atari sports
games were made. Atari versus Mattel became just as common as Coke
versus Pepsi. Mattel became famous for their Sports conversions.
By 1982, George Plimpton was featuring Space games in his commercials.
No doubt these commercials ate into profits quite substantially. However,
on a positive note, Intellivision became a household word in the early 1980's.
As this advertizing war raged, the Intellivision seemed to lose the emphasis
on "Intelligent Television". The Keyboard component was continually delayed.
The problem? The Keyboard Component was supposed to be an "inexpensive" add
on to the Intellivision system. Unfortunately, the Keyboard component was
hoplessly expensive. The Keyboard was only sold in test markets but never
made it into wide release.
A voice add-on module called the Intellivoice was introduced late in 1981.
Ultimately, five voice compatible cartridges were released. The Intellivoice
was not very successful because consumers liked the idea of voice games, but
not the fact that one had to purchase an expensive add-on.
Also, 1981 saw a joint venture with General Instruments and Mattel produce
a device known as "Play Cable". This Intellivision add on, styled on the
original Master Component, allowed Intellivision games to be broadcast
by cable companies, providing users with new games on a rotating basis.
Mattel began to concentrate less on educational programs such as those in the
"Childrens Network" and more on video games. In fact, with this new marketing
thrust, the Network concept for cartidges was discontinued after 1982.
During 1982, the Intellivision was redesigned and the original Master Component
was fazed out of production with the introduction of the Intellivision II.
The Intellivision II did not have as high production quality as the original
Master Component. This was the beginning of the decline of the high quality
standards which were seen in the original Master Component and other
Intellivision products. Declines in workmanship included omitting the
sheilding built into every cartridge, making the Intellivison "book" boxes
into normal boxes, getting rid of the plastic cartridge tray and not
printing the instruction booklets in colour.
By 1983, the industry began to have serious problems. Known to video game
fans as the "Great Video Game Crash", 1983 saw Mattel, Atari and Coleco
all decimated with huge loses. The problem was simply more supply than demand.
The Entertainment Computer System, a Keyboard Component replacement, was
quietly released in 1983 with little or no marketing push. The ECS was only
released in response to U.S. Federal Trade Comission complaints about the
original, never released Keyboard Component.
By summer 1983, Mattel had laid off all employees involved in hardware
development. In the fall, another round of layoffs affected programmers.
Unfortunately, by January 1984, it was all over. Mattel Electronics went
belly up, and so it seemed, took the entire Intellivision product line
with it.
Terry Valeski, however, had different ideas. Valeski and a group of investors
bought all the remaining stock and the rights to all the Intellivision
product line. Known as Intellivision Incorporated, they began to sell off
the remaining stock of Intellivision games, and to sell games which had been
ready for release right before Mattel Electronics demise.
By the end of November 1984, Valeski bought out the other investors and
changed the name of the Corporation to INTV Corporation. Thus began a
new chapter in the life of the original Master Component. INTV re-released
the original Master Component with some minor cosmetic changes. Dubbed the
Intellivision System III, and later INTV Super Pro System, the Intellivision
continued to be manufactured and sold through mail order, and stores such
as Toys R Us. Despite having a different model number, the "Super Pro System"
from INTV returned the Intellivision product line to its roots, selling a
black and silver, original style Master Component.
INTV continued to sell Master Components and cartridges, as well as to hire
former Mattel Electronics empolyees to continue developing games. Surprisingly,
INTV Corporation kept the Intellivision name alive until 1990. Having run out
of money, INTV Corporation failed to sucessfully make the jump from
exclusively supporting the Intellivision, to developing for the incredibly
successful Nintendo Entertainment System, and went bankrupt some time in 1991.
"Intelligent Television" however, had almost killed Mattel. In the aftermath
of the demise of Mattel Electronics, Mattel began to rebuild its company.
After finding new investors, and divesting themselves of all but their
core toy business, they relocated from their long-time headquarters in
Hawthorne to El Segundo, California. Today, they are once again, one of
the strongest companies in the toy industry, with $3 billion in annual
sales. Despite the video game industry staging a comeback, Mattel is
reluctant to enter this volitile market. Mattel President Jill Barad
recently told Forbes magazine with regards to the video game market:
"I'm watching it, and I want to be there. But I want to be there
appropriately and correctly."
APh Technology Consultants, having many non-video game contracts,
sucessfully survived the "Great Video Game Crash" of 1983. Today, they
are still at their same location, programming processors in everything
from spacecraft to consumer electronics.
The Mattel Electronics Intellivision today is still remembered fondly by
many people. The original Master Component, along with the Intellivision II,
Sears, Radio Shack, Sylvania and INTV clones ultimately sold about three
million units. With the possible release of new games very soon, perhaps
the story of the Mattel Electronics Intellivision is not quite over!
Intellivision II Master Component #5872 Development History �
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The Intellivision Master Component got a make over in 1982.
The Intellivision II was smaller and lighter than the original
Master Componenet. It was a light grey accented with a black and
silver face plate. Earlier models of the Intellivision II sported
a red strip around the base of the unit. The new Master Component
was developed under the code name "Big Mac", and its design achieved
three main goals.
The first goal was to reduce cost. This goal was realized by redesigning
the circuitry which lowered the number of components in each Master
Component. The Intellivision II also omitted the metal sheilding which
was soldered over the motherboard of the original model.
The second goal was to allow the parts most prone to failure, the power
supply and the hand controllers to plug in.
The final goal of the Intellivision redesign was to add an external video
input. This input allowed the System Changer to be sold as an add on to
the Intellivision. The System Changer was a device which allowed Atari
2600 Video Computer System games to be used with the Intellivision. The
System Changer was in fact, an actual Atari 2600 clone without its own
power supply and video output. The Intellivision System Changer did not
"emulate" an Atari, but actually WAS an Atari.
The reason behind the System Changer was purely marketing. Mattel wanted
to claim that the Intellivision system had the most games available.
Allowing access to the Video Computer System library made this claim
possible. The original Master Component, which lacked an external video
output, could only utilize the System Changer with an internal factory
modification.
When the Intellivision II hit the market, it was soon discovered that the
three Coleco Intellivision games on the market did not work with the new
unit. Mattel claimed it was not sure why this was, suggesting that perhaps
software changes needed for the System Changer were responsible.
However, the truth was that Mattel KNEW why the Coleco games did not
work with the Intellivision II. The Intellivision II was designed NOT
to work with these games!
How this was done was by modifying the internal software in each
Intellivision. This software, known as the EXEC, contains a subroutine
which displays the Mattel Copyright notice. This routine has a memory
location for the copyright year. In the Intellivision II, the EXEC
program was modifyed to halt if this location did not have a valid date!
This tactic effectively rendered the then current Coleco games useless!
In addition, a Mattel game which bypassed this routine, "Word Fun" was
also rendered inoperative on the new Intellivision. Obviously it was
more important to the Mattel executives to hurt the Coleco sales
than to have the Intellivision II work with all of Mattel's own games!
As games at Mattel went from the original 4k size to 8k and larger, many
programmers began to bypass the Executive Copyright Routine replacing it
with their own custom screens. This situation led them to be informed
about the requirement to set the copyright bit in order for their games
to work on an Intellivision II. This was done on a "one to one" "need
to know" basis. The reason for this secrecy was that Mattel made a
deliberite attempt to render the competitions software useless, and may
have been illegal! However, shortly after the Intellivision II was
released, third party developers were able to discover how to make their
cartridges work on it.
Unfortunately for Intellivision II owners, this change in the Executive
program introduced a slight timing difference with the original Master
Component. Minor sound effect troubles began showing up. Two already
released games, Shark! Shark! and Space Spartans were affected by these
changes to the Executive. The later release of Super Pro Football by
INTV Corporation had the biggest error related to the new Exec. The
Quarterback does not appear on the screen until AFTER the ball was
hiked. An errata had to be placed in each Super Pro Football sold.
Obviously many programmers ignored these subtle changes to the EXEC!
Intellivision III Master Component [UNRELEASED] Development History����������
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When Intellivision was introduced, Mattel's marketing positioned it
as the cornerstone of a home computer system, implying that while the
Atari VCS (2600) was a toy, the Intellivision -- Intelligent
Television -- was an educational tool. After its release though,
Marketing discovered that most people who chose Intellivision over
Atari did so because of better graphics. Educational games and the
Keyboard Component were dropped in priority and the focus shifted
to exploiting the graphics with a series of commercials showing
side-by-side comparisons of Intellivision and Atari games.
This backfired when Colecovision was introduced in early 1982.
Suddenly, Intellivision was no longer the superior graphics system.
Atari tried to compete with the introduction of the Atari 5200, but
consumers were disappointed it couldn't play Atari 2600 cartridges.
Marketing decided that the only way for Mattel to respond was to
introduce a new game machine -- Intellivision III -- that had graphics
as good or better than Colecovision and could still play all the
original Intellivision cartridges.
The solution to this was actually fairly simple since the
Intellivision contains a separate video processor, the STIC chip.
Mattel commissioned General Instruments to build an improved STIC for
the Intellivision III. This new Super-STIC (STIC 1B) would have a
double-resolution background mode and allow for more moving objects
(sprites) and colors, but otherwise would be compatible with the
original STIC. By having the Intellivision III based on the same
CP1610 processor as in the original Intellivision, the old games
would still run, and new games could take advantage of the improved
graphics features.
General Instruments prototyped the Super-STIC, Design & Development
modified an Intellivision to use it, and APh Technology
Consultants began writing the expanded EXEC program to control it.
The project was code named Coffee.
Had that been the extent of it--an Intellivision with a new STIC chip,
expanded EXEC ROM and some extra RAM (to keep track of all those
moving objects) -- the product probably could have hit the market
fairly fast. Unfortunately, Intellivision III fell victim to Kitchen
Sink Syndrome, as in Everything-But-The.
While Intellivision III was in development, Intellivoice hit the
market. Consumers liked the concept of talking games, but they didn't
like that they had to buy an add-on module. Sales were sluggish. To
save the voice program (which represented quite an investment), it was
decided to incorporate Intellivoice into the Intellivision III.
Now, the Intellivoice contains a buffer chip to interface the
speech processor with the Intellivision CP1610; it was
designed so that other peripherals could also interface with the
CP1610 through this buffer chip. On the drawing board at the time:
wireless hand controllers. Since the buffer chip would have to be
built into the Intellivision III, it was decided to add the (as yet
undeveloped) wireless hand controllers, too.
Of course, if you're going to double the graphic resolution, you
really should double the audio quality, so an extra sound chip was
added to the design. And, since the input ports of the Intellivision
sound chip are used for the hand controller inputs, that meant you
could add two more hand controllers to the Intellivision III and
design 4-player games.
All of these extra features meant the new EXEC had to be even more
complex to control everything. Not only that, but the Intellivision
programmers wanted to see frequently-used subroutines, such as screen
scrolling, added to the EXEC instead of having them use up precious
game cartridge space. Ray Kaestner (Burgertime) was sent to APh to
represent the Mattel Electronics programmers during the development of
the new EXEC.
These expanded design features were grafted on one at a time over
several months, causing a lot of rework and frustration and delays.
In private rooms in the Mattel Electronics booth at the June 1982
Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago, major toy buyers were told
of the upcoming improved Intellivision to bolster their faith in the
product line. At the January CES in Las Vegas, they were told, they
would see the working system. But by January 1983, Intellivision III
still hadn't progressed beyond the preliminary breadboard stage in the
Design & Development lab.
So if it never left the lab, what were the toy buyers looking at in
the private rooms of Mattel's booth at the January CES? Not a
prototype Intellivision III as they thought. They were looking at a
plain old Intellivision displaying some really good graphics.
Six cartridges were shown; two were supposedly games in progress, the
other four demonstrated enhanced features of Intellivision III. The
nearest thing to a real technical advancement in these cartridges was
that they contained up to 16K of memory. Since they were all graphics,
special effects and music (by Bill Goodrich) and no game play, they
could be a lot flashier than the then common 4K real game cartridges.
The two "games in progress," shown with printed packaging,
were Treasure of the Yucatan and Grid Shock. The first was a static
picture of a stone idol overgrown with jungle vines. An impressive,
complex screen, it had been done a year earlier by Eric Wels (Mr.
Color) when he was first hired, simply to learn how Intellivision
graphics worked. The screen eventually found it way into Bill
Goodrich's D&D voice game, Quest.
Grid Shock was the beginnings of an actual game by Andy Sells. A wall
that swept back and forth across the playing field, changing
perspective as it moved, gave the screen a strong 3-D feel. Grid Shock
had been abandoned by Andy since he was spending so much time doing
sound effects and music for other games (e.g. Shark! Shark! and
TRON Solar Sailer), but what was complete was visually interesting
enough to pass as Intellivision III.
The other cartridges, written by Ray Kaestner and programmers at APh,
used sleight-of-hand to demonstrate Intellivision III features --
multiplexing moving objects put more than the normal limit of
eight on screen at one time (albeit flickering); updating moving
object positions every 1/60 of a second instead of the EXEC's
normal 1/20 gave the illusion of smoother, faster motion.
So what games were really in development for the Intellivision III?
Well, none. Since both systems were CP1610-based, it was decided to
just keep writing for the Intellivision. Then, when (and if) the
features and release date of Intellivision III were finalized, any
Intellivision games nearing completion would be quickly upgraded for
the new system by tossing in fancy graphics and sounds. In October
1982 for a meeting with Marketing and distributors, Gabriel Baum, VP
of Application Software, listed the likely candidates to be released
as Intellivision III games: the then-in-development Basketball II,
Mission X, Thin Ice, Air Battle and Mystic Castle; proposed Winter
Olympics and Dungeons & Dragons cartridges; and a to-be-determined
children's title using one of the newly acquired licensed characters.
But no upgrading was ever needed, because in mid-1983 Intellivision
III was killed, done in by the delays. Retailers saw it as too little,
too late to compete with the then year-old Colecovision. And with the
Aquarius Home Computer System and the Intellivision
Entertainment Computer System (ECS), there was already a glut of
hardware in the 1983 pipeline. With Mattel Electronics starting to
pile up hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, it was announced
that Intellivision III was being canceled, officially because most of
its features had been incorporated into the ECS. (A bogus claim; the
extra sound chip and hand-controller ports are the only features they
share.) The last hope for the future of Intellivision now rested with
the top-secret project code-named Decade: Intellivision IV.
NOTE: The Intellivision III should not be confused with the INTV
System III, which was simply INTV Corporation's re-release of the
original Intellivision Master Component with minor cosmetic
differences. To make it worse: at the January 1987 CES, INTV Corp.
announced the INTV System IV, which shouldn't be confused with the
Intellivision IV. The INTV System IV was really the Intellivision III;
Glenn Hightower of APh had convinced INTV's Terry Valeski that the
system was still viable. INTV Corporation, however, was not; despite
making the announcement, they didn't have the financial resources
needed to actually resume the development that had stopped
three-and-a-half years earlier.
Intellivision IV Master Component [UNRELEASED] Development History ����������
��������������������������������������������������������������������
After the Intellivision Keyboard Component was canceled, Dave
Chandler and his design group were able to devote full time to their
biggest project: Intellivision IV. Intellivision III had been
rushed into development simply as a stop-gap product to compete
short-term with Colecovision. Intellivision IV, on the other hand, was
to introduce the next generation of video game systems.
Code named Decade, since it was to be the cornerstone product of
Mattel Electronics for the rest of the eighties, Intellivision IV was
developed from mid-1982 to mid-1983 secretly in an unmarked building a
mile away from Mattel headquarters. Being away from the daily whims
and pressures of marketing and administration, Chandler's group was
able to create freely.
The system they created was based on the MC68000 processor, the CPU
later used in the first Macintoshes and the Amiga. Video was handled
by a custom chip named Magic. Screen resolution was 240 by 192 pixels
(40 by 24 4-color 6x8 cards) with a programmable 16-color palette,
16x16 4-color sprites and hardware scrolling. On-board software
supported 3-D graphics along with music and speech synthesis. The
Combo chip coordinated peripheral devices, including a built-in modem:
a point-of-view two-person tank battle played over phone lines was
talked about as a typical Intellivision IV application.
Unlike the other hardware in development in 1983, the Intellivision IV
had the potential of being a significant step forward; after
Intellivision III was canceled, many people saw Intellivision IV as
the last hope for the company. The hope didn't last long. Losses kept
mounting and on July 12, 1983 the president of Mattel Electronics,
Josh Denham, was replaced with Mack Morris. Morris set about shifting
the company from hardware to software; on August 4 most of the
hardware people were laid off, including those working on
Intellivision IV. The shift didn't help; January 20, 1984, Mattel
Electronics was shut down.
Would Chandler's group have succeeded in creating a super game machine
at an affordable price, or would it have been another Keyboard
Component? With all the secrecy surrounding the project, it's not
known how far along the system really was. We do know it never reached
the stage of actual game development; about the only involvement the
Blue Sky Rangers had with Intellivision IV was when Dave Chandler
borrowed a couple of graphic artists to create some demo screens. A
screen shot of Castle Grayskull from Masters of the Universe, rendered
by Joe Ferreira, is about all that remains of the game machine that was
going to save Mattel Electronics.
Keyboard Component #1149 Development History �
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When the Intellivision was first introduced, it was intended to be more
than a mere Video Game system. The Intellivision Master Component was to
be the foundation of a home computer system. By adding the Keyboard
Component, the Intellivision was meant to assist and educate its owners,
hence the moniker "Intelligent Intellivision".
The Keyboard Component was developed by Dave Chandler's engineering group.
This group was also responsible for giving the Intellivision its initial
look. The Keyboard Component, code named "The Blue Whale" and sometimes
referred to as the "Intelliputer", matched the Master Compnents chocolate
brown and gold plate design.
The Keyboard Component was an impressive piece of engineering. The
Intellivision Master Component was meant to drop in to the Keyboard
Component, to complete the system. Program cartridges would then plug
into the Keyboard Component cartridge slot. It sported a 60 key typewriter
style keyboard, a built in tape deck for storing data and programs. A
Microphone was also included. A separate 40 column thermal printer was
also developed for the system, and sold separately via mail order.
Internally, the Keyboard Component had its own 6502 Microprocessor,
which handled input and output. The Keyboard came equiped with 64K
of dual port Random Access Memory. The tape deck could synchronize audio
with programs and graphics, and contained a sophisticated block addressable
interface! The supplied microphone could be used to record audio which
could be played back under program control. The Keyboard Component program
cassette "Conversational French" used this feature. Other programs on
cassette included Jack La Lanne's Physical Conditioning, Spelling Challenge,
and Jeane Dixon Astrology. These programs were all coded in CP1610
assembly language, and they took full advantage of the system's sound
and graphic capabilities. There was also a BASIC programming language
cartridge which could be plugged into the cart port which allowed the
use of simpler BASIC programs. These included Geography Challenge, Family
Budgeting, and Crosswords I, II, and III. Of course, the user could write
programs using the BASIC cartridge.
Unfortunately for Intellivision owners, all of these impressive features,
such as 64K Random Access Memory drove the final cost of the Keyboard
Component too high. The Keyboard Component was supposed to be an
inexpensive add on. Only Dave Chandler's reputation saved the Keyboard
Component from being killed off early in the Intellivision's life.
Chandler's group was allowed to continue working on it, trying to bring
the cost down. This effort was largely unsuccessful, and the Keyboard's
release date was delayed repeatedly.
The Keyboard was supposed to be available in 1981. Early Intellivision
game packaging stated; "For use with Intellivision Master Component
(Avalable now), or with Master Component and Keyboard Component (Coming
soon) in combination". The mention of the Keyboard Component was soon
dropped, as it became clear no Keyboard Component was coming.
Jay Leno got a huge laugh when entertaining at the Mattel Electronics
1981 Christmass Party with the line; "You know what the three big lies
are, don't you? 'The cheque is in the mail', 'I'll still respect you
in the moring', and 'The Keyboard will be out in the spring!'"
Unfortunately for Mattel, consumer complaints from people who bought
the Intellivision with the intention of upgrading it to a computer,
caused the U.S. Federal Trade Commision to investigate them for possible
fraud. Mattel Electronics claimed the Keyboard Component was a real
product, which was still being test marketed. A few select stores
received Keyboard Components, and they were made available to customers
who complained (at a loss to Mattel) via mail order. The add on thermal
printer however, was only made available through mail order. The same
printer design was later recycled for use with the Aquarius computer
system, which had a somewhat wider release.
Ultimately, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission reportedly fined
Mattel Electronics $10,000 per month, until the Keyboard Component
was in wide release. This situation forced Mattel Electronics to
release the Entertainment Computer System, or ECS. Code named "LUCKI"
for "low user cost keyboard interface" it had been quietly developed
by Design and development as a possible alternative to the Keyboard
Component.
The Keyboard Component has now become the "Holy Grail" for those
attempting to put together a complete Intellivision collection. They
are very rare, and highly sought after. The following is a message from
a former Keyboard Component user which was posted on UseNet.
�������������������
Re: Intellivision Keyboard Component
From: Ronald E Engel rengel@jis.net
Since I've never seen any posts from anyone that owned one of the original
Intellivision computers, I thought I would take the opportunity to try and
do it some justice.
My family was one of the few that purchased the unit and I had it as a kid.
IT WAS TERRIFIC. It was IMHO way ahead of its time in terms of its
programmability, graphics, user-friendliness, etc. I later had an Atari
400, 800 and then an Apple II and it was, in many ways, superior to them all.
There were only a few software titles available at the time and the only
ones I had were utilities/educational (Conversational French, Personal
Finance, BASIC programming, etc.), so I couldn't vouch for its game play,
but the applications I had were terrific.
The Conversational French featured a female lead character, Mimi, who
led you around France...for the learning part, it showed a close up of her
face and she spoke in French and then you repeated her words into a
microphone and the cassette replayed your voice! She would then respond
with words of encouragement, etc. I was quite a computer junkie at the
time, despite my age, and I had never seen anything like it.
The BASIC programming was equally good. I remember programming on the
later computers and being frustrated in their limitations compared to the
Intellivision computer that I had learned BASIC on.
I also had a small thermal printer from Mattel Electronics. The only
application that I had with any printing functions was BASIC, however.
After eagerly awaiting the other software titles (especially the enhanced
Intellivision sports games that were advertised) and the other accesories,
my family received a rebate offer from Mattel with a letter stating that
the system would no longer be supported. And even though we enjoyed the
system as much as we did, we reluctatly returned it for approximately
$700, which was just slightly less than the original purchase price if I
remember correctly.
Because of my fond memories of the unit and its incredible rarity, I think
of it as the crown jewel of classic video game collecting (once again
IMHO).
I only know of one still in existence. Are there any others?
Entertainment Computer System Development History ���������������������
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COMPUTER ADAPTOR & KEYBOARD #4187 MUSIC SYNTHESIZER #4188 �
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Midway through 1981, Richard Chang's Design & Development
group began work on the Basic Discovery System (BDS). This was
announced within the company as a plug-in module for the Intellivision
that would introduce kids to computer programming through an
inexpensive keyboard and a simplified, color-coded version of BASIC.
Only a few people knew the real purpose behind the BDS. The Federal
Trade Commission was starting to look into fraud charges against
Mattel for not releasing the Intellivision Keyboard Component. Key
people at the top of Mattel Electronics, concerned that Dave "Papa
Intellivsion" Chandler's engineering group would never make the
Keyboard Component cost-effective, started looking for something they
could release in its place. Afraid Chandler had the political clout
within Mattel, Inc. (the parent company), to kill any effort to
develop an alternative to the Keyboard, they had to keep their
intentions secret.
The Design & Development group was challenged to build a module for
the Intellivision that would be inexpensive (under $150 retail) but
would fulfill the basic original promises of the Keyboard Component:
turn the Intellivision into a computer, make it possible to write
programs and store them to tape, and interface with a printer.
The design for the module was worked out by Jan Chodak and principally
implemented by Greg Goodknight. The simplified BASIC interpreter was
mainly programmed Jay Hastroudian. As work on the module progressed,
it was officially listed and discussed in memos as an additional
product for the Intellivision line, never as a replacement for the
Keyboard Component.
But the issue was forced when the FTC started fining Mattel monthly
until the Keyboard Component was released. Finally, the Basic
Discovery System was openly advanced as a possible alternative to the
Keyboard. Renamed Lucky (from LUCKI: Low User-Cost Keyboard
Interface), it was presented to the programmers to start developing
games.
(The idea of a music keyboard add-on came from within Design &
Development. Musical instruments were pet projects of the group. They
had already produced Synsonics Drums, and electronic guitars, basses,
and brass/woodwinds were in the works. Other ECS add-ons briefly
worked on in D&D: a Biofeedback Module and a Camera Module.)
In fall of 1982, at the annual meeting of Mattel's marketing people,
sales staff and distributors, Lucky -- the Computer Module, the
Computer Keyboard, and the Music Synthesizer -- was presented under
its final name: the Entertainment Computer System (ECS). Everyone at
the meeting was delighted (mainly by the low retail price) and the
obvious became official: the Intellivision Keyboard Component was
dead.
A pre-Christmas commercial was rushed onto the air with Mattel
Electronics spokesman George Plimpton teasing the introduction of the
ECS (using the inside joke "[Intellivision owners] won't believe their
luck!"). Although the ECS wasn't available for Christmas 1982, the aim
of the commercial was to get people to buy Intellivisions instead of
Ataris or Colecovisions with the promise (once again) that a computer
add-on was just around the corner.
Officially introduced to the public at the January 1983 Consumer
Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, ECS hit the market later that year
with a handful of games. Satisfied, the FTC dropped the monthly fine.
Note: The ECS styling is similar to the Intellivision II. In Europe,
the ECS was released with BROWN plastic to match the original Master
Component.
By the time ECS was released, however, the focus at Mattel Electronics
had shifted. After the June 1983 CES in Chicago, Josh Denham and Stav
Prodomou, Mattel Electronics' President and Senior Operations VP,
resigned. Josh and Stav had been blamed for pushing the company too
far into hardware production; hundreds of millions of dollars had been
tied up in the development, beyond the original Intellivision, of the
Keyboard Component, Intellivoice, Intellivision II, the System
Changer, ECS, Aquarius (and peripherals), Intellivision III and the
top-secret Intellivision IV. On July 12, 1983, Josh was replaced by
Mack Morris, a marketing man famous for putting the blue dot on Breath
Savers mints. (The gimmick or hook that set a game apart quickly
became known as its "blue dot" around Mattel.) Under Mack Morris, the
emphasis was put almost entirely on software (nearly everyone related
to hardware development was laid off on August 4, 1983). The ECS
received very little marketing push and further game development for
it dropped to almost nothing.
PlayCable Intellivision/Cable TV Adapter (Model PCR) Development History �
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Playcable Box
Introduced in 1981, PlayCable: The All Game Channel enabled
local cable operators to send Intellivision games over the wire with
the TV signal. Subscribers used a special converter -- the PlayCable
Adapter -- to download the games to play on their Intellivision Master
Components. While reportedly popular in the areas in which it was
available, PlayCable was discontinued in 1983.
The PlayCable Company was a joint venture of Mattel and General
Instrument, the company that designed the Intellivision chip set.
The units themselves were manufactured by General Instrument's Jerrold
Division, which supplies cable TV converter boxes.
The PlayCable matched the original Intellivision Master Component
in design. It plugged into the Master Component's cartridge slot and
hooked up to the TV cable. Switching on the Intellivision brought up
several pages of on-screen menus, displaying the available games.
Twenty titles were available at a time, rotated monthly. The object
code for these games was being continuously broadcast over the cable;
when one was chosen, its code would be "tuned in" and fed into the
PlayCable's memory (taking about 10 seconds). The Intellivision would
then read the PlayCable's memory as if it were a game cartridge.
Several factors contributed to the systems demise:
* The PlayCable Adapter contained insufficient memory to download
the larger (8K and above) games introduced in 1983. The converter
boxes would either have to be upgraded or the system limited to
older games.
* With the growing number of channels that subscribers were
demanding ("I want my MTV!"), most cable operators felt reserving
bandwidth for PlayCable wasn't worth it (especially considering
the hardware investment needed to provide the service).
* At least two people figured out that a PlayCable could make a
dandy Intellivision development system. By hooking up a personal
computer to a PlayCable and poking around by trial and error, they
quickly decoded the EXEC software and started writing their own
games. While these two were kept from competing with Mattel by
hiring them to program the Intellivision Bump 'N' Jump arcade
conversion, management was afraid PlayCable would make it too easy
for small companies to get into the Intellivision-compatible
business.
Subscribers rented the PlayCable Adapters from the cable companies.
When the system was discontinued in 1983, the adapters had to be
returned.
System Changer ATARI 2600 ADAPTOR #4610 Development History �
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Legend:
1 - Game Select
2 - Left Difficulty
3 - Color / BW Switch
4 - Right Difficulty
5 - Game Reset
The System Changer, developed under the code name Portofino
(after the Redondo Beach hotel where the first design meeting was
held), was introduced in 1983 just so Intellivision could be
advertised as the system that played the most games.
Many people expressed amazement that the Intellivision's processor
could emulate an Atari 2600. Well, it can't. The System Changer is
itself simply an Atari 2600 clone -- essentially a 6507 processor, a
TIA (Television Interface Adaptor) video/sound chip, and a 6532 RIOT
chip (128 bytes RAM, I/O ports, and a general purpose timer). The
System Changer only uses the Intellivision for its power supply and RF
modulator.
(The Intellivision reads the System Changer as a game cartridge called
M Network and actually draws an M Network title screen. With no
cartridge in the System Changer -- hence no external video signal --
this title screen is displayed on the television. When a cartridge is
plugged in, the external video signal takes over the RF modulator,
displaying the output of the System Changer, instead.)
Although Atari threatened to sue, Mattel's lawyers concluded that it
would be legal to clone 2600s since they contained all off-the-shelf
hardware and no copyrightable software (as an Intellivision or
Colecovision does). No lawsuit appeared, and clones started appearing
from other companies.
Don't bother opening a System Changer to read what the chips are.
Instead of being housed in the familiar DIP (multi-pin) packages, the
integrated circuits are soldered directly to the printed circuit board
using microscopic wires, then protected with a blob of epoxy. This
cost saving technique was also used in most of the later game
cartridges.
The only problem was that the Intellivision doesn't have an
external video input. The Intellivision II was designed with the
System Changer in mind -- it can accept an external video signal on
pin 2 of the cartridge port and pass it to the RF modulator.
But the Intellivision (and its clones -- the Tandyvision One, Sears
Super Video Arcade, any of the INTV Master Components) requires a
circuit-board modification. Mattel used to perform this modification
for people who brought their units to a service center.
The "Blue Sky Rangers" ��������������������������������������������������
�������������������������
When Mattel Electronics launched the Intellivision, all the original
games were programmed by APh Technology Consultants. To develop games
"In house" a large amount of talented programmers were hired. Mattel was
afraid these programmers would be lured away by arch rival Atari, or by
other start up companies such as Imagic and Activision. In order to
protect themselves from corporate head hunters, Mattel attempted to
hide the identity of their programmers. In a 1982 TV Guide interview, the
real names of the programmers were changed. The programmers in this article
were refered to as the "Blue Sky Rangers". The moniker stuck, and from that
time onward, the programmers adopted this new name. They even produced a
T-shirt. Now, many years later, the Rangers have their own World
Wide Web site, and sell copies of their "BSR" T-shirt to the public.
On this web site, a great portion of information for De Re Intellivision
was obtained. The site is maintained by Keith Robinson who wrote Tron
Solar Sailer and is located as of Winter 1997/1998 at;
www.makingit.com/makingit/bluesky/
The Blue Sky Rangers continue to meet periodically for reunions. Despite the
untimely demise of their jobs at Mattel Electronics, many have gone on to
successful enterprises in the video game industry. In fact, many Blue Sky
Rangers are responsible for the later releases of games by INTV Corporation.
The following text is a transcript of the TV Guide article first presented
on June 19, 1982.
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� Behind the scenes with the Blue Sky Rangers who dream up Mattel's �
� video games �
����������������������������������������������������������������������
By Howard Polskin
I'm surrounded by the Blue Sky Rangers, nine guys who talk as though
they could do their math homework without hand-held calculators.
We're sitting in a windowless conference room at Mattel's corporate
offices just south of Los Angeles airport. The giant toy company's
electronic games division is holding a formal brainstorming session to
dream up new programs for the voracious video-game market. The process
is known as blue-skying. The programmers who probe the outer
boundaries of their imagination for ideas are the Blue Sky Rangers.
Blue-skying is the first and one of the most important steps in
video-game development, a process that takes as long as 20 months to
develop a $30 plastic cartridge that can be inserted into Mattel's
video game Intellivision, a sophisticated $250 piece of hardware that
connects to any color-TV set.
The nine programmers chosen for this meeting are part of a
specialized, 22 person (18 men, four women) team of video-game
programmers (whose ranks have since more than doubled). Because Mattel
fears that rival firms would lure their people away if their
identities were revealed, I've changed their names.
Except for Hal, the gentle 36-year-old group leader, they're mostly
under 30 and border on that fine line between eccentric and brilliant.
They're paid to think (between $20,000 and $40,000 a year) and it
reflects in their appearance. They're haphazardly dressed. For the
most part, their eyes seem sunken and hollow from countless hours
spent toiling indoors in front of computer terminals. They all work in
carpeted cubicles in a vast windowless room that seems designed to
turn their thoughts inward.
For all the Blue Sky Rangers, video-game programming is not an
occupation but a joyful passion. Many times during the work day,
programmers let out shrieks of delight as they engage in one of the
"routines" of the job: playing with the product. During coffee breaks,
programmers will sometimes drop what they are doing -- which is often
developing a new game -- only to play another game already created. At
the end of a hard day's work, it is not uncommon for programmers to
wind down by heading to a local arcade to play the more sophisticated
coin-operated games.
About 70 per cent of a programmer's time will be spent actually
sitting at a computer terminal, programming a game. The rest of the
time is occupied by thinking up and talking about new games.
The formal creative sessions are held in a variety of locations to
spark as much creativity as possible. One of Mattel's most productive
brainstorming meetings took place in a Los Angeles park on a beautiful
spring day in 1981.
About 10 programmers, led by Hal, drove to the park. They loosened up
their minds and bodies by tossing around a few Frisbees. At lunch they
nibbled on sandwiches provided by Mattel. Most of all, they talked
about new video games in the cool shade of a large gazebo in the
center of the park. Their only distraction was a park custodian who
was painting the gazebo. They joked all day that he was a spy from
Atari, a rival firm.
The programmers tried to conceive games that would use Mattel's newly
developed device called Intellivoice, which adds the realism of
human-sounding voices speaking to the player. All day they struggled
for inspiration. Then, toward dusk, the brilliant idea surfaced.
No one quite knows who suggested it, although four programmers got
credit for the idea, including Josh, a computer whiz from Princeton.
The game, eventually called B-17 Bomber, would simulate an Allied
aircraft flying over occupied Europe while avoiding flak and enemy
aircraft. Different crew members positioned off-screen talk to the
pilot via Intellivoice, advising him to take appropriate actions such
as "Drop bombs" or "Zoom to the left." The game seemed to have those
magical qualities that instantly identified it as a winner.
Soon after the meeting, Hal assigned Josh, one of his top programmers,
to develop the concept further. Josh recently completed programming
Astrosmash, one of Mattel's biggest-selling cartridges. Before joining
Mattel, Josh worked at the UCLA School of Medicine in bio-mathematical
cancer research. His senior thesis at Princeton was a statistical
linguistic analysis of the writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author
of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. In his spare time, he presides over
a society of Sherlock Holmes freaks in Santa Monica.
For the task of developing B-17 Bomber, Josh drove himself
relentlessly. Besides often working till midnight at the computer
terminal, he made several visits to the Air Museum outside Los
Angeles, where, after befriending the curator, he was allowed to crawl
through an old B-17 on exhibit. He learned how the aircraft operated,
where the gunners sat and how targets looked to them. Soon his small
office was cluttered with models of B-17s sitting next to his Sherlock
Holmes memorabilia.
After more than a year of development, many of Josh's fellow
programmers feel that it is one of the best home-video games ever
devised. Soon they'll know if the public feels the same way. Sometime
in late summer or early fall, B-17 Bomber will be made available to
the home video game market.
At the blue-sky meeting I'm attending, Josh is one of the most
talkative programmers, spewing out an assortment of off beat ideas and
jokes. The session begins informally with Hal inserting a new video
game cartridge, tentatively called ZZAP, into the master component.
Sometimes, a game that's well under development will be critiqued to
iron out weak spots. Hal pushes a button, and computer-generated
images of ships at sea chased by submarines appear on the screen.
"It doesn't have something," says Hal. "I can't figure it out."
"The motions of the subs are random," says Josh. "But I like it
because you get to hit a lot of things and they blow up. I mean, isn't
that the purpose of life?"
Everyone laughs.
Hal isn't convinced, though.
"Maybe we should make the graphics better and change the speed of the
torpedoes," he suggests.
Bob, at 23 the youngest member of the group and an avid reader of
Shakespeare and science fiction, says he doesn't like the game.
"OK," says Hal, "then let's think of other games."
That triggers a flood of ideas for the next hour. The game with ships
and submarines appears to be forgotten, although it is being
considered as a Mattel product. Hal keeps nodding wisely, never
putting down anyone, no matter how ludicrous the suggestions.
Finally, one idea hits. It is another air plane game and, like B-17
Bomber, it, too, will utilize Intellivoice. No one's sure what form
the game should take but everyone tends to agree that the plane should
be in some sort of trouble.
After 15 minutes' nonstop discussion, Hal seems to feel that the Blue
Sky Rangers, who are now clearly excited by this game, have talked
enough about it. Later he will review the notes of the meeting and
decide if the idea warrants further development.
"Ideas for other games," he now commands gently.
More comments flow from all corners of the room. The programmers talk
about games with sorcerers, games with comic book heroes and games
with weird monsters. The suggestions dwindle. The programmers seem
restless. Hal senses the change in mood and tells everyone that the
meeting will now be shifted to Barnabey's, a local hotel in Manhattan
Beach, down the road from Mattel.
It's 5 o'clock and they've been at it for more than two hours, but Hal
thinks he can milk some more ideas out of them. In his 18 months at
Mattel, he's accumulated more than 1000 video-game ideas, but feels he
can never have enough.
As we drive to Barnabey's, Hal explains to me that he ended the
meeting because his guys needed a break. The change of atmosphere
might spark their thinking. Also, he plans to pump some wine into them
to help loosen their thoughts.
At Barnabey's, Hal has rented a large private room, where dinner will
be served later in the evening. First, one of the programmers, Jason,
gathers everyone into the center of the room. He takes out a large bag
and scatters its contents on the floor. About 20 toys come tumbling
out, including a plastic rat, a flag gun, a spiked coin and fake mouse
ears.
"Pick up a toy and make a game that relates to it," says Jason. "After
dinner, we'll report back on what we came up with."
They all grab toys and huddle in groups of three. As they play with
the toys, befuddled waiters hover over them, pouring glasses of wine.
After 45 minutes, the programmers sit down to dinner in the suite.
They bring their toys to the table.
But as they eat and drink, the wine and toys fail to trigger any
brilliant plans for video games. They toss out concepts for games
about ethnic folklore, Greek mythology and even video Ouija boards.
The ideas and wine keep flowing. But either the ideas are
deteriorating or they are getting so strange that I can't follow them.
When one programmer starts elaborating on a game based on a Hawaiian
war chant, I know that the Blue Sky Rangers have soared out of orbit.
No one's mentioned holographic video games but I know if we stay here
another hour and drink more of this cheap California wine, someone
will suggest it and Hal will nod knowingly.
At 8:30, after more than five and a half hours of brainstorming, Hal
announces that he'd like to end the meeting. But some of the Blue Sky
Rangers don't want to quit. They're having too much fun. Their
circuits must be overloaded because even as they're getting into their
cars to drive away, they keep rambling on like defective computers,
spitting out meaningless data about their beloved video games. They're
so hopelessly addicted to their work that some, like Josh, will go
back to their offices and work till 2 A.M.
Hal's job in the next few days will be to examine the notes from the
meeting and select versions of the better ideas. If he likes what he
sees, he brings the game before a group of four to six Mattel
executives, who examine the concept from technical, marketing and
financial viewpoints. Ultimately, they will decide if it will become a
product. Most of the time, when Hal thinks that a game is worth
bringing before this committee, it stands an excellent chance of being
developed. Some times, as in the case of a sailboat game that one of
the programmers devised, they can't get a decent visualization and the
game is scrapped.
After a game is given the go-ahead, another two to five months are
spent programming the cartridge. At this stage, product engineering
and marketing groups are brought into the picture, and Hal's role
starts to fade. The businessmen get out their pencils and hammer out
production schedules, marketing plans and profit projections. Compared
to working with the programmers, it's bland, boring stuff. The Blue
Sky Rangers are special. They get paid to have fun. The more fun they
have, the better they create.
When Mattel wants to stroke them, it knows which buttons to push. For
instance, the night following the creative session at Barnabey's, the
company threw a party for the programmers (and the marketing people),
thanking them for all their hard work.
Mattel didn't rent a yacht or take them to a fancy disco. It went one
step further. The company created an event that is probably every Blue
Sky Ranger's definition of heaven.
The party was held in an empty Redondo Beach video game arcade, and
every game was free for the night.
�������������������������
The Blue Sky Rangers T-shirt is light blue, and features a portrait of
Gabriel Baum, the Vice President of Applications Software who was "Hal".
The motto "In Hal We Trust" was also placed around the caricature of "Hal".
The shirts are 100 % heavy cotton with the dark blue logo on the front.
Send a personal cheque or money order for $12 US funds plus $2 postage and
handling (customers outside the USA please add $1. California residents must
add 8.25 % sales tax.) to:
The Blue Sky Rangers
P.O. Box 10007-64
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
U.S.A.
To order by credit cart (Visa, Master Card or American Express) call
310-379-5337
������������������������������������Ŀ
� Blue Sky Rangers Questions/Answers �
�������������������������������������������Ŀ
� �
�By: Keith Robinson �
� The Blue Sky Rangers �
� www.makingit.com/makingit/bluesky/ �
� �
� Making It Productions �
� makingit@netcom.com �
� http://www.makingit.com/makingit/ �
� �
���������������������������������������������
The following questions and answers were constructed by various responses
from the "Blue Sky Rangers" to questions posed on the Internet UseNet
Newsgroup Rec.Video.Games.Classic.
Q. I recently came across a pile of Intellivision carts with white labels
only and was wondering if anybody out there knew the scoop on them.
Are they any rarer than the coloured versions? The manuals also are
in B&W only, not like the ones I already have.
A. Pretty cheesy, huh? I was in charge of printing those; Terry Valeski
contracted with me to provide all the packaging for the INTV Corporation
releases. He wanted costs as low as possible, so overlays were eliminated
where possible (Mattel's policy was that every game had to have overlays,
even if they weren't really needed, such as for Pinball; Valeski got rid
of them), manuals became black & white (folded, not stapled) and labels
were printed on whatever stock my printer had leftover and would give me a
price break on. That's why you'll find different size labels on different
copies of the same game.
Of course, INTV didn't invent this cost cutting. Mattel's Intellivision
packaging went downhill quickly, too. The original boxes opened like a
book and had a plastic tray the cartridge fit into. Manuals were all full
color. The plastic tray was the first thing to go, then the manuals
went to two-color, then the boxes simply became boxes (some games, like
BurgerTime, were released in both versions of the boxes).
At INTV, we printed the boxes on an even cheaper grade of cardboard, but
at least Valeski wanted them to be colorful. I designed most of them with
an art budget of about $800 per box. A painter named Steve Huston did the
Super Pro sports covers and I did most of the cartoony covers (Thin Ice,
Learning Fun I & II). Other artists and photographers did individual
titles. I had Joe Ferreira, who did the graphics for Hover Force, do the
artwork for the box. And if the cover art for Thunder Castle looks more
threatening than the cute graphics in the game, it's because that artwork
had been commissioned by Mattel for the Tower of Doom cartridge. Valeski
had it used for Thunder Castle since that game was already completed when
he bought the Intellivision rights; Tower of Doom was incomplete. He had
Tower of Doom finished later and I had to come up with new art for its
box.
(By the way, look for the number 47 on the INTV boxes; that number is how
Pomona College alumni sort of say "hello" to each other. Dave Warhol, the
Pomona alum who produced these games, asked me to slip a 47 into the art
whenever possible. Trivia: another Pomona Alum got onto the staff of Star
Trek, which is why the number 47 pops up in most episodes of Next Generation
and Voyager, and TWICE in the movie Generations.)
Sorry that I can't answer your real question though, namely which labels
are worth more. That's a question for the collectors. But remembering how
quickly some of this stuff was slapped together, it amuses me today to
hear people pondering their value.
Q. I have Intv corp Super Baseball, Football, Skiing, and Tennis, and
although all have white labels, the text is different (collecting 2x of
every Intv cart made so I have something to compare). What happened there?
A. Without seeing them, I would guess that you're comparing Intellivision Inc.
labels with INTV Corporation labels. Intellivision Inc. was the company
that took over the rights from Mattel; Terry Valeski was president, and
his investors were merchandise liquidators. During that period, they did
manufacture new copies of some of the popular games, but mostly they were
selling off the exsisting Mattel stock. Once the stock was pretty much
depleted, Terry bought the rights from his investors and changed the name
of the company to INTV. He commissioned new games and continued
manufacturing many of the old ones. I was brought in at that point to do the
packaging; while I got the original artwork for the boxes and instructions,
I simply did new typesetting for the labels. The Intellivision Inc. labels
usually have a copyright notice [ (c)I.I. 19XX U.S.A., where the year is
the year of the Mattel copyright]; the INTV labels don't.
OR...as I said in a previous post, the labels were printed on whatever
leftover stock my printer had and would give me a price break on. In some
cases, the labels were so much shorter than what we had used previously,
that I had to re-typeset some titles in a condensed font.
Q. Burgertime for the Colecovision, was made by Coleco, not Mattel
who did the other systems versions, right?
A. Actually, Mattel DID do it; it was programmed at our European office in
the south of France. It was nearly completed when Mattel Electronics was
shut down in the US (we showed it with the Mattel Electronics title screen
at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show), but by law Mattel had to
keep the French office open until they could find a buyer for it. So the
programmers were kept on payroll finishing BurgerTime and several other
games. Finally, Tim Scanlon, director of the office, found investors so
that the division could buy itself from Mattel and become independent.
Part of the deal was that they got the rights to the games they were
working on. Their new company Nice Dreams (they were located near Nice)
sold the Colecovision versions of BurgerTime and Illusions (an original
game) to Coleco, and their Intellivision versions of Championship Tennis
and World Cup Soccer (originally intended to be 4-player games for the
ECS) to INTV. Their Intellivision version of Illusions was never released.
We don't know what happened to Nice Dreams after those four games were
released; a check with the French Commerce office last year failed to
turn up a "Nice Dreams" still in business in France.
Q. Did the original Intellivision Keyboard Component use normal audio
casettes, or something special to the Intellivision?
A. With the Microsoft BASIC cartridge, users could write their own programs
and save them to tape on the built-in tape drive. Mattel sold special Data
Storage Cassettes, which were similar to normal audio cassettes except
they had no leader (same as some answering machines use).
Q. Roughly how many Keyboard Components were made available to the public,
and what did they retail for?
A. Just over 4,000 Keyboard Components were manufactured, but no one knows
how many actually wound up in the hands of consumers, or stayed there.
Mattel tried to buy back all the outstanding units to avoid lawsuits when
it was discontinued. If you had your receipt, you got a full refund on
your purchase price (reports on how much the price was vary from $600 to
$800). If you didn't have a receipt, you were given $550 for
the unit, $60 for the BASIC cartridge and $30 for each game cassette.
Some consumers insisted on keeping their Keyboard Component. They were
allowed to, plus they were given $1000 worth of other Mattel Electronics
products.
Either way, they had to sign a statement that read: "By accepting this
offer, I recognize that I am releasing Mattel Electronics from all
liability due to its decision to discontinue the keyboard component and
related products."
Some of the unsold and returned units were converted into Intellivision
development stations at Mattel Electronics in California and in France.
The rest were apparently dismantled and the processors and memory chips
recycled.
Q. When I turn Chip Shot Golf on, I get a quick flash of another title
screen that just says "Golf". Why this is?
A. The Intellivision EXEC has a default routine that draws a title screen.
The early Intellivision games all used this routine. Later Mattel games
and all of the INTV releases bypass this routine and draw custom title
screens. But, as you've noticed, timing glitches can cause a flash of the
default screen. Knowing this can happen, the programmer usually puts the
name of the game in the memory location where the default routine expects
to find it. Looks like the programmer, Steve Ettinger, got lazy and just
put the name "Golf" there, instead of the full name of the cartridge.
Q. While I was playing Chip Shot I found out that if you press the 0 key
while at the title screen a list of credits pops up. This isn't in the
documentation, is it common knowledge?
A. Several INTV releases will display the game's credits if you press 0 on
the title screen: Body Slam, Chip Shot, Super Pro Football, Hover Force,
Slam Dunk and Tower of Doom. Several others simply display the credits if
you leave the title screen up long enough: Diner, Monster Truck Rally,
Mountain Madness, Super Pro Decathlon and Slap Shot.
They didn't document the "press 0" trick, but they didn't want to make it
hard to find. What you *aren't* supposed to find is the Chip Shot
programmer's secret message to his family: press 23 (2 and 3 at the same
time) on the left hand controller and 26 on the right hand controller and
press reset.
Q. I have a couple of the probably-rare INTV catalogues. Do you
remember the one that features Santa Claus playing the intellivision?
A. Hey, that's ME! In addition to the packaging, I designed the INTV catalogs.
When it came time to shoot the Christmas catalog, I saved money on a model
by just putting on the Santa suit myself. In the lower right hand corner of
the photo is a weird looking doll with sunglasses; that's me, too. The
doll was a gift from Monique Lujan-Bakerink, one of the graphic artists
who worked with me at Mattel Electronics. She did this "soft-sculpture
portrait" of me for my 29th birthday.
Q. I love your cartoon Keith. I'm sorry the Chicago tribune no longer
carries it :(
A. Me too. But I hope you're reading it weekly on the Making It website at
http://www.webcom.com/makingit/ (And to tie this all back to Intellivision,
the character of Prof. Warhol, seen working at his computer this week, is
based on Dave Warhol, who programmed Mind Strike and Thunder Castle, and
who designed and supervised most of the original games released by
INTV Corporation. Dave and I co-designed Normy's Beach-Babe-O-Rama, based
on my comic strip, released by Electronic Arts for the Sega Genesis.)
Q. Some Mattel and all INTV boxes do not open like the early Network games.
What happened here?
A. Mattel had already switched from the book-cover boxes to standard boxes
by the time INTV took over. INTV used up Mattel stock, then made up new
batches of the most popular games. In these cases, the INTV boxes are
identical to the Mattel boxes (printed from the same negatives) except
the Mattel Electronics name is deleted and the INTV name and address is
added on the back. Major League Baseball also underwent a name change to
Big League Baseball, since the Major League trademark either expired or
wasn't transferable.
All of the INTV games were released in full-color standard boxes, except
for a brief period where they tried to get away with no boxes -- sending
out mail orders with the cartridge and instructions simply sealed in a
plastic bag. Consumers complained -- loudly -- and boxes were quickly
reinstated.
Q. I'd like to know just who did all these brilliant Data East
conversions for Mattel. God, I suspect. Inty BurgerTime, Bump 'N' Jump,
and Lock 'N' Chase are among the most satisfying/addictive home system
titles I've ever played. Graphics, sounds, level designs, difficulty,
controls--everything is soooo nice on these games.
I suspect they gave the 2600 versions to the trainee coders ;)
A. You'd like to know? You only have to ask... BurgerTime was programmed
by Ray Kaestner, who also did the BurgerTime sequel, Diner, that INTV
released. (God was a good guess, though.)
Lock 'N' Chase was done by Mike Winans. After Mike left Mattel, he went
to Atari where he programmed, appropriately enough, Intellivision Pac Man.
Bump 'N' Jump is a long story which we will be posting to the website.
The gist of it is, two guys discovered that if you hooked up a Playcable
to a personal computer, you got a terrific Intellivision development
station. They reverse engineered the Intellivision and demonstrated that
they could write games for it. To keep them and their information out of
the hands of competitors, we contracted them to program Bump 'N' Jump,
under the supervision of Dave Warhol, programmer of Mind Strike and later
producer of all the INTV original releases.
Q. Who owns the rights to all the Intellivision games now that INTV
Corporation is no more?
A. The rights to the games are tied up in the courts right now following the
1991 bankruptcy of INTV Corporation. Sometime in the future we may be able
to offer some of the unreleased games.
Q. What kind of development hardware was used to program the games?
A. At Mattel, development was in a time-sharing minicomputer environment.
After Mattel, one of our group designed and built a PC compatible
Intellivision development system and wrote the necessary software, so that
he could continue commercial development of Intellivision games. He may
still release some limited edition games; while that remains a possibility,
he doesn't want to release the technical details of the development system.
We're respecting his wishes on that -- he certainly invested enough time
and money that he deserves something back.
Watch the Blue Sky Rangers website for future announcements.
Q. I just picked up a boxed copy of World Championship Baseball for the
Intellivision. Now I thought that this was one of the titles that was not
made by INTV, but the box distinctly says on the back "distributed by
INTV corporation". Its number is 5789 which is the same as the regular
Mattel release, so I am confused...
A. World Championship Baseball was programmed at Mattel under the name All
Star Major League Baseball (it is an enhanced version of the original
Major League Baseball), but the game was not fully debugged before Mattel
Electronics was closed down, so Mattel never released it.
INTV Corporation chose to release the game as-is. They stuck a note on the
back of the instruction book that reads:
"Due to the sophisticated and complex nature of this game, at times
interference may appear on your T.V. screen. If this happens simply
return to start."
In other words, it crashes a lot. The "interference" that appears is the
debugging screen that Mike Minkoff (Director of Applications Software)
linked into the game to try to figure out what was wrong with it.
Q. My Intellivision is broken! Can you help?
A. One of the most asked questions we get at the Blue Sky Rangers is "Where
can I get my Intellivision repaired?" Well, the official Intellivision
repair service (i.e. the one Mattel still refers people to when they call)
is:
J.H.C. Electronics Service
901 South Fremont Avenue #108
Alhambra, California 91803
phone: 818-308-1685
fax: 818-308-1548
J.H.C. is owned by James Hann, the guy who ran the repair service for
INTV Corporation. While their primary business is special controllers for
newer videogame systems, they still have the equipment to test and repair
Intellivisions and are (amazingly) still willing to do it.
They advertise: "J.H.C. Electronics will repair any Intellivision video
game system, no matter where or when purchased, for one low price!
Complete overhaul, thorough testing, no-charge return shipping to you --
only $49.95."
J.H.C. can also repair Intellivoice and computer modules. Call for prices.
Note: They do NOT have Intellivision II power supplies. They get asked
that all the time, and they looked into having some made, but the minimum
order is 500. J.H.C. has 100 people on a list now, and if they get 400
more commitments they'll have a batch made up. We wouldn't hold our breath,
unless someone wants to pay $3,000 for the first one to get the ball
rolling. Still, if you want to be added to the list, e-mail us at
makingit@netcom.com; we'll pass them along to James if a significant
number of people write.
Q. Why was Kool Aid Man for the Intellivision different than the Atari
2600 version instead of being the same like most people would produce?
A. Both games were created specifically for the Kool-Aid tie-in; in
fact, they were the result of an in-house contest. The reason the two
games are different is the result of a philosophical difference between
the programmers and Marketing.
Since every game system had its strengths and weaknesses, any game
originally developed for one system (or for the arcades) would suffer
when adapted for another. For the most part, the programmers wanted every
game to be an original, designed for a specific system and taking full
advantage of that system's strengths.
Marketing wanted games that would be on as many systems as possible, with
game play and graphics that were recognizable across those systems. They
argued for simplifying Intellivision graphics on some games to make them
more like the 2600 versions. (This led to many heated discussions --
particularly between myself and Marjorie Brent, a marketing person who
had been a friend of mine from before we both wound up at Mattel.)
Anyway, Marketing had made a deal with Kool-Aid, then presented the
deadline to Programming. No game idea was presented to us -- just that it
had to use Kool-Aid Man. It was, of course, a rush job. We argued that
the only way to meet the deadline -- which required an Intellivision and
2600 version to be ready at the same time -- was to allow the programmers
to develop different games for the two systems; designing to the
strengths of a system is faster than adapting something around its
weaknesses.
We hoped that the result would be two good games instead of one good
game and a lame adaptation or two passable versions of one game and that
it would lead to more games in which the Intellivision, 2600, Colecovision
or whatever versions could differ greatly to take full advantage of each
system. But Marketing HATED that the two games were different and never
let us do it again. They said consumers would be confused and angry. And
you know, based on the e-mail we've received and the posts to this
newsgroup about Kool-Aid Man, looks like they were right. After 12 years,
I guess I owe Marjorie an apology.
Keith Robinson
Blue Sky Rangers
http://www.makingit.com/makingit/bluesky/
_________________________________________________________________
The Blue Sky Rangers
Where Are They Now?
AN UPDATE ON MATTEL AND ON COMPANIES FOUNDED BY BLUE SKY RANGERS
_________________________________________________________________
QUICKSILVER SOFTWARE
While Mattel Electronics was collapsing around them, several Blue Sky
Rangers started planning a new company so they could continue
producing games. In fact, it was to be called Blue Sky Rangers
Software, but this was changed to Quicksilver to avoid confusion with
the already-existing Blue Sky Software. The original owners were Bill
Fisher (Space Hawk), Steve Roney (Space Spartans) and Mike Breen
(Buzz Bombers). Only Bill devoted full time to the company, and as it
grew he bought out the others.
Today, Quicksilver employs around 20 full-time programmers and
designers at their Costa Mesa, California, office. They specialize in
multimedia computer games; their award-winning titles "Castles" and
"Castles II" set standards for the industry. To find out more about
Quicksilver, visit their website at www.quicksilver.com/.
STRAND CRUISERS
Strand Cruisers was founded in 1985 by Keith Robinson (TRON Solar
Sailer) to design catalogs, packaging and other visual material for
high-tech companies. Clients have included Hewlett-Packard, Tandon
Computers, Sony Interactive and INTV Corporation, for which Strand
Cruisers designed most of the post-Mattel Intellivision game packages.
Strand Cruisers has also designed game graphics for Quicksilver
Software and Realtime Associates.
Making It Productions, a division of Strand Cruisers, distributes
Keith's weekly "Making It" comic strip, available on the web at
www.makingit.com/makingit/. "Making It" is the basis for the
Electronic Arts Sega Genesis game, "Normy's Beach-Babe-O-Rama."
REALTIME ASSOCIATES
Realtime Associates was founded in 1986 by David Warhol (Mind Strike).
Originally called Warhol Audio Arts and specializing in sound effects
and music for computer games, Realtime quickly expanded into full game
development. Over the years, Realtime has employed more than a dozen
Blue Sky Rangers on a free-lance or permanent basis. Today, they have
70 full-time employees at their headquarters in El Segundo, California
and another 30 at their hand-held game development center in Seattle,
which is run by Steve Ettinger (Hover Force). Realtime has produced
many video games based on well-known characters, including Ren &
Stimpy, Beavis & Butthead, and -- yes -- Barney.
The original Realtime title BUG!, the first U.S. produced title for
the Sega Saturn, earned great reviews and strong sales. A sequel is on
the way.
Dave Warhol has led roundtable discussions on music at the annual
Computer Game Developers' Conference. Audiotapes of his and other
conference seminars are available from the Know-It-All Audiovisual
Library at www.webcom.com/knowit/cgdc/.
NICE IDEAS
In February 1983, Mattel Electronics opened a programming office in le
parc international d'activit�s de Valbonne Sophia Antipolis, a
heavily-wooded technology park 10 miles inland from the south coast of
France, midway between Cannes and Nice. With a staff of programmers
half recruited in London and half in Paris, the office was to develop
Intellivision and Colecovision games that would reflect and appeal to
a European sensibility.
When it came time to shut down Mattel Electronics, it turned out that
because of French labor laws and the financial incentives Mattel took
advantage of to move into Valbonne Sophia Antipolis, legally the
French office couldn't be closed; Mattel would have to find a buyer.
So while all other Blue Sky Rangers were laid off in January 1984, the
programmers in France stayed on the payroll, working on games that
Mattel had no intention of releasing. Ultimately, Director Tim Scanlon
found investors so the division could become independent. Renamed Nice
Ideas, they continued videogame programming, selling games to INTV
Corp. and Coleco, among others.
STORMFRONT STUDIOS
After Mattel Electronics, Don Daglow (Utopia) was a producer at
Electronic Arts, then served as head of Br�derbund's Entertainment and
Education division. In 1988, he founded his own company, Stormfront
Studios. Stormfront, located in San Rafael, California, created the
"Tony La Russa Baseball" series, the "Eagle Eye Mysteries" games,
America Online's "Neverwinter Nights" multiplayer game and many
others.
Visit the Stormfront Studios website at www.stormfront.com.
_________________________________________________________________
��������������������������������������������������������Ŀ
�Further Technical Information From The Blue Sky Rangers �
����������������������������������������������������������
The original General Instruments off-the-shelf design included the 2K
system ROM (the RO-3-9502) that would contain the operating system for
the unit.
A later idea, born at APh or Mattel, was to include another ROM (the
RO-3-9504) with a 2K library of common subroutines that the programmers
could utilize. (This includes a random number generator, frequently used
sound effects, scoring routines, etc.)
The system ROM contains the interrupt level code that controls the
timing and updating of information to the STIC and System RAM; for most
games, this is invisible to the programmer who doesn't have to worry
about it. But by changing the interrupt address, the programmer can
transfer control to his own interrupt code to gain direct control of the
STIC and System RAM, do whatever special functions that can only be done
at interrupt level (such as scrolling the screen), then transfer control
back to the routines in the system ROM.
At Mattel, we simply considered these two parts -- the operating system
and the library of subroutines -- as the Executive ROM. The fact that
it's physically located in two ROMs, plus some overflow code stuck into
the GROM chip, came about because of the last-minute addition of the
library and is irrelevent to the programmer. And, as I mentioned in the
eariler post, these two parts were combined into one ROM in the
Intellivision II (though it still overflows into GROM).
Since the Blue Sky Rangers were a programming group, we present the
information on the website from a programmer's view. Information about
the hardware is included when it has an impact on how to program a game,
or when it puts design features in context (such as why everytime a
device got an extra sound chip it also sprouted two extra hand
controller ports).
The RO-3-9503 chip in the Intellivision is the Graphics ROM (GROM) chip
covered on the website; the RO-3-9504 is the Executive ROM (exec), also
covered. The RO-3-9502 contains system code and data used by the 1610,
the STIC and the System RAM chip (which also controls bus timing). The
code in this chip is invisible to, and not accessible by, the
Intellivision game programmer, so it is not covered on the website. But
the next time we update that page, we'll stick in a parenthetical
comment about its existence.
On the Intellivision II, the EXEC code and this system code were
combined into a single RO-3-9506 ROM chip.
The Games ��������������������������������������������������������������������
�����������
Games Published By Mattel Electronics �
���������������������������������������
Action Network �
����������������
INTELLIVISION ACTION NETWORK
The Action and Space Action Networks featured arcade-style games. The
Intellivision was introduced with the promise of a well-rounded
library, but by late-1982 it became obvious that, responding to market
demand, most of the new games then in development would wind up in the
Action Network. Rather than continuing to point out the growing
disparity between the Action and the, say, Children's Learning games
(two titles and holding), Marketing quietly discontinued the network
concept.
All of the games on this page were released in Action Network red
boxes, with the exception of Pinball. While Pinball had long
been listed as an Action Network game, it was released in 1983 after
the networks had been abandoned. Several of these games were also
released under the Sears brand name in different packaging.
_________________________________________________________________
Armor Battle
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1121]
Also released by Sears [#4975211]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Dust off your field glasses and scan the horizon for enemy tanks.
There's one -- grinding its way out of the woods!
You see each other at the same time. Both turrets swing toward their
targets. Who will fire a split second sooner? And who will be reduced
to a pile of rubble?
When you've beaten your opponent, move on to a new battlefield. There
are literally hundreds of new terrains to conquer!
War may be nerve-wracking, but this is pure fun!
PRODUCTION NOTE
An M Network version of the game, called Armor Ambush, was released
for the Atari 2600.
_________________________________________________________________
Sea Battle
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1818]
Also released by Sears [#4975213]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Destroyers, battleships, submarines, minesweepers, and aircraft
carriers! You're the Admiral, and your mission is to rid the seas of
the enemy fleet.
Start by setting a strategy. Lay invisible minefields where you think
the big enemy ships will travel. But be careful, because the other
Admiral is laying mines to foil you...
Battle stations! Now you slug it out with shells, torpedoes, and naval
tactics. Sleek battleships are waiting to pounce on sluggish
minesweepers. You can't relax for a minute.
But who worries about the torpedoes, you say. Full speed ahead!
PRODUCTION NOTE
An M Network version of the game, called High Seas (announced in some
catalogs as Sea Battle), was announced for the Atari 2600 and
completed, but never released due to poor test results. An Aquarius
version was also announced, but never completed.
_________________________________________________________________
Sub Hunt
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3408]
Working title: Submarine
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
You're at the periscope of a Nautilus class nuclear submarine, the
last line of defense between the enemy and the fleet. Enemy PT boats
drone around seeking you out. Meanwhile, enemy destroyers constantly
jockey for depth-bombing position. You must keep you head to control
depth, speed, direction and torpedoes. You have simultaneous periscope
and satellite hrizon displays with compass readings to keep you afloat
and the enemy at bay. If you do it, you should be immediately
commissioned an Admiral in the U.S. Navy.
* Simultaneous displays
* One player game
* Control depth, speed, and torpedo launch
_________________________________________________________________
ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
CLOUDY MOUNTAIN Cartridge
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3410]
AKA Adventure (working title), Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, ADVANCED
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Cartridge
Based on the role-playing game by TSR Hobbies, Inc.
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Take the wrong turn and you'll soon be staring at the biggest, meanest
and most clever dragon you've ever imagined. You start out in a maze.
But, this is no ordinary maze. It's revealed to you only a few feet at
a time as you enter each new uncharted corridor. The maze scrolls: up,
down, right and left. You don't know when it's going to take a turn --
for the worse. That dangerous dragon could be between you and the
treasure that you must find. Along your way you'll find a variety of
objects to help you avoid the dragon. Based on the popular
role-playing board game, this video version will provide you with many
hours of enjoyment.
One player game
Game screen "scrolls" up and down, left to right
Continually changing maze
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Because of its complexity, this was the first cartridge to go over the
4K size limit; it was allocated a whopping 6K.
Originally released as ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Cartridge, CLOUDY
MOUNTAIN was added to the name later when ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
TREASURE OF TARMIN Cartridge was announced.
FUN FACT: The all-capitalization and the word "cartridge" are actually
part of the title, as required by the contract with TSR Hobbies,
owners of the Dungeons & Dragons trademark.
_________________________________________________________________
Explorer
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [unfinished]
AKA Zork
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
PRODUCTION HISTORY
As indicated by its working title, this game was inspired by the text
adventure game Zork. It didn't get too far; about the only record of
it is in a December 10, 1981 status report written by Gabriel Baum, VP
of Applications Software, after reviewing development at APh: "A new
game closely paralleling Dungeons & Dragons. A man in a large cave
searches for treasure, is attacked by beasts and defends himself or
proceeds within the game using objects he collects. Currently only
some graphics are defined." The game apparently was discontinued
because it was too similar to the two Dungeons & Dragons cartridges
already in development.
_________________________________________________________________
Snafu
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3758]
Working titles: Blockade+Snakes, Ssssnakes!
Program, Graphics and Sound: Mike Minkoff
Music: Russ Lieblich
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
You each start off with little lines that start to grow.
They grow fast, tangling, weaving, writhing like magic beanstalks. And
you're at the controls, trying to completely enclose the other guy so
he can't grow any more.
This is a game of lightning quick strategic decisions. Hesitate...or
slip...and you'll find yourself surrounded.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Developed under the working title Blockade+Snakes to reflect the two
basic versions of the game. In the first, inspired by the board game
Blockade, opponents try to surround and trap each other. In the
second, inspired by a handheld LED game in development at Mattel but
never released, opponents bite at each other's tails until one is
reduced to nothing.
Mike liked the name Ssssnakes! and started using it on the title
screen; he fought for it to be the final name. Marketing instead chose
Snafu, from the military acronym "Situation Normal -- All Fouled Up"
(actually, most veterans use a different word than "Fouled"). Mike
hated the name since it had nothing to do with the gameplay.
Snafu was the only game released to use the Intellivision video
chip's colored squares mode.
An Aquarius version of Snafu was also released.
PLAYING TIPS: From Intellivision Game Club News, Issue 2, Winter 1982
(credited to "Mike, another Intellivision programming specialist"):
* Practice steering -- Get a good feel for the action of the
direction disk.
* Anticipate -- Concentrate on the moves of the opposing snakes as
well as your own.
* Plan ahead -- Press the direction disk JUST SLIGHTLY ahead of when
you want to turn. If you wait too long, you won't be able to turn
until the next avenue.
* For the "trap" games -- try getting in front of the opposing
snakes forcing them to the outside. If you're clever, you can
create channels around the perimeter from which the opposing
snakes cannot escape. Allow a snake back into the middle and you
make it easier for it to double back to trap you.
* For the "bite" games -- learn to read the rebounds. Be careful not
to bite off your own tail by doubling back on yourself. Alternate
between the horizontal, vertical and diagonal modes to cross up
your opponent. Go on the defensive when you have only a few links
left. This will give your snake time to grow new links. For a
twist in strategy, go on the defensive right from the start. Grow
extra links before you attack.
_________________________________________________________________
Triple Action
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3760]
Working title: Arcade
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
It's three classic video games in one!
Racing Cars -- You and your opponent race against the clock down a
crowded highway.
Battle Tanks -- It's a duel to the finish between two heavy tanks. One
of you will end up as scrap iron.
Biplanes -- It's a thrilling dogfight -- biplane style! Watch out for
the control tower...don't get lost in the clouds. But most of all,
watch out for that blood thirsty baron with a leather cap!
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Developed under the name Arcade, the cartridge was to contain five
different arcade-type games. Space limitations forced this to be cut
back to three. It's not clear what the lost two games were, but one of
them may have been Brickout!, a clone of Atari's Breakout.
FUN FACT: More hours were spent in the programming cubicles playing
Biplanes than any other Intellivsion game. Although it's one of the
simplest, many programmers felt it was the most challenging and fun of
the two-person games. The first time you deliberately stall, go into a
free fall, then pull out with a backward loop at the last second to
blast your opponent at point-blank range is a joy!
FUN FACT: So many hours were wasted on Biplanes, that when a memo was
circulated April 1, 1982, ordering Triple Action deleted from
programmers' hard disks, Biplanes-addict Steve Montero (Night
Stalker) didn't argue; sheepishly, he erased it, only later
discovering that the memo was an April Fool's hoax.
FUN FACT: In Biplanes, although the game ends when one player reaches
15 points, bullets in the air at that point are allowed to score. It's
possible, therefore, to have a game with a 15-15 tie, or to win with
16 points.
_________________________________________________________________
Brickout!
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [UNRELEASED]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Brickout! was an Intellivision version of the Atari arcade and video
game Breakout. Although the game was completed, it's unclear what
plans Marketing had for it, since it's not included in any catalog or
press release. It may have been intended for the Triple Action
cartridge, which was originally to have included five arcade-type
games. Brickout! may very well have been shelved for fear of legal
action from Atari; such fears killed the original version of
Astrosmash, which was an Asteroids-like game.
_________________________________________________________________
Frog Bog
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5301]
Working title: Frogs
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Sitting upon two lily pads in the middle of a lily pond are a pair of
hungry frogs; one for you, one for your opponent. Overhead swarm
delicious flies. Whether or not your frog scores his dinner while you
rack up points is entirely up to you. You control the height and
direction of his jump; even the flick of his long pink tongue. Leap
too high or at the wrong angle and "Pl-op" your frog goes into the
pond. He must swim back to his lily pad, taking away valuable scoring
time while your opponent goes on racking up points. As play continues,
night will come to the pond. Or, you can choose to play the entire
round at night, leaping for fireflies -- in the dark.
* One or two player game
* Continuous scoring
* Screen changes from day or night
PRODUCTION NOTE
An M Network version, called Frogs and Flies, was released for the
Atari 2600.
_________________________________________________________________
Land Battle
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5302/UNRELEASED]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
Revised Graphics: Peggi Decarli
PRODUCTION HISTORY
This wargame simulation took a long time in programming (officially
391 days, compared to 170 days for Night Stalker, begun at about
the same time); when completed in mid-1982, Marketing was concerned
that its design, similar to Sea Battle, already looked dated.
A second concern was that, due to the complexity of the game, it
required more memory than an Intellivision contained; the cartridge
would have to include 256 bytes of RAM onboard. Only USCF Chess had
been approved for onboard RAM, an expensive proposition.
When the Entertainment Computer System (ECS) was given the green
light, Gabriel Baum, VP of Applications Software, proposed changing
Land Battle to an ECS title; the ECS had an additional 2K of RAM
available for cartridges. Marketing resisted this -- they still wanted
Land Battle as a stand-alone game. Peggi Decarli was assigned to give
the game a graphics makeover.
After the makeover, Marketing still didn't find it visually
interesting enough. By that time, wargame fanatic Steve Sents, having
completed Deadly Discs, had started work on an ECS wargame called
Desert Fox, which Marketing liked the looks of better. The decision
was made to kill Land Battle and incorporate as much of its gameplay
and programming as possible into the Desert Fox design.
_________________________________________________________________
Night Stalker
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5305]
Working Title: Attacker
Design & Program: Steve Montero
Graphics: Peter Allen
Sound: Russ Lieblich
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
You're on the run. Your attackers are relentless robots. Destroy one
and it's replaced by an even smarter, faster robot. It's a nightmare.
Your only defenses are avoidance and weapons found somewhere in the
labyrinth. When one weapon empties, you avoid robots to find another.
Duck around a corner or go into your safe house. But, be careful.
There are also people-size spiders and their webs to slow your escape.
Bats also wing their way at you. If either spiders or bats bite you,
you're stunned; easier prey for the robot attackers.
* One player game
* Realistic antagonists
* Challenge increases as game progresses
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Steve Montero is an expert on robotics, so it was natural for him to
program Night Stalker. In development late in 1981, the game was a
favorite with other programmers, who didn't need their arms twisted to
spend hours testing it. Unfortunately, the first time Marketing
brought in some 12-year-old kid to try it out, he got further than any
of the programmers had. A new, tougher robot had to be added to the
game, at the cost of losing one of the best features: the spider's web
(the game was only 4K in size). Originally, as the spider crawled
around the maze it left a web that would slow you down considerably as
you ran through it. You could shoot the web away, but you'd use up
bullets. Without the web, the spider became like the bats: just a
nuisance.
After Night Stalker was finished, game cartridges began getting larger
in size, so Steve proposed Ms. Night Stalker, a 12K sequel that would
include the web and all the other features he had wanted, including
multiple weapons (bazookas to blast through walls!), multiple
scrolling mazes and smarter robots. Marketing shelved the idea and
Steve was assigned to program Space Shuttle instead, which may
have been a contributing factor toward Steve leaving Mattel and the
game industry not long after.
Mattel Electronics released M Network versions of Night Stalker for
the Atari 2600, the Apple II and the IBM PC. (The Atari 2600 version
was called Dark Caverns.) A version was also announced for the
Aquarius, but was not completed.
PLAYING TIPS: From Intellivision Game Club News, Issue 4, Winter 1983:
* Carefully count how many bullets you have left. It's always wise
to kill a robot with your last shot to give you time to get a new
weapon.
* In the beginning, shooting bats is a good way to rack up points.
However, after 5,000 points, remember every bat that you hit turns
into a Gray Robot.
* Don't just concentrate on robots at higher point levels. The bats
and spiders can sneak up on you when you're not watching.
* When being followed by the White Robot, don't be afraid to use the
bunker. Peek your head out and fire a quick shot at him and then
duck inside for cover.
* The only sure way to kill the Black Robot is to fire at him from
point-blank range. Try ducking around a corner or come out of the
bunker and fire off a quick shot. You have to be very close to
make a direct hit.
PLAYING TIPS: Night Stalker is a favorite of Blue Sky Ranger Steve
Roney (Space Spartans, B-17 Bomber). He plays the game with a
controller in each hand -- one to run, one to shoot -- since buttons
and disk cannot be used simultaneously on one controller.
Steve adds: "Another trick to bagging the later robots has to do with
there being only one moving object available for the robot bullets. If
you wait just above the place where the robot appears and dangle your
feet where the robot can see, the robot will shoot below your feet.
You can then safely drop down and quickly get off all three shots to
nail the robot before his bullet gets all the way across the
bottom!!!!"
FUN FACT: Russ Lieblich was proud of his sound effects for Night
Stalker, especially the constant heartbeat. Whenever he heard someone
playing the game, he'd run into their cubicle, grab the volume control
on the TV, and turn it up full.
_________________________________________________________________
Pinball
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5356]
Design & Program: Minh Chou Tran, Bob Newstadt
Graphics: Peggi Decarli, Monique Lujan-Bakerink
Sound: Mark Urbaniec
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
A challenging and exciting video version of the time-honored Pinball
machine you find in arcades. You get it all -- five balls, flippers,
two- player scores, with all the sounds and action of the real thing.
If you've ever "tilted" a real pinball machine, try our Pinball.
You're in for some surprises and a whale of a lot of fun.
* One or two player game
* Realistic arcade action
* Authentic sounds
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Pinball was in production longer than any other Intellivision game --
well over two years. Chou Tran, who started the game, could never get
the ball motion debugged. Finally, Bob Newstadt was assigned to help
her. He got the motion problems worked out, then he and Chou expanded
the design from it's original single screen to its final multi-screen
layout.
Although originally announced as part of the red-boxed Action Network,
the game was released in 1983, after the "network" concept was
dropped. Pinball was released in a purple box.
_________________________________________________________________
TRON Deadly Discs
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5391]
AKA TRON I, Deadly Discs
Based on the Disney motion picture TRON
Design & Program: Steve Sents
Graphics: Eric Wels
Sound: Bill Goodrich
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Our hero, TRON, is locked in battle against the Evil Blue Warriors.
Score points by knocking out the computer-controlled attackers with
flying discs. Your task is to bring your man safely through battle
after battle. The attacking warriors are also armed with destroyer
discs, and they'll come after TRON in wave after wave. You get them,
or they'll get TRON!
* One player game
* Intense strategy and action
* Richocheting discs
PRODUCTION HISTORY
TRON Deadly Discs was in production at the same time as TRON, the
Disney movie; the design for the game was based on storyboards and
production stills from the film.
Mattel Electronics bet a lot of dough that the movie would be a
phenomenon. A state-of-the-art special effect film about video games,
the hottest trend in the country -- how could it miss? Well, it did.
The lukewarm reception the movie received did little to boost interest
in the six TRON games Mattel released (four originals, two
conversions). TRON Deadly Discs, though, was a strong enough game in
its own right to garner good reviews and word-of-mouth; it went on to
sell over 300,000 copies -- a respectable number, but only about a
third what Marketing was hoping for. Ironically, the original
production run was planned to be 350,000, but at the last minute it
was increased to 800,000. "The reason for the increase," explained
Marketing man Dick Baumbusch in a June 1, 1982 memo, "is due to the
anticipated popularity of the Tron film and the fact that we will
feature it in a commercial this Fall. Also, the international demand
for Tron will limit any downside risk." It was this type of
forecasting that put Intellivision where it is today.
In answer to a frequent question, there was no connection between the
production of Mattel's TRON video games and the arcade games TRON and
Discs of TRON. A separate company had licensed the arcade rights to
the movie and there was no communication between them and Mattel.
Early catalogs listed TRON Deadly Discs (under its working title TRON
I) as a Space Action Network cartridge; it was actually released as
part of the Action Network.
An M Network Atari 2600 version and an Aquarius version were also
released.
BUG: There is a trick that pretty much lets you rack up unlimited
points, as first pointed out in a letter Mattel received November 3,
1982 from Steven M. Little, an Intellivision owner in Minneapolis:
"Once you are able to open the top left and top right doors, which
enables you to go in one door and out the other...just step out the
right top or left top door and stay there...90% of the enemy discs go
through you and your man is not hit or destroyed. If you stay at that
position, you can reach a score of 1,000,000 very easily by just
breaking the enemy's discs and...throwing your disc just enough to
keep only one enemy on the board at all times. Once you reach close to
a million points, don't destroy any more warriors. Just hold your disc
in the block mode and break discs. If you do get hit just go back and
forth for repair. (Never throw disc to destroy warrior for you may get
a replacement that carries the stick.) I went from 1,000,000 to
10,000,000 with no problem."
PLAYING TIPS: From Intellivision Game Club News, Issue 5, Spring 1983:
* Keep moving because a moving target is hard to hit. Try to line up
a shot where the Warrior is in front of an open door. That way you
can de-rezz the attacker and jam open the door with just one disc.
* When a leader Warrior appears (dark blue), concentrate all of your
shots at him since the Warriors become quicker and more accurate
when he is on the game grid.
* To knock out the Recognizer, run to the very top center of the
grid. From this position, you have a good chance of making a
direct hit on his eye. However, in this position, you are very
vulnerable to the Paralyzer Probe. Take aim, throw your disc
quickly, and run out of the path of the Probe.
PLAYING TIP: This is the favorite Intellivision game of Blue Sky
Ranger David Warhol (Mind Strike). He plays with one controller in
each hand -- one for maneuvering (thumb on disc), one for throwing
(thumb on keypad). "If you like Deadly Discs with one hand controller,
you'll love it with two," he says. "Try it now and thank me later."
EASTER EGG: Deadly Discs fan Dave Warhol put together his own private
version of the game, replacing the enemy warriors with the hot dogs
from BurgerTime. He called the result Deadly Dogs. If you want to play
it, it's hidden in the INTV Corporation release of Dig Dug: press 47
(4 and 7 simultaneously) on both hand controllers and press reset. The
Deadly Dogs title screen will appear.
_________________________________________________________________
TRON Maze-A-Tron
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5392]
AKA TRON II, Mazatron, Maze-A-Tron
Based on the Disney motion picture TRON
Design & Program: Russ Haft
Graphics: Eric Wels
Sound: Andy Sells
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Based on the Disney movie TRON, this is a great action game for 1 or 2
players. You are engaged in a deadly struggle to penetrate the inner
circle of the Master Control Program. Watch out for the deadly "bits."
You've got to destroy them to reach your goal and accumulate the most
points.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Like TRON Deadly Discs, this game's production paralleled the
production of the movie. And like TRON Deadly Discs, the movie's
less-than-enthusiastic reception didn't help sales.
Note: Despite what the above catalog description says, TRON
Maze-A-Tron is a one-player game.
_________________________________________________________________
Lock 'N' Chase
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5637]
Based on the Data East arcade game
Program: Mike Winans, Julie Hoshizaki
Graphics: Peggi Decarli
Sound: Bill Goodrich
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
A fast-action chase game as you maneuver your thief through the maze,
picking up coins and other treasures. Billy-club swinging cops are in
hot pursuit, but you can temporarily escape them by locking gates
behind you. The longer you survive, the more valuable the treasures
become. One or two players.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Lock 'N' Chase was the first in a series of conversions based on Data
East arcade games, a series that eventually would include Bump 'N'
Jump, BurgerTime, Mission X, Thin Ice (based on the arcade game Disco
No. 1) and the unreleased PizzaTime (a BurgerTime sequel). The
association carried over to INTV Corporation, which did Commando and
Diner (another BurgerTime sequel).
Mike Winans almost killed himself trying to fit the game into 4K. He
finally proclaimed it couldn't be done and, reluctantly, 6K was
authorized. Mike managed to just squeeze it into the 6K, although the
control of Lupin wasn't ideal. (In the arcade game, the thief is named
Lupin, a nice touch of personality that Mattel left out of our
version.)
When the game was released, press and customers complained about how
difficult it was to control Lupin. (You had to time turns precisely,
or Lupin would stop dead.) The problem was considered bad enough that
a running change was ordered: after the 6K cartridges were sold out,
improved 8K versions would be released. By this time, Mike had
transferred to the Design & Development department, so Julie Hoshizaki
was assigned to make the improvement. The improved versions aren't
marked on the package; the easiest way to tell if you have an improved
version is to watch what happens when a cop catches Lupin. In the
arcade game, Lupin collapses into his hat -- an animation there wasn't
room for in the 6K version. The collapsing animation is in the 8K
version.
M Network Atari 2600 and Apple II versions were also released. IBM PC
and Aquarius versions were announced, but never completed.
FUN FACT: An insignificant typo almost caused Mattel to dump tens of
thousands of dollars of perfectly good ROMs and to delay the release
of Lock 'N' Chase by several months. Why? First, some background:
The legal department required programmers to include an ASCII
copyright notice somewhere in every game so that it could be read if
someone dumped the cartridge's object code. Traditionally, if there
was room, the programmer would also include his or her name. (It was
forbidden to hide your name in the game such that it could ever show
up on screen, but object code was OK.) For Lock 'N' Chase, Mike
included his, Peggi's, and Bill's name in the code. The day the game
was to be shipped to the ROM factory, the three of them went to lunch
to celebrate. At lunch, Mike realized for the first time that Peggi's
last name is spelled "Decarli." He had spelled it "de Carli" in the
code. No problem; he went back after lunch, corrected it, then bid
everyone farewell and went off to his new job in Design & Development.
What Mike didn't know was that Bill Fisher, who was in charge of
coordinating with the factory, had copied the finished game off of
Mike's hard disk during lunch and shipped it out.
Three months later, ten thousand plus ROMs were finished. Sample chips
were sent back from the factory. Bill loaded one into a ROM reader,
then compared the chip's checksum to the checksum of the archived
version on Mike's hard disk. To Bill's horror, they didn't match.
There was a bug in the ROMs!
Programmers started playing the game for hours on end, trying to see
how bad the bug was -- would the game crash? Marketing needed to know
instantly if the game was releasable. Should they toss out tens of
thousands of dollars worth of chips and lose at least three months
time, or should they risk the bad publicity of sending out a
bug-filled version?
Finally, after a couple days of panic and anxiety, they asked Mike to
come up from Design & Development to help track down the bug. After
working on the problem for awhile, he slowly remembered lunch that day
three months earlier. Learning how to spell Peggi's name....
Mike went to the archived version of the game, changed "Decarli" back
to "de Carli" and recompiled the program. Now the checksums matched.
Crisis averted, the cartridges went out.
_________________________________________________________________
Sharp Shot
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5638]
Working Titles: Poww, Zzap!
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
An exciting new target shooting game specially designed for children.
There are four different shooting ranges for one or two players. Hit
the pass receiver. Shoot down the spinning spacecraft. Bomb Navy
ships. Fire at the maze monsters. Challenging action for video game
beginners.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
These four single-button games were originally programmed by APh for a
TV game show -- contestants controlled the single fire button by
saying "Pow!" With no advance notice, APh sent over these four games
stitched into one with the intention that Mattel release it as a
children's cartridge. Since Mattel by contract had to buy a certain
amount of product each year from APh, Marketing agreed to release the
cartridge, over the objections of Gabriel Baum, VP of Application
Software.
Gabriel particularly objected to the packaging. In a memo to Marketing
(August 31, 1982), he wrote: "...the packaging and instructions do not
in any way indicate that the game and graphic content of the cartridge
is extremely simplistic...I believe that Mattel Electronics is going
to be exposed to very unfavorable comment when consumers discover that
the quality of the cartridge is in many ways reminiscent of early
Atari games." In answer to this memo, Marketing had a label added to
the front of the package reading, "Specially designed game for
children over 4."
An M Network Atari 2600 version of the game was also submitted by APh.
It was rejected.
_________________________________________________________________
Shark! Shark!
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5787]
Working Title: Shark
Design & Program: Ji-Wen Tsao
Sound & Music: Andy Sells
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
It's survival of the fittest in the deep, dark waters of the ocean.
And you're just a little fish! You must eat smaller fish to stay alive
and grow. But you're not the only one struggling for survival. Bigger
fish are out to eat you. Beware, the most feared predator of all is on
your tail. Shark, Shark! One or two-player action.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Marketing totally dismissed Shark! Shark! as an inconsequential kiddie
game and was reluctant to release it. It had one of the smallest
initial shipments of any Intellivision game -- only 5,600 copies in
1982 (compared to nearly 800,000 for the heavily advertised Star
Strike). So, of course, there were almost no copies in the stores when
Shark! Shark! went on to become one of the best reviewed Intellivision
games ever ("Shark! Shark! is an original. A must cartridge for
Intellivision owners...positively delightful...certainly one of the
finest cartridges for this system." -- Videogaming Illustrated, June
1983).
BUG: Due to a timing error in the Intellivision II, the bubble
sounds don't have their full effect when the cartridge is played on
that system.
FUN FACT: Everyone thought it would be a great gag to use the song
Mack the Knife ("Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear...") for
the "game over" music. Andy Sells put together a hilarious arrangement
of the song which was used in the prototype version, while the Mattel
crack legal team looked into getting clearance to use it. We had never
licensed a song before, so they weren't used to tracking down rights,
but they finally found the owner: Warner Communications...parent
company of Atari. Andy wrote an original tune to use instead.
_________________________________________________________________
Strategy Network �
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The Strategy Network cartridges were based on classic board games,
with the exception of the original title Utopia. Each of these games
could be played against a computer player; Marketing liked to hold up
these games as proof of the "Intelligent" in "Intellivision."
Strategy Network cartridges were released in purple boxes.
Backgammon and Checkers were also released under the Sears
brand name in different packaging. Checkers was released with
different packaging in Great Britain under the English name Draughts.
_________________________________________________________________
ABPA Backgammon
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1119]
Trademark used under license from American Backgammon Players
Association
Also released by Sears as Backgammon
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Beating Intellivision at backgammon is a lot of fun. But it's
definitely not child's play.
The computer knows all the tricks -- and it calculates all the odds
before it moves.
Can you find a flaw in its strategy? Can you give it pieces to gobble
up freely, then trap it in the back game? Or will you just cross your
fingers, press the button and roll the dice?
Perfect your own backgammon skills with this modem version of one of
the world's oldest games.
PRODUCTION NOTES
ABPA Backgammon was one of the original four games introduced with
Intellivision when it was test marketed in 1979.
The program code was recycled in the Triple Challenge cartridge
released by INTV Corporation.
_________________________________________________________________
Checkers
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1120]
Also released by Sears
Released by Mattel in Great Britain as Draughts [#1120]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Pit your skill and imagination against an opponent who can assess the
board opposition in a few seconds and think several moves ahead.
The computer won't make a foolish mistake, but you can still beat
it...if you concoct a strategy it can't handle.
* Hi and Lo skill levels
* "Bail Out" button asks computer to recommend your next move
PRODUCTION NOTES
The game Checkers is known as Draughts in Great Britain, necessitating
a packaging change for the English market.
The program code was recycled in the Triple Challenge cartridge
released by INTV Corporation.
_________________________________________________________________
Takeover
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [UNRELEASED]
AKA Empire
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Essentially an Intellivision version of the war/strategy board game
Risk, Takeover was well-liked among the programmers. Unfortunately,
the game used the same colored-squares graphics mode used by
Snafu, limiting the screen graphics to colored blocks, plus the
eight moving objects. Marketing felt that while the game was good, it
looked too boring to be a successful seller. The game was never
released.
_________________________________________________________________
USCF Chess
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#2611]
Trademark used under license from U.S. Chess Federation
AKA: Chess
Heuristics programming: Teletape, Inc.
User interface programming: Russ Ludwick
Graphics: Dave James, Peggi Decarli
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
A great new way to play the ultimate game of strategy, whether you're
a novice, intermediate or expert. Pit your skill against the computer
or an opponent. Select from eight degrees of difficulty and a time
limit on moves. Move up in skill as you improve.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
A good Chess program was beyond the capabilities of the both the
Intellivision hardware and the Intellivision programmers, but
Marketing felt that it was a must-have title to establish the
Intellivision as more than a toy.
Money was authorized to produce the Chess cartridges with 2K of RAM on
board to bolster the insufficient 147 available bytes in the Master
Component. No other Mattel Intellivision cartridge was released with
on-board RAM.
The gameplay programming was farmed out to Teletape, Inc., a company
with experience in Artificial Intelligence. In-house, Russ Ludwick
programmed the onscreen display and user interface.
Although on the schedule from early on, the technical difficulties
(including a record 19 weeks of testing and debugging) held up release
of the cartridge until 1983. When finally released, it did receive the
good reviews Marketing was looking for.
The program code was recycled in the Triple Challenge cartridge
released by INTV Corporation.
FUN FACT: Russ tested the program by playing countless games against
the cartridge at all levels. He found that when playing at the highest
levels, the cartridge was good, but slow. He got in the habit of
making a move, then going home and letting the Intellivision think
about a response overnight. Because of this, three features were
added: (1) the normal Intellivision time-out feature was disabled, (2)
a feature letting you switch to an easier level in the middle of a
move was added, and (3) a warning that moves at higher levels could
take hours -- or days --was put into the instruction book.
_________________________________________________________________
Utopia
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5149]
Working title: Island
Design, program, graphics: Don Daglow
Sound: Russ Lieblich
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
You and your opponent each have an island to rule. Points are
accumulated based on the welfare of your island people. You can choose
to be a benevolent ruler or an aggressive dictator. Your people need
food, housing, and industry for clothing and other essentials. What
you cannot manage are natural disasters. A single hurricane could wipe
out your crops, sink your fishing fleet, destroy all the homes and
factories you've built. Rebels may automatically appear should the
welfare of the people drop. They could attack. Classic dilemmas in a
game that is sure to become an absorbing classic in its own right.
* One or two can play, either competitively or cooperatively.
* Colorful computer graphics and special sound effects.
* Computer measures your people's well being through a sophisticated
scoring system that weighs ALL island conditions.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
In college, Don Daglow had been a fan of main-frame computer
simulation games; he had little interest in arcade games. So it was
only natural that he would try a simulation game for the
Intellivision. His result, Utopia, was hailed by reviewers for its
originality: it wasn't another arcade rip-off, and it wasn't just a
video version of an existing game or sport. It was even educational
without being boring.
Although Marketing didn't put much of a push behind the game (they
preferred graphically splashier, no-brainer games like Star
Strike), the reviews and word of mouth pushed sales to a respectable
250,000.
Today, Utopia is one of the best-remembered Intellivision game, with
some people referring to it as Civilization 0.5, a reference to Sid
Meier's later breakthrough computer simulation game.
An Aquarius version was also released.
_________________________________________________________________
Reversi
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5304]
Working title: Othello
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Three levels of difficulty insure you'll be playing Reversi for a
long, long time. Your objective is to take control of the board. Your
opponent is either another player or the computer. Either way, it's
great fun. As the game progresses, the playing pieces switch from
black to white or white to black depending on which player takes
control. Your score is continuously displayed on the screen.
* One or two player game
* Three difficulty levels
* Three board sizes
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Reversi is an old board game that seems to make a reappearance every
generation or so. In the late seventies, it had regained popularity
from one toy company under the trademark Othello.
Atari licensed the name Othello for a video game version, but the game
itself was in public domain, so Mattel also did a version. In trying
to come up with a title for it, Mattel discovered that the classic
name of the game, Reversi, had never been trademarked. So Reversi (TM
Mattel) became the name of the cartridge.
_________________________________________________________________
Sports Network �
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INTELLIVISION SPORTS NETWORK
No doubt about it, these are the games that first sold the
Intellivision. An early TV commercial showing a side-by-side
comparison of baseball played on an Atari 2600 and on an Intellivsion
made the Atari version look laughable. The Intellivision was
established as the serious sports-game machine, and Major League
Baseball went on to become the best-selling Intellivision cartridge.
Mostly programmed for Mattel Electronics by APh Technology
Consultants in 1979 and 1980, the games are impressive, especially
when keeping in mind that all of them (except for Motocross,
World Championship Baseball and the unfinished Basketball II)
are only 4K in size. Also, most of these games require more than seven
players and a ball to appear on screen at the same time -- difficult
since the Intellivision can only draw eight moving objects on screen.
Tricky swapping of players from static background drawings to moving
objects and back achieves the illusion of more than eight moving at
once.
The main drawback to these games is that most require two players. By
1981, work was starting on second-generation sports games that
featured computer opponents; several of these were eventually released
by INTV Corporation.
The Sports Network games released by Mattel were in royal blue boxes
(with the exception of Motocross, which was released after the
themed "network" concept had been dropped). Several of these games
were also released under the Sears brand name in different packaging.
All of these games first appeared in 1980 except Bowling and
Boxing, which came out in 1981, and Motocross, which was
finally shipped in 1983. World Championship Baseball was released
by INTV Corp. in 1985.
_________________________________________________________________
Auto Racing
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1113]
Also released by Sears
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Snap on your crash helmet, fire up your Formula I, and slam it into
first. Power through the first turn and you're off on a Grand Prix
class racing circuit.
The faster you push your race car the more alert you have to be. You
may slide off the track and into a maze of grass and trees. You may
find yourself skidding into a pond. Or you may find yourself halfway
through a hairpin turn before you know it.
Whether you race against an opponent or against the clock, there are
thrills enough for anybody
* Five different race cars
* Five different race courses
* One or two players
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY: There were two versions of Auto Racing released
due to a running change made during manufacturing. In the original
version, steering is realistic -- it is oriented to the car. For
example, if your car is moving downward onscreen and you want to turn
right (that is, toward the left of the screen), you press right on the
hand controller disc. Mattel received complaints about how difficult
this was (even the instruction book warns that it takes some getting
used to), so a running change was ordered to make steering intuitive
-- to orient it to the screen. In the above example, to turn toward
the left of the screen, you press left on the hand controller disc,
even though the car is actually making a right.
Both versions had their advocates -- intuitive steering being easier
to play; realistic steering being a better simulation of driving. One
programmer likened it to the difference between driving an automatic
and driving a stick. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell which
version is which from the package; you either have to check the
instruction book, or just plug in the cartridge and play.
FUN FACT: The five courses are mapped on a globe; you can drive off
one, through the trees, and onto another, or onto the hidden drag
strip. Drive off at the right place and the trees are spaced so that,
without touching the hand controller, your car will circle the globe
forever (well, until the screen-saver times out).
_________________________________________________________________
NHL Hockey
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1114]
Trademark used under license from NHL Services, Inc.
Also released by Sears as Hockey
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Your opponent has a man in the penalty box, so it's time to push hard
on offense. There's the whistle! Time to move down the ice. Your team
mows toward the opposing goal in perfect formation, nudging the puck
back and forth as defenders move in.
You're across the blue line. You send a pass across the front of the
goal, then...wham! a screaming slap shot whips past the goalie and in
for the score.
The crowd roars its approval. And the buzzer announces the end of the
game. You won! A little practice and you'll be ready for the big time.
* Two players
* Face offs, trapping, interception, penalty box
PRODUCTION NOTE
NHL Hockey was one of the games to be included on the Go For the Gold
album cartridge.
_________________________________________________________________
Tennis
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1814]
Also released by Sears
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Thunk! You send a screaming serve across the net. Your opponent races
to intercept it and returns a lofty lob into your deep backcourt. You
get to it in time to send a smashing ground shot just out of reach of
your opponent's outstretched racquet.
Play an entire three set match, and each game will be different and
exciting. You control ball placement, velocity and strategy. And it's
a game of wits as well as of dexterity. Even the crowd gets in the act
by turning their heads to follow the ball -- and cheering at just the
right time.
* Two players
* Full three set matches
* Control ball velocity and placement
_________________________________________________________________
NASL Soccer
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1683]
Trademark used under license from NASL Marketing, Inc.
Also released by Sears as Soccer
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
A well executed drive down the soccer field is a thing of beauty. The
man with the ball jukes, whirls, passes to his teammate. The teammate
dribbles toward the goal until he attracts a crowd of opponents. Then
he passes to a third man who sets up the score.
The game action is as realistic as the excitement of Pro Soccer --
minus the black 'n blue shins.
* Two players
* Corner kicks, goal kicks, free kicks
* Realistic action and sound effects
PRODUCTION NOTE
An M Network Atari 2600 version, called International Soccer, was
released.
_________________________________________________________________
PGA Golf
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1816]
Trademark used under license from the Professional Golfers'
Association of America
Also released by Sears as Golf
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Stand steady at the tee...head down...slow backswing. Now, drive your
tee shot 220 yards down the fairway, splitting a pair of sandtraps.
Loft a five iron onto the green. And sink a twenty foot putt for a
birdie!
You control the swing and aim throughout 9 championship quality holes.
The fairways and greens are beautifully manicured, but the sand traps
are deep...and the rough is...rough!
* Up to four players
* 9 holes
* 9 clubs
* Realistic sound effects
_________________________________________________________________
U.S. Ski Team Skiing
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1817]
Trademark used under license of the United States Ski Team, Inc.
Also released by Sears as Skiing [#4975219]
Re-released by INTV Corp. as Alpine Skiing [INTV #1817]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Take a deep breath, dig your poles hard into the snow, push off...and
you're speeding down a world class skiing course.
Stay low and glide gracefully through the turns because you're in a
race against the clock. But don't cut the comers too sharply or you'll
go tumbling! All the excitement of the Winter Olympics on a beautiful
video snowscape.
* Up to six players
* Downhill and slalom course
* Jump moguls, edge through turns, race downhill
PRODUCTION NOTE
U.S. Ski Team Skiing was one of the games to be included on the Go For
the Gold album cartridge.
FUN FACT: A couple years after the game was finished, a Mattel
programmer needed to take a look at the original APh source code. He
was startled to find that all variables and subroutines were named
with the vilest (and most creative) obscenities.
_________________________________________________________________
Boxing
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1819]
Also released by Sears
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Slip into the powerfully muscled body of the fighter of your choice.
Maybe you'll go for a power slugger. Or an agile defender. Or a
completely unpredictable fighter.
There's the bell! You're playing at championship speed, so the action
is lightning fast. Feint, duck, block, then move in for a quick
combination.
Remember that your fighter is using up precious energy. And each punch
he takes has its toll. So use your brains as well as your brawn -- and
keep your warrior in shape to go 15 rounds.
* Two players
* Four skill levels
* Six different boxers
* 15 rounds, KO's, point decisions, endurance limits
PRODUCTION NOTE
Boxing was one of the games to be included on the Go For the Gold
album cartridge.
_________________________________________________________________
NFL Football
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#2610]
Trademark used under license of National Football League Properties,
Inc.
Also released by Sears as Football
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
The whistle blows! The crowd roars! The two teams sprint onto the
field and line up for the opening kickoff.
Your ball, first and ten on the twenty yard line. Will you grind out
the yardage on the ground...or risk a long bomb for a quick score? You
and your opponent can choose from over 180 offensive and defensive
plays -- so it's as much a game of strategy as execution.
Two full halves of fun. With all the refinements of passing, punting,
end runs and razzle-dazzles. The computer keeps track of time and
score, and the crowd lets you know what it thinks of your performance.
* Two players
* Call realistic offensive and defensive plays
* Scoreboard monitors downs, yards to go, time outs, time remaining,
and score
PRODUCTION NOTE
An M Network Atari 2600 version, called Super Challenge Football, was
released.
_________________________________________________________________
Major League Baseball
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#2614]
Trademark used under license of Major League Baseball Promotion Corp.
Also released by Sears as Baseball
Re-released by INTV Corp. as Big League Baseball [INTV #2614]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
The crowd roars as the nine man home team sprints out onto the field.
Then you and your opponent use all the tricks in the book to score the
winning run.
You control all the action -- balls and strikes, hit and run, double
plays and stolen bases. And it's not over until the last out of the
ninth inning!
* Two players
* Nine full innings
* Control pitching, fielding, base running, batting
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Developed at APh during 1979, Major League Baseball came out in 1980
and went on to become the best selling Intellivision cartridge, with
1,085,700 shipped as of June 4, 1983 (the last date for which figures
are available). After Mattel Electronics went out of business,
INTV Corp. changed the name of the cartridge to Big League
Baseball rather than pay to renew the Major League Baseball trademark
license.
An M Network Atari 2600 version, called Super Challenge Baseball, was
released.
FUN FACT: Major League Baseball is the only cartridge to use the
Intellivision sound chip for speech synthesis (the umpire crying "Yer
out!"). Marketing put a stop to any further such use, fearing it would
hurt sales of the Intellivoice module.
_________________________________________________________________
NBA Basketball
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#2615]
Trademark used under license of NBA Properties, Inc. and the National
Basketball Association
Also released by Sears as Basketball [#4975203]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Two teams square off at mid-court. Up they go for the jump ball. It's
tipped to your team. You fake, drive, and move in for a slam dunk!
Each three man team of remarkably realistic athletes can dribble. Pass
in any direction, jump, block, steal...even take a casual set shot
when they've caught the other guys napping.
Four action-packed quarters -- plus overtime when needed!
* Pass, steal, rebound, fast break, jump or set shot
* Two players
PRODUCTION NOTE
NBA Basketball was one of the games to be included on the Go For the
Gold album cartridge.
_________________________________________________________________
PBA Bowling
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3333]
Trademark used under license of Professional Bowlers' Association
Also released by Sears as Bowling [#4975223]
Program, graphics: Rick Levine, Mike Minkoff
Sound: John Sohl
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Warm up by picking up some tricky spares. Now you're ready for ten
frames of championship bowling. Select the bail weight you prefer.
Decide how "slick" you want the alley. Take a few deep breaths
and...you're up!
Aim carefully allowing for loft and curve. Release nice and smooth,
and watch the ball plunge into the sweet part of the pocket. Strike!
Keep it up, score 200, and you'll get a rousing fanfare.
* Up to four players
* Nine ball weights
* Ten alley speeds
* Licensed by The Professional Bowlers Association
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
PBA Bowling was the first Intellivision game actually programmed by
Mattel employees: Mike Minkoff and Rick Levine from the handheld-games
department. Since Mattel didn't have development equipment yet (1980),
Mike and Rick commuted from Mattel in Hawthorne to APh in Pasadena
three days a week. Mike gives Rick, an avid bowler, credit for the
many realistic details in the game.
_________________________________________________________________
Motocross
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3411]
AKA MX
Design: Rick Koenig, Rick Levine
Program: Rick Koenig
Graphics: Rick Levine, Joe Ferreira
Sound: Mark Urbaniec
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION
Speeding up the long straights, blasting through tight S turns, or
hurling across wild jumps, you're meant to eat dirt and claim victory!
What a racing bike you've got! The competition is fierce, the terrain
is rough. Challenge your toughest adversary, then leave him behind, as
you cross the finish line!
* For one or two players!
* Three rugged, exciting racing courses to choose from. And another
you can design yourself!
* 1-bike or 2-bike spectator courses too!
* Normal direction, reverse direction -- take your pick! Up to 10
laps!
* Lots of action! Out-maneuver, out-class your opponents!
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Started by Rick Levine in 1981 as his follow-up project to PBA
Bowling, Motocross was put on hold when Rick left Mattel. (Tired of
commuting from Irvine to Hawthorne, Rick took a non-gaming job. Later,
he went to work for Imagic, where he programmed the Intellivision
games Microsurgeon and Truckin'.) Months later, biker Rick Koenig took
a stab at completing the game. After several weeks, he got permission
to scrap the existing code and begin from scratch. Only Rick Levine's
basic concept and graphics were kept, with new animations by Joe
Ferreira.
Rick Koenig approached the game scientifically, writing routines to
simulate all the movements of the cycles according to the laws of
physics. The result is motorcycles that accelerate, skid and jump
realistically.
Although announced in Mattel catalogs in 1981 and 1982 as part of the
Intellivision Sports Network, by the time the game was released in
1983 the themed "networks" had been dropped. The Sports Network isn't
mentioned on Motocross's final packaging.
FUN FACT: Gravity is a factor in the motion routines. During testing,
Rick made gravity adjustable to determine the best looking arc when
jumping. Several unsuspecting programmers were invited to test the
game, not knowing gravity had been set to zero. The first time their
cycles hit a ramp, the cycles would sail up-up-and-away off the
screen, while the programmers frantically tapped the controller discs,
trying to make them come back down.
FUN FACT: Rick was able to reuse his basic algorithms from Motocross
several times: in Racing Destruction Set, a Commodore 64 game for
Electronic Arts (produced by his old Mattel boss, Don Daglow), in
Stadium Mud Buggies, an Intellivision game for INTV Corp., and in
Monster Truck Rally, an NES game also for INTV.
_________________________________________________________________
World Championship Baseball
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [INTV #5789]
AKA Baseball II, All-Star Major League Baseball
Credits and description are on the INTV RELEASES page (under
construction).
_________________________________________________________________
Basketball II
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [UNFINISHED]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
During 1981, APh started work on Baseball II and Basketball II --
one-player versions of the original games. These were not high
priorities since the original versions continued to sell well. In
1982, when the Keyboard Component was killed, Marketing wanted to
produce a series of Super Sports cartridges for the ECS to help push
that system, so work was halted on the non-ECS sports games.
Baseball II was far enough along that, eventually, it was
released. Basketball II, however, was abandoned (although it was
briefly considered as an Intellivision III title).
_________________________________________________________________
Space Network �
���������������
INTELLIVISION SPACE ACTION NETWORK
By the end of 1981, Intellivision had the reputation for the best
sports titles and Atari had the reputation for the best arcade games.
In 1982 the battle was over who had the best space cartridges. The
movie Star Wars in 1977 had sparked a science fiction resurgence,
which hit a peak in 1982 with the release of E.T.: The
Extra-Terrestrial. Mattel Electronics turned to the same TV-commercial
strategy they used to establish their sports titles: a side-by-side
comparison of an Atari game with an Intellivision game, in this case
Asteroids versus Star Strike. The strategy paid off; four of the
five released Space Action Network games approached the 1,000,000 mark
in sales, with the fifth, Space Hawk, reaching 500,000.
Atari fought back with its highly publicized multi-million dollar
purchase of the videogame rights to E.T. Atari used the anticipation
for this cartridge to sell their 2600 console. Cleverly, Mattel
countered by hiring E.T. star Henry Thomas to join spokesperson George
Plimpton in Intellivision commercials. Mattel's lawyers, however, to
avoid a lawsuit, didn't allow Thomas's connection to the movie, or to
science fiction, or even his name to be mentioned in the commercials.
(While the anticipation of the E.T. cartridge may have succeeded in
selling Atari consoles, its actual release was the greatest flop in
the videogame industry.)
Surprisingly, given the success of the Space Action Network, Mattel
put no space titles into production for the Intellivision during 1982
or 1983 with the exception of the never-finished Target: Andromeda.
All of the games on this page were released in Space Action Network
dark blue boxes. A couple of these games were also released under the
Sears brand name in different packaging.
_________________________________________________________________
Space Battle
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#2612]
Also released by Sears [#4975212]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
The alien squadron is closing in on your Mother Ship. You're awesomely
outnumbered, and they attack and attack...
Flick on the situation map and analyze your position. Dispatch a
fighter squadron toward the closest alien cluster.
You're smarter, a little faster, and you're going to let these aliens
know they've got a fight on their hands.
Flick back to a cockpit close-up view. Here they come! Aim
lasers...fire!
* Computerized situation map
* Close-up attack viewer
* Computerized and manual battle modes
PRODUCTION NOTE
An M Network version of the game, called Space Attack, was released
for the Atari 2600.
PLAYING TIPS: From Intellivision Game Club News, Issue 2, Winter 1982
(credited to "Hal, one of our creative programmers"):
Strategy Mode (radar screen)
* Fight your own fights -- when the computer fights for you, you
will probably lose more ships than if you fought the battle
yourself. Rotate through your squadrons if more than one is
engaged.
* Stagger dispatches -- if you carefully time your squadron
dispatching, you may be able to complete the first battle before
your second squadron engages.
* Don't let the radar screen fool you -- make your dispatch
decisions based on the actual distances from the aliens to your
mother ship. The rectangular layout on the game screen may cause
you to misjudge the distance.
* Win the battle but don't lose the war -- the instant one of your
squadrons defeats an alien squadron, dispatch your squadron to
another alien group or return it to base. Don't waste valuable
time by leaving a squadron drifting aimlessly in space.
* Hit them where it hurts -- if an alien squadron penetrates your
home base territory, send in one of your squadrons. Keep the alien
squadron busy and they'll have less striking power to use against
your home base.
Battle Mode
* Practice aiming -- lead the ships with your cursor for best
results.
* Keep moving -- after firing, it's not necessary to keep your
cursor on target. Your lasers will blast the spot at which they
were fired. Move on to a new target, and keep mobile to avoid
enemy lasers.
* Avoid target fixation -- keep switching back to the radar screen
to track alien progress.
_________________________________________________________________
Arcade
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [UNFINISHED #3605]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Galaxian strategy! Hordes of oncoming aliens swoop down on your
star-ship! You defend your position -- parrying, blasting, avoiding
the torpedoes! Wave after wave of them march down upon you...will you
save the star-base? Only your command of strategy can help you!
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Although included in early Intellivision catalogs, a prototype of this
game was never demonstrated; it's not clear how much work was actually
ever done on it. Designed to be a Galaxian clone, it was probably
abandoned for fear of a lawsuit. (Possibly it was in development with
the hope of obtaining the license, and abandoned when Mattel failed to
get it.) While called Arcade in the catalogs, this was most likely a
working title. (Triple Action was developed under the working
titles 5-in-1 Arcade and 3-in-1 Arcade.)
_________________________________________________________________
Space Armada
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3759]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
You're defending Planet Earth against the unrelenting attack of alien
warlords.
At first they throw their light brigades at you. If you're quick and
careful, you should be able to elude their bombs, moving out of the
way or taking refuge behind a bunker.
But when you wipe out the first couple of brigades, they'll launch a
more deadly attack, dropping faster, more lethal bombs. Clear the
battlefield once more, and they'll resort to guided missiles and even
more fiendish devices.
You've got your hands full -- of excitement and aliens!
* Two skill levels
* Varied alien weaponry
* Invisible targets
* Super sound effects
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Space Armada is a clone of the arcade game Space Invaders. According
to Mattel lawyers, the copyright of the original game hadn't been
properly protected. Any other company could make their own version as
long as they changed the name ("Space Invaders" is a trademark).
Space Armada was the first Intellivision game to take advantage of
sequencing GRAM to create the illusion of more than eight moving
objects (sprites) onscreen at one time.
PLAYING TIPS: From Intellivision Game Club News, Issue 3, Summer 1982:
* Start to the right. Knock off vertical columns to delay the armada
from advancing down another rank. The fewer columns left in the
armada, the better your chances of clearing the screen as the
armada approaches the bottom.
* Hit the saucer. It's difficult but well worth it. Not only do you
get points, a bunker will be rebuilt as well.
* Don't get hit. Stay mobile or hide behind the bunkers. You'll need
every "life" possible late in the game.
* Remember the red spiral missiles don't need a direct hit to cause
damage. If you're too close when the missile hits bottom, your
base will be destroyed.
* Outmaneuver the red homing missiles. Lead them into a bunker. They
will crash and self-destruct. Or, lead them along to one side,
quickly double-back underneath and fire.
* Concentrate. Remember the structure of the invisible armadas. Many
good players suffer early defeat because they forgot the presence
of just one alien.
_________________________________________________________________
Astrosmash
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3605]
Working titles: Rocks, Meteor! + Avalanche
Design & Program: John Sohl
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Spin. Blast. And drop into hyperspace to avoid a killer asteroid
shower. Power on. Attack computer engaged. Fire a quick burst at the
alien antagonists. Got 'em!
Now take a deep breath and relax. But only for a fraction of a second,
because more trouble is on the way.
You're all alone in a hostile universe of tumbling asteroids and
homicidal aliens. You've got the wits and the speed, but you're
awesomely outnumbered.
With a little practice, you may survive...
* Battle aliens and tumbling asteroids
* Unlimited scoring potential
* Hyperspace feature
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Astrosmash started out as a clone of the arcade game Asteroids, called
Meteor. The game wasn't very big, so John Sohl used the extra room in
the cartridge to come up with a variation called Avalanche using the
same graphics and sound effects. At the last minute, afraid of a
lawsuit from Atari, the Mattel lawyers killed the Asteroids-like
Meteor. Rather than risk introducing bugs by deleting code, John
simply put a branch around the opening-screen menu straight into the
Avalanche variation, which was released under the name Astrosmash.
Astrosmash quickly became one of the most popular Intellivision games
thanks in large part to a very simple technique John programmed in:
like most arcade-style games, Astrosmash gets faster and harder at
higher levels, but unlike most arcade-style games, as you start to
lose lives, the game gets easier again. The game then is never too
easy or too hard, making it extremely addictive and making it possible
for even a beginner to play a single game for over an hour.
The popularity of Astrosmash was such that late in 1982 it replaced
Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack as the cartridge shipped with the
Intellivision Master Component. By June 1983, the last date for which
figures are available, 984,900 copies of Astrosmash had been shipped,
making it the most widely distributed cartridge by any of the Blue Sky
Rangers (trailing only the APh produced Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack
and Major League Baseball cartridges). John Sohl was rewarded with
a plaque from Mattel and a better offer from Activision, which he took
(after finishing B-17 Bomber).
An Aquarius version was also released, as was an M Network version
called Astroblast for the Atari 2600. A musical adaptation, Melody
Blaster, was released for the ECS Music Synthesizer. An obscene
version, called...well, we can't tell you what it was called, was
developed for in-house use only. The story of this version can be
found in a TRON Solar Sailer FUN FACT.
BUG: There's no check for the score overflowing -- beyond 9,999,999
points, the scoring routine starts displaying negative numbers,
letters, and other ASCII characters. (Ironically, the catalog
description promises "Unlimited scoring potential.")
BUG: John simply branched around the code for the Asteroids version of
the game; the code is still in the cartridge. Verrrry rarely, when
there's a glitch hitting RESET, the Asteroids version will show up on
screen. (This would be a dandy Easter egg if it were intentional or
reliably repeatable, but it's neither.)
PLAYING TIPS: From Intellivision Game Club News, Issue 1, Fall 1981:
Here is some extra ammunition from John P. Sohl, creator of
Astrosmash. [Note: this issue was the only time that Intellivision
programmers were publicly referred to by name until the inclusion of
credits on cartridges late in 1983. The same issue mentions Mike
Minkoff as the creator of Bowling.] Sohl says you'll be unbeatable
if you follow three basic rules: don't get hit, shoot anything that
moves and never take risks unless you have to.
Sound easy? It is if you practice Sohl's special techniques for
hitting your targets.
* To hit rocks, fire two shots rapidly. The first will split the
rock, the second will explode both smaller fragments. If you are
threatened by a rock and a spinner, go for the spinner.
* Shoot the fastest falling spinners first. Aim carefully; the extra
moment you take aiming usually pays off with a hit on the first
shot. Go for spinners at any cost -- if one reaches the ground,
you've lost.
* Guided missiles are easy to shoot, hard to evade so shoot them
high on the screen before they give you trouble. If you miss
they'll follow you around. The only way to get rid of them is to
lure them off the edge of the screen and use the hyperspace to get
away.
* The UFO will appear when the score is over 20,000. It shoots
torpedoes at your laser base whenever the base is when the shot is
fired. So keep moving and you will avoid 90% of all UFO torpedoes.
Precision aiming is important. To get the highest scores, Sohl says to
leave the anti-fire on and steer with the directional wheel using the
firing button to get off extra shots as you need them. Keep on
shooting!
FUN FACT: The unused Asteroids-version code was recycled in the game
Space Hawk.
FUN FACT: Late in 1981, Mattel held a series of local "Intellivision
VideoChallenge Tournaments" in Washington D.C., Baltimore, New York,
Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles benefiting Variety Clubs
International. Contestants competed for prizes (Grand Prize: an RCA
projection TV) playing Major League Baseball, Auto Racing, and
U.S. Ski Team Skiing. The publicity was so good, that Marketing
took the idea national in 1982 with the "$100,000 Astrosmash
Shootoff."
From March until August 11, Intellivision owners were invited to send
photographs of their TV screens showing their high score in
Astrosmash. Just for entering, they would receive an Astrosmash
Shootout patch, and it was announced that 16 regional high-scorers
would be flown to Houston to compete for eight cash prizes.
Over 13,000 people entered, and quickly it became obvious there was a
problem. First, because of the scoring bug, many of the pictures
showed scores made up of seemingly random ASCII characters. John Sohl
had to review the photos and, with an ASCII table, decipher the actual
scores. Second, it turned out that no one in Marketing realized that
Astrosmash, like many Intellivision games, can be played at slower
speeds simply by starting the game by pressing 1, 2, or 3 instead of
the disc. (This is a feature programmed into the EXEC.) There was
no way of telling who had legitimately obtained a high score and who
had played at the easiest speed. There were reports of competitors who
literally played for days at the slowest speed, pausing the game
(pressing 1 and 9 simultaneously, also programmed into the EXEC) to
sleep or go to school.
Unable to decide who was legit and who wasn't, instead of the
announced 16, Mattel Electronics wound up flying 73 entrants to
Houston for an all-expense paid weekend, September 11 & 12, 1982.
There, the entrants competed in 1 hour of timed play. 18-year-old
Manuel Rodriguez of Stockton, California won the $25,000 top prize
with a score of 835,180.
_________________________________________________________________
Space Hawk
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5161]
Also released by Sears
Design & Program: Bill Fisher, John Sohl
Graphics & Sound: Bill Fisher
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
You're equipped with a jetpack for directional avoidance control, a
blaster for protection and 5 force shields. If you get hit, you lose a
shield. Not only that, you're sent into a space spin that could be
disastrous. While you're regaining control, UFOs and comets scream
past you. Of course, you can use hyperspace to get out of a
super-tight spot. That'll put a few million light years between you
and danger. But, watch out. You could wind up in an even hotter spot.
If you want to find out how good you are, invite a friend over,
compare scores.
* One player game
* As your score goes up, the game automatically becomes more
challenging
* Laser fire and maneuvering options add variety
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Most new programmers started their first day with a copy of a simple
training game called Killer Tomatoes. They were expected to spend a
few weeks playing with it and modifying it to get a feel for how the
Intellivision system worked before being assigned to a real game.
Bill Fisher, however, had a different training game. On his first day
in June 1981 he was given John Sohl's original Asteroids version of
Astrosmash. He was told to modify it into a game that would still
be like Asteroids, but different enough that the Mattel lawyers would
allow it to be released. Space Hawk was the result. (And while he was
at it, he fixed the bug in displaying the score.)
FUN FACT: While testing the game, Bill came across a bug: every now
and then, the game would, seemingly at random, hyperspace you. He and
his boss, Mike Minkoff, went over the code with a fine-tooth comb
before realizing what the problem was: the Intellivision hand
controllers encode button presses in such a way that an action (side)
key pressed at the same time as particular directions on the disc will
be interpreted instead as a numeric key being pressed. There was no
software way around this; shooting while moving would occasionally be
interpreted as pressing 9 -- the hyperspace button.
After several days of puzzling over a solution, the bug was ultimately
"fixed" by including the following note in the instruction manual:
"Every once in a while, your space hunter will move near a 'black
hole,' and the computer will automatically put him into HYPERSPACE.
This will cost you the same number of points as if you had pressed the
HYPERSPACE key yourself. On the other hand, it will save your hunter."
This led to an axiom frequently heard around Mattel: If you document
it, it's not a bug -- it's a feature. Anytime a game in development
crashed -- no matter how badly or bizarrely -- witnesses would
invariably turn to the frustrated programmer, shrug, and calmly say
"document it."
_________________________________________________________________
Star Strike
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5136]
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
For action fast and furious, take command of a rocket-powered
fighter-interceptor flying a few hundred feet off the deck. Your
mission: attack and destroy alien silos defended by several squadrons
of alien rocket-craft. You must react instantaneously. You are a few
hundred feet above the terrain in a narrow canyon. That's where the
aliens have dug in. Maneuvering room is severely limited. Meanwhile,
earth is slowly coming into target position for the silos. Remember,
you alone can save earth. Don't miss.
* One player game
* Six skill levels for greater challenge
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Inspired by the Death Star trench sequence from the movie Star Wars,
Star Strike is actually a very simple game; most players quickly learn
the timing of it to consistently win. But visually it was stunning,
with a 3-D effect (accomplished by sequencing GRAM) not seen
before in a home videogame. Heavily promoted, it was the top-selling
Intellivision game of 1982, with nearly 800,000 units shipped that
year.
BUG: Hold down the left controller disk in a single position while
simultaneously pressing one of the top action keys. The fighter will
soon remain in a fixed position on the screen. Release the disk to
unfreeze the fighter.
PLAYING TIPS: From Intellivision Game Club News, Issue 3, Summer 1982:
* Stay mobile. Keep moving up, down, left and right when the aliens
are behind you. Don't give them a stationary target.
* Practice firing at the aliens. Line up the alien ship between you
and your laser's vanishing point.
* Try shooting down both aliens. Doubling up on targets will give
you a little extra time to align your ship for bombing before a
new wave of aliens appear. You'll add extra points to your score.
* Stay on the deck. It's much more difficult to bomb the alien's
silos from a high altitude. Stay low and score higher.
* Keep a mental scorecard. Keep track of alien silos destroyed.
Don't risk damage by going after a "dead" silo.
* Be aware of damage. Keep a careful record of your ship's
capabilities. Damage reduces control. Don't ask your ship to do
something it can't in emergency situations.
FUN FACT: The Star Strike TV commercial became probably the most
notorious of all videogame commercials of its era, with Mattel
Electronics spokesperson George Plimpton bragging about "our most
amazing visual effect ever: the total destruction of a planet!" while
the earth is seen being blasted to pieces. Comedians, cartoonists and
politicians all jumped on this as an example of the glorification of
violence in videogames.
Children's Network �
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CHILDREN'S LEARNING NETWORK
Intellivision was promised as an educational as well as an
entertainment product, and one of the first four titles released,
The Electric Company Math Fun reflected this. However, Mattel
quickly saw where the money was -- sports and arcade titles -- and
educational games were put on the back burner.
Only two titles came out as part of the orange-boxed Children's
Learning Network. No others were even in development. (Partly this was
due to the belief that the Intellivision Keyboard Component was
better suited to educational games.) Each of these games ultimately
sold just under 150,000 copies -- low by Intellivision standards.
_________________________________________________________________
The Electric Company Word Fun
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1122]
Trademark used under license from Children's Television Workshop, Inc.
AKA Word Fun
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
How those little monkeys love to learn! Watch them swing through the
jungle, capturing letters with their tails and making words.
Three great learning games. Find A Word has little learners weaving
words in and out of each other. Word Hunt sends them into the jungle
looking for missing letters.
And Word Rocket has them blasting vowels into the sky to make words
out of clouds of consonants. It's the fun and easy way to improve
vocabulary skills.
* Three fascinating word games
* One or two players
* Developed in conjunction with The Children's Television Workshop
PRODUCTION NOTES
Find A Word was renamed Crosswords between the printing of the
catalogs and the release of the cartridge.
The three games in the Word Fun cartridge were recycled in the
Learning Fun II cartridge from INTV Corporation.
BUG: The game won't work when plugged into an Intellivision II. A
feature to keep early Coleco-produced Intellivision cartridges from
working in the Intellivision II inadvertently keeps Word Fun from
working also. Marketing didn't feel Word Fun was important enough to
hold up release of Intellivision II to fix the problem.
_________________________________________________________________
The Electric Company Math Fun
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#2613]
Trademark used under license from Children's Television Workshop, Inc.
AKA Math Fun
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Who would guess that learning basic arithmetic skills could be this
much fun!
To solve the math problems, two players race their clever gorillas
along the river bank, ducking past obstructing animals.
The math gets more challenging when the players are ready for it.
Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division -- all are more fun
with Math Fun.
* Accomodates wide range of learning levels
* One or two players
* Developed in conjunction with The Children's Television Workshop
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Although it has a higher production number than Word Fun, Math Fun
was released first -- it was one of the original four cartridges test
marketed in 1979.
Initially, the solutions for math problems had to be entered ones
column first. For example, when subtracting 5 from 24, the solution,
19, would have to be entered as 9, then 1. While this was designed to
duplicate how people solve problems with pencil and paper, many
customers complained; intuitively, they wanted to simply press in 1
then 9. A running change was ordered so that later copies of the
cartridge use this intuitive method of entry, instead.
The Electric Company Math Fun was recycled as the game Math Master on
the Learning Fun I cartridge from INTV Corporation.
_________________________________________________________________
Gaming Network �
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INTELLIVISION ACTION NETWORK
The Gaming Network featured "betting" games, with the word "bet"
always in quotes or following the word "simulated" or "make-believe,"
lest people think Mattel was promoting gambling.
Gaming Network cartridges were released in green boxes. Several of
these games were also released under the Sears brand name in different
packaging.
_________________________________________________________________
Las Vegas Roulette
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1118]
Also released by Sears
AKA Roulette
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Can you parlay your pile of chips into a fortune? Do you dare risk it
all on a single number that you just know is due to come up on the
next spin of the wheel? Here's a great party game with all the sound
and color of the big casino. Place your "bets"...all "bets" down? Then
here goes the big wheel of fortune -- clickety-click-click -- and
cross your fingers as the wheel slows and the ball bounces toward your
lucky number.
* Authentic roulette table layout
* One or two players
_________________________________________________________________
Horse Racing
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1123]
Also released by Sears
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
A great game of make-believe for up to 6 players. It's like spending a
day at the races. Study the tout sheet. Pick a winner -- or a loser.
The odds will change. Go for a long shot or play it safe. They're off
and the excitement begins. Cheer your horse on. You could clean up --
on paper. A fun party game.
_________________________________________________________________
Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#2611]
Also released by Sears
AKA: Poker & Blackjack
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
From the shuffle of the cards...to the clinking of the coins...to the
felt green of the gaming table...to the shifty eyes of the dealer,
Intellivision has captured the flavor and the color of casino card
games.
Play poker! Five card stud or draw. Seven card stud. This dealer plays
tough. He raises, drops, even bluffs. Play carefully because he'd like
nothing better than to empty your wallet.
When you've had enough poker, relax with a few hands of blackjack.
Play real casino style and double down when you feel hot!
FUN FACT: Because it came free with the Intellivision Master Component
during 1980, 1981 and most of 1982, Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack had
the most distribution of any Intellivision cartridge: over 1,900,000
shipped by the end of 1982. When it was eventually replaced by
Astrosmash as the free cartridge, distribution fell dramatically; only
2,500 Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack cartridges were shipped in the first
six months of 1983.
_________________________________________________________________
Las Vegas Craps
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [UNRELEASED]
AKA Craps
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
PRODUCTION HISTORY
APh completed (and was paid for) this adaptation of the dice game
Craps, but it doesn't appear to have ever been announced or scheduled
by Marketing for release.
_________________________________________________________________
Royal Dealer
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#3758]
Working titles: Cards, Card Fun
Produced by APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
If you don't always have someone to play cards with and you're not
challenged enough by Solitaire, this cartridge introduces you to three
players and three different card games: Hearts, Rummy and Crazy
Eights. Your computer deals the cards and keeps score. You can choose
to play against one, two or three players.
* One player game
* Choose from three different games
* One, two, or three computer opponents
PRODUCTION HISTORY
While a fairly minor release (36,000 initial shipment), Royal Dealer
had a major effect on the development cycle inside Mattel Electronics.
Long overdue from APh, when the game was finished it went straight
into production with only brief playtesting by a few other
programmers. When it was too late, it was discovered that the
cartridge contained a major -- and easy to come across -- bug that
crashed the game. Because of the low sales expected, Marketing decided
to ship the cartridge anyway with an errata slip, but they were
furious. The Quality Assurance department, which had frequently been
bypassed on late games such as this one and B-17 Bomer, was
immediately given life-or-death authority over all future games:
nothing was allowed to be released until the official game testers
Traci Roux and Dale Lynn had signed off on it. They were merciless:
stomping on a game then gleefully showing the videotaped results to
the programmer when they found a bug. But it paid off; to this day, we
haven't seen any reports of bugs in games they approved.
BUG: Recreating the bug discussed above was outlined in a September
30, 1982 memo from game tester Traci Roux to Joel Crain, head of
Quality Assurance:
The following steps lead to the problems with Royal Dealer.
They occur in all four games. You are rearranging your cards and have
a card out of the deck. Then one of the players lays down her final
card and that round ends. The new round starts and you hit the disk. The
card from the last hand appears. Depending on how you rearrange and
throw your cards, different errors can occur. (If you hit rearrange first,
the game will progress normally, and the errors never occur.) The errors
that occur are:
You can rearrange the blank cards that are displayed. If you
rearrange enough times, the program gets confused and the screen
blanks out. You have to hit reset to start over.
Sometimes when you lift up a card to rearrange, you see it where the card
was. This usually occurs if this is one card by itself. If you have to draw
15 cards and they are all in a row, it usually will not let you pass. The
result is that you have to hit reset to start over. In Rummy, if you win
the round the music plays and the card screen comes up. The screen doesn't
show "GIN" by your hand and a card shows up in your final hand that wasn't
there before. Results are that you can't continue to the next hand, and you
have to hit reset to start over. If a gap appears between your cards, you
cannot get to the cards on the left side of the gap. The gap will go away
if you can discard your cards on the right of the gap. If you need a heart,
for example, and you draw until you have 15 cards, you may have to pass. If
there is a heart on the left side of the gap, you cannot get to it, the
program sees the heart, and will not allow you to pass. The result is you
have to hit reset to start over.
Because of this bug, the following errata slip was added to the
packaging: "Please correct your instruction booklet on Page 2 to read:
You can only rearrange your cards each time it is your turn before
playing or discarding a card from your hand. Once you have played or
discarded, you must wait until your next turn before rearranging your
cards."
_________________________________________________________________
Arcade Network �
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ARCADE NETWORK
It was obvious that Mattel was at a disadvantage in doing arcade game
conversions: Atari, through its coin-op division, created and owned
many of the most famous arcade titles. Mattel had to go shopping at
other arcade game companies, trying to license whatever popular games
were left over.
There was an alternative which many programmers and a number of
Marketing people favored: create good, original arcade-type games for
Intellivision, promote them, then license those titles to outside
coin-op companies; the companies would get the benefit of Mattel's
advertising, and Mattel would benefit from a line of Intellivision
coin-op machines in the arcades. Thus was born the Arcade Network.
However, while the first Arcade Network game, Vectron, was in
development, Mattel Electronics signed a deal with Data East for the
first option on their arcade games. Data East became, in effect,
Mattel's coin-op division and Marketing lost interest in the idea of
developing original arcade titles in-house. Aside from a big push in
the Intellivision Game Club News (Issue 5, Spring 1983), Vectron
was released with no promotion and no attempt was made at licensing it
to outside companies. There was no second Arcade Network game.
The Arcade Network box color was burgundy.
_________________________________________________________________
Vectron
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#5788]
Working titles: Vectrix, Vortex
Design, Program, Sound: Mark Urbaniec
Graphics: Connie Goldman
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
Hungrees, G-spheres, splits, sweeps and prizums -- the nasties are out
to stop you from building your energy bases. Use your Vectron to build
the bases level by level to increase your score. Or, use Vectron to
shoot down or stun the nasties with energy blasts. But don't run out
of energy, the nasties are nibbling away at your score. One or two
player action.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Mark wanted to capture the speed and color of the arcade game Tempest
in an Intellivision title. The challenge was that Tempsest used vector
graphics, while the Intellivision used TV's standard raster graphics.
To reflect that the game would have a vector graphics look and feel,
Mark chose the name Vectrix. Unfortunately, late in the development of
the game, the Vectrex Arcade System from General Consumer Electronics
(later bought by Milton Bradley) was announced -- a self-contained
home game system that used true vector graphics. Mattel briefly
considered fighting for the name, then decided to let it go. The game
was briefly titled Vortex before the final name -- Vectron -- was
chosen.
FUN FACT: Mark and Keith Robinson, who was programming TRON Solar
Sailer at the same time Mark was programming Vectron, both disliked
the built-in Intellivision font, and they both hated that the "at"
sign (@) was used as a copyright symbol on the title screens. They
developed custom fonts for their games and made a special point of
including a true c-in-circle copyright symbol in the character sets.
They proudly showed off their custom title screens to Management,
pointing out that for the first time Intellivision games would have
correct copyright symbols.
Management vetoed their use. The argument: if there was ever a court
fight over the legitimacy of the copyrights on the old games, Mattel
could argue that the "at" sign should be accepted in context as a
copyright symbol, since the Intellivision can't generate a true one.
Ah, but Vectron and TRON Solar Sailer would show that the
Intellivision could generate a true copyright symbol, thus
jeopardizing the copyrights of all previous Intellivision games. Mark
and Keith were ordered to use "at" signs, instead.
Feeling that this was about the stupidest thing they had ever heard,
Mark and Keith went directly to Roy Ekstrand, head of Mattel's legal
department, and presented their case. His decision: Mattel could argue
that technological advancements since the earlier games now made it
possible to use correct copyright symbols, where previously it wasn't.
It would be safe to use the real copyright symbols.
Gabriel Baum, VP of Applications Software, was furious that Mark and
Keith had gone over his head, and told them to "never do it again."
Then he told them to use their real copyright symbols.
They later wondered: Was it worth risking their jobs over something as
trivial as having the correct copyright symbol on their title screens?
Their conclusion: "Damn right it was."
FUN FACT: According to the instruction book, if you beat the top
level, #99, you will be rewarded with "a special little visual treat."
The treat? Due to space constraints, there was only room for a message
reading "Congratulations. You are very good." The difficulty increases
so much, though, that it is impossible to beat level 99. Or at least,
Mark hopes it is. "If I went through all that to see the 'special
visual treat' and all I got was, 'You are very good,'" Mark notes,
"I'd sure be pissed."
EASTER EGG: With the right combination of maneuvers with the energy
block, you can get Mark's name to appear on screen. Since Mattel
forbid hiding names in games, Mark made sure that the combination was
so complicated that no one would stumble across it by accident. Well,
he did such a good job hiding it, that he can't quite remember anymore
how to do it. He's trying to recreate the combination; we'll post it
here as soon as he finds it.
Intellivoice Games �
��������������������
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGES
Intellivoice was introduced with great fanfare in 1982, hitting
the market with three titles: Space Spartans, Bomb Squad
and B-17 Bomber. But while the Intellivoice and the games were
well reviewed, they were not big sellers. By June 1983, only
300,000 each of the voice unit and first games had been shipped
(compared to over 3 million Intellivisions); most of these were
still on store shelves. The fourth game, TRON Solar Sailer,
received only 90,000 orders. The release of a planned
International Intellivoice module was cancelled.
In August 1983, the plug was pulled on Intellivoice altogether.
Work continued on two titles, Space Shuttle and World
Series Major League Baseball, where the voice would become an
enhancement only; the rest were canceled. Space Shuttle was
canceled later, leaving World Series Major League Baseball to
become the fifth and final voice game released. The fact that it
works with Intellivoice is mentioned only briefly on the back of
the box.
FUN FACT: The Major League Baseball cartridge uses the
Intellivision's sound chip to generate a crude voice saying "Yer
out!" Marketing ordered a stop to further use of the sound chip to
synthesize voices, fearing it would hurt demand for the
Intellivoice.
CREDITS: All Intellivoice games had scripts by the Creative Media
Department (Joey Silvian, Brad Geagley, Glenn Stello) to develop
distinct personalities for the voices. Voices were recorded at
Fred Jones Recording Services in Hollywood, directed by Joey
Silvian. International voices were recorded at studios in France
and Italy and smuggled back into the U.S. on tapes marked "blank"
to avoid paying duty (really). Voice files were digitized, edited
and optimized by the Voice Department (Ron Carlson, Patrick Jost,
Deidre Cimarusti, Sandy Disner, Lynn [Liliedahl] Fordham, Irene
Pfannkuch). All Intellivoice programs included voice routines
written by Ron Surratt and Steve Roney.
The following list includes all Intellivoice games on which
programming was actually done. Games completed but never released
are marked UNRELEASED; games canceled before completion are marked
UNFINISHED.
_____________________________________________________________
Space Spartans
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#3416]
Design/Program/Graphics: Bill Fisher & Steve Roney, Mike Minkoff,
Brian Dougherty
Sound: Bill Fisher, Bill Goodrich
Voice of the Computer: Keri Tombazian
plus voice credits
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
You are the commander of a spaceship. Suddenly, your ship's under
attack. "Shields destroyed, Battle Computer one-third down," the
ship's computer warns. You've got to hold them off until you can
hyperdrive to a Starbase for repairs. "Starbase Two under attack!"
The aliens have you in their clutches -- "The battle is over."
Four different voices, two screens.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Space Spartans, the first Intellivoice game, was begun in mid-1981
by Brian Dougherty, who only worked on it a short time before
leaving to join the start-up company Imagic. Mike Minkoff took
over the project and developed it further. When Mike was promoted
to manager, he passed it off to the team of Bill Fisher and Steve
Roney, who really defined the game and made it more than just
Space Battle with voice.
At the time the game was in development, all Intellivision
cartridges were 4K in size. To accommodate the voice data, Space
Spartans was the first to be given a seemingly generous 8K. This
turned out to be woefully inadequate; dialogue had to be cut to a
minimum, and the sampling rate was dropped to the point where it's
difficult to distinguish the male voices from each other. Luckily,
dropping these to a very mechanical sound added to the sci-fi feel
of the game. Only the female computer voice was kept at a higher
rate, since it adds a strong note of personality. (Check out a
sample of her voice at the Blue Sky Rangers Souvenir Stand.)
All the voice games that followed were allocated 12 or 16K; even
the foreign versions of Space Spartans (Gli Spartani Dello
Spazio, Les Spartiates De L'Espace and Spartana Aus Dem
All) were given 12K each.
Most of the sound effects were written by Bill Fisher, but Bill
Goodrich contributed the explosions; this was fortunate, since it
helped find a bug in Intellivision II. While playing Space
Spartans on an Intellivision II, Bill Goodrich was distressed to
discover his explosions sounded "thin." Comparing other released
cartridges, he discovered similar loss of sound quality in the
bubbles in Shark! Shark! It was too late to fix the bug in
Intellivision II, so subsequent games were tested and reprogrammed
to get around any sound problems.
BUG: The level counter is not checked properly -- it allows you to
reach one higher level than it's supposed to. On that "level," you
can reposition the alien bases as if they were your own.
_____________________________________________________________
Les Spartiates De L'Espace
INTERNATIONAL INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [UNRELEASED]
AKA French Space Spartans
Program: Steve Roney
plus voice credits
DESCRIPTION
Space Spartans with a French title screen and voices.
Gameplay, graphics and sound effects are unchanged (aside from a
couple minor bug fixes: the level counter and an Intellivision II
sound-problem work-around). Requires the International
Intellivoice unit.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Steve made the modifications to the Space Spartans code for all
three foreign versions. The tricky part was that the syntax for
how numbers above ten are phrased varies from language to
language.
_____________________________________________________________
Gli Spartani Dello Spazio
INTERNATIONAL INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [UNRELEASED]
AKA Italian Space Spartans
Program: Steve Roney
plus voice credits
DESCRIPTION
Space Spartans with an Italian title screen and voices.
Gameplay, graphics and sound effects are unchanged (aside from a
couple minor bug fixes: the level counter and an Intellivision II
sound-problem work-around). Requires the International
Intellivoice unit.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
See Les Spartiates De L'Espace.
_____________________________________________________________
Spartana Aus Dem All
INTERNATIONAL INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [UNRELEASED]
AKA German Space Spartans
Program: Steve Roney
plus voice credits
DESCRIPTION
Space Spartans with a German title screen and voices.
Gameplay, graphics and sound effects are unchanged (aside from a
couple minor bug fixes: the level counter and an Intellivision II
sound-problem work-around). Requires the International
Intellivoice unit.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
See Les Spartiates De L'Espace.
_____________________________________________________________
Bomb Squad
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#3883]
Working titles: Voice Bomb, Juggernaut
Design/Program: Gene Smith, Shatao Lin
Graphics: Kai Tran
Sound: Russ Lieblich
Voice of Frank: Phil Proctor
Voice of Boris: Peter Bergman
plus voice credits
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
It's a race against time as you attempt to disarm the terrorist
bomb before it destroys the city! The screen shows the bomb
circuitry as voices heighten the tension. "Wrong part...they'll
never do it in time...one minute till blast." Hurry, other lives
besides your own hang in the balance. Three voices, three screens.
FUN FACT: The working title Juggernaut came from the 1974 Richard
Harris movie of the same name that was used for inspiration.
FUN FACT: The voices of Frank and Boris were provided by Phil
Proctor and Peter Bergman, two members of The Firesign Theatre,
the popular comedy group responsible for 22 best-selling record
albums. Phil Proctor and a third member of the group, Phil Austin,
are heard in the game Bomb Squad.
FUN FACT: INTV Corporation unloaded the leftover inventory of
Bomb Squad cartridges to a distributor in Mexico, even though the
Intellivoice was never sold in that country. Without an
Intellivoice, the game is virtually unplayable.
French, Italian and German translations of the dialog were
recorded but never used.
_____________________________________________________________
B- 17 Bomber
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#3884]
Working titles: Air Traffic Controller, Flying Fortress
Design: John Sohl & Bob Del Principe, Bill Fisher & Steve Roney
Program: John Sohl, Bill Fisher & Steve Roney
Graphics: Kai Tran, Peggi Decarli (map of Europe)
Sound: Bill Fisher
Voice of Pilot: Phil Proctor
Voice of Bombadier: Phil Austin
plus voice credits
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
World War II action at 12 o'clock high as you fly a bombing
mission deep inside Fortress Europe. You select your targets and
switch from cockpit view to bomb bay view. the closer you get to
your target the more flak and enemy planes you encounter. "Target
in sight," you switch back to the bomb bay view "Bombs Away."
Three voices, three different screens.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Despite published reports that this game came out of a
brainstorming picnic in the park (TV Guide, June 19, 1982),
John Sohl remembers it differently: The initial Intellivoice
brainstorming session was held mid-1981 on the third floor of the
main Mattel Toys building -- a floor with armed guards to keep
spies from finding out Mattel's biggest secrets, such as what
Barbie would be wearing next year. This session yielded three
ideas that went into production: Space Spartans, Bomb
Squad and Air Traffic Controller. John, fresh from Astrosmash,
began work on Air Traffic Controller, although he wasn't
enthusiastic about the concept: bringing a plane in for a landing
based on feedback from the control tower. He was leaning toward
using the alternate scenario developed for the game -- an oil
tanker negotiating a foggy docking with feedback from the Harbor
Master -- when Bob Del Principe, a graphics artist, came into his
cubicle and suggested making the airplane a bomber on a mission
over Europe. Now blowing stuff up was a concept John could get
enthusiastic about! Within an hour, Air Traffic Controller turned
into Flying Fortress.
By early 1982, John, with graphics artist Kai Tran, had developed
an impressive bombing run simulation with revolutionary
Intellivision effects, but the cartridge was oversize and the
gameplay was still to be defined. Steve Roney and Bill Fisher,
just off Space Spartans, were assigned to the game, now called
B-17 Bomber, full-time. John, Steve and Bill worked up to the last
minute -- literally -- to finish it. Unfortunately, most of John's
fancy features (such as a turret gunner who could rotate 360
degrees) had to be cut in favor of gameplay. On April 23, 1982,
two months overdue, on the day the program absolutely had to be
shipped to the ROM factory in Arizona, programming frantically
continued. (John recalls: "During the final week, and particularly
the final day, I got the impression that everyone [in the
department] was adding code or graphics to the game.") With less
than an hour to go, they pronounced it finished (or, more
accurately, "close enough"). An unsuspecting visitor to Mattel
that day was Shanghaied, stuck in a cubicle and asked to try out
the game. That 30 minutes of play was the extent of the game
testing. The code was shipped, and everyone kept their fingers
crossed that the bugs wouldn't be too bad. Luckily, they weren't,
and B-17 Bomber was released to strong reviews.
BUG: If your altitude is high enough, and you're hit with enough
enemy fire, you can rack up so much damage before you hit the
ground that you'll roll over the counter. Voil�! Instant repair!
BUG: Dropping a bomb to the far left of the screen from just the
right altitude will crash the game.
BUG: Flying into flak features some great perspective animation;
the rear view, however, doesn't look quite right. They ran out of
time to debug it. By the way, they also ran out of room for a flak
graphics picture. Instead, the program grabs some of the Executive
ROM program code and graphically displays it. This random jumble
of bits passes as flak.
BUG: When the game starts, the bomber faces east. When you return
from a mission, the bomber faces west. When you start the second
mission, the bomber is still facing west, so you can easily end up
half-way to Bermuda, trying to figure out how the English Channel
got so wide and where the German fighters are.
FUN FACT: The gauges screen was not intended to be in the game. It
was a debugging tool, used by the programmers to check on the
value of certain variables during the game. John liked it so much
it became part of the finished product. But since this screen was
never intended to be seen by the public, it wasn't coded to check
for values overflowing, resulting in non-numeric characters
showing up on the counters.
FUN FACT: Early in the development of the game, John and Kai, just
for fun, used Atari logos to mark targets on the map of Europe. No
one noticed this when the marketing department displayed the
unfinished game at the January 1982 Consumer Electronics Show. No
one, that is, except the Atari legal team, who swooped into the
Mattel booth and forced them to stop demonstrating the game.
FUN FACT: One of the characters in the game has a pronounced
Southern accent. A few customers, hearing the drawl
"Buheee-Sevunteen Baaahmmmer" on the title screen, sent the
cartridge back as defective. (The character, described in Joey
Silvian's script as: "Southern accent, laid back, slow drawl even
under fire, talks like sittin' in a cotton field on a sunny day
watchin' the bees buzz," was voiced by Phil Austin, a member of
The Firesign Theatre comedy group.)
FUN FACT: B-17 Bomber was not included when foreign versions of
the Intellivoice games were recorded. In a rare show of good
taste, Marketing decided that a game in which the goal is to drop
bombs on France, Germany and Italy would be inappropriate for the
European market.
FUN FACT: At least one programmer was strongly opposed to Mattel
releasing the game at all. In the main hallway of the programming
department one day, numerous copies of a flyer appeared
"announcing" the "logical follow-up" to B-17 Bomber: a Viet Nam
game called Napalm the Babies. The flyer described how well
Intellivision graphics could render burning flesh and how
realistically Intellivoice could reproduce children's screams.
While the author of the flyer remained anonymous, it was widely
believed to have been Rick Sinatra (Melody Blaster), whose
quintessentially non-violent game Sailing had just been canceled
for lack of action. Rick left the department shortly thereafter.
(Gabriel Baum, VP of Applications Software, took revenge with the
TV Guide profile, in which the upcoming release of B-17 Bomber
was repeatedly hyped: he singled out Sailing as an example of a
game that got killed for lack of a "decent visualization.")
Rick, however, says don't look at him -- he didn't even know of
the existence of the flyer until he read about it here on the
website. Actually, he says, B-17 Bomber was one of his favorite
games. So the mystery of the Napalm the Babies flyer continues.
_____________________________________________________________
TRON Solar Sailer
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#5393]
Working Titles: Solar Sailor, Voice Tron
Based on the Disney motion picture TRON
Design: Keith Robinson, Don Daglow
Program: Keith Robinson, Gene Smith
Graphics: Keith Robinson
Music: Arranged by Andy Sells from the TRON themes by Wendy Carlos
Sound: Mark Urbaniec
Voice Script: Creative Media Department
Speech Synthesis/Editing: Voice Department
Voices: Cory Burton (Tron), Diane Pershing & Patti Glick (Yori),
Brian Cummings (MCP), Joannie Gerber (Bit) and Fred Jones
(mechanical voice)
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
A nightmare numbers game based on the Disney movie, TRON. Your
challenge is to first seek out and then to decode the evil Master
Control Program. The voice of TRON's girlfriend Yori helps you
find the MCP as an electronic voice gives you the secret code to
remember. The rest is up to you alone. "Energy low, We've been
hit...end of line." Five different voices and two screens.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
TRON Solar Sailer was started by Don Daglow, but it was almost
immediately put on hold when he was promoted to manager. A couple
of months later, Keith Robinson picked up the project. As the
drop-dead deadline of October 15, 1982 approached and the game was
25% oversize, Gene Smith was assigned full time to optimize the
code while Keith (to Gene's dismay) continued to add features. The
day before deadline, they finished a version that both fit into
12K and was pronounced bug-free by Traci Roux in Quality
Assurance.
French, Italian and German translations of the dialog were
recorded but never used.
FUN FACT: In early releases about the game, Marketing spelled it
Solar Sailor, with an or. It took months to convince them that the
proper spelling was Sailer. (A sailor is a person who sails, a
sailer -- as in this case -- is something a person sails on.)
FUN FACT: Keith wanted to use music from the film, but the Mattel
legal department wasn't sure if our license with Disney included
to rights to use Wendy Carlos's score; they said they'd check on
it. They never did get back to Keith, so he just went ahead and
used it. If you're reading this, Wendy, your check's in the mail.
FUN FACT: While testing the game, Keith's boss Mike Minkoff kept
getting access codes that ended in "69." Mike accused Keith
several times of skewing the random numbers for an adolescent
joke. Tired of being unfairly accused, Keith put the data stream
01000101 (the binary representation of 69) in the game's opening
demo screen. He then told Mike, "Look, if I was going to put a
'69' in the game, I'd put it right on the title screen!" and
waited to see how long it would take Mike to notice. He never did;
the game went out that way. 01000101 appeared on the demo screen,
in the advertising, on the back of the box and in the
instructions. When Keith finally pointed it out, Mike said, "But
that's 45!" Mike is such a dedicated programmer, he saw the number
in hexadecimal (base 16); he never made the final calculation that
45 (base 16) is 69 (base 10).
FUN FACT: Keith and Gene felt that the digitized word "can't" in
the MCP's line "I can't allow this" sounded...well...obscene, even
though Deidre Cimarusti from the Voice Department insisted it had
tested fine. To prove their point, Gene edited the voice file to
isolate the word. They then altered the Space Spartans title
screen so that it read and said "Mattel Electronics presents
Space......" Well, you get the idea. This title screen became so
popular among some programmers that a game was inevitable. They
tacked the screen onto a version of Astrosmash with new graphics:
the missile launcher, the missiles and the flying saucer were
replaced with...c'mon, do we have to spell this out? (You can
check out the word for yourself; it was left as-is in the game.)
EASTER EGG: When you enter the access code on track one, append
Keith's birthday -- 991955 -- to the code before pressing enter.
He'll wish you luck before the next phase of the game.
_____________________________________________________________
Magic Carousel
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#4161/UNRELEASED]
AKA Funny Farm, Funny-Go-Round
Design: Steve Ettinger & Joe Ferreira, Ron Surratt & Peggi Decarli
Program/Sound/Music: Steve Ettinger
Graphics: Joe Ferreira
plus voice credits
MARKETING DESCRIPTION
+ Identify animals on a carousel and follow instructions given
throughout the game.
+ Score points by doing what the voices tell you:
o Choose the correct carousel animal.
o Play a piano.
o Drink some milk.
o Answer a telephone.
+ Learning game for children.
+ 2 different game screens.
+ 1 player Intellivoice game.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Marketing specifically requested a children's educational game for
the Intellivoice. Programmer Ron Surratt (Atari 2600 BurgerTime)
and graphic artist Peggi Decarli (USCF Chess) drew up some initial
concepts for the game (Ron's input was requested because he used
to be a teacher), then Steve Ettinger was assigned as programmer.
New-hire Joe Ferreira was added to train with Peggi as a graphics
artist. Steve and Joe quickly became a strong design team, taking
the concept from a barnyard to a carousel and making the game
their own. By the time it was finished, however, Marketing decided
that sales of Intellivoice units were too low to support such a
"specialty" cartridge. Magic Carousel was shelved with the hope
that a future increase in Intellivoice sales would justify the
game's release. It never happened.
Steve and Joe had proved themselves to be a formidable team, so
they were chosen to design the top-secret experimental
Intellivision game, Hover Force 3-D.
EASTER EGG: Connect the twinkling stars above the carousel on the
title screen to get SEE and JAF, Steve and Joe's initials.
_____________________________________________________________
Space Shuttle
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#4162/UNFINISHED]
Design/Program: Steve Roney & Keith Robinson, Boyd Hays, Steve
Montero
Graphics: Joe Ferreira, Peggi Decarli
Voice of Ground Control: Mayf Nutter
Voice of On-Board Computer: Fred Jones
Voice of Female Astronaut: Patti Dworken
Voice of Male Astronaut (player): Tony Pope
plus voice credits
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
"Columbia, this is Mission Control." All systems are go as you
prepare your trek aboard the space shuttle. "We have ignition."
You're at the controls from launch to landing as Mission Control
keeps you informed. Repair satellites, refuel during orbits and
perform other tasks. Seven different views and three voices help
you accomplish your mission and make a safe landing. "Roger, out."
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Space Shuttle was started by Steve Montero, assisted by new-hire
Boyd Hays. A short time later Steve left Mattel and Boyd took over
the project as solo programmer. He and artist Joe Ferreira put
together a launch sequence and cockpit view of orbiting, re-entry
and landing, before Boyd also left. Steve Roney and Keith Robinson
adopted the project, defining the actual gameplay of matching
orbits with and capturing satellites. Joe did new cargo bay
animations; Peggi Decarli designed a Mission Control map of the
earth, showing the orbits.
As the game was nearing completion, Intellivoice development was
canceled. Steve and Keith saved the game temporarily by changing
the voice to enhancement only, but ultimately Marketing felt Space
Shuttle was too much simulation, not enough game, and canceled it.
FUN FACT: Joey Silvian, who directed the voice recordings, was
sometimes a bit obsessive about capturing just the right sound and
personality. For the voice of Ground Control, he insisted on
flying in an actor from Houston. During the recording session at
Fred Jones's studio on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, the actor kept
talking about Pink's -- a famous hot dog stand also in Hollywood.
He went on and on about the fantastic chili dogs he had there last
time he was in town. Finally, Joey turned to Fred and said "Can
you get this guy a Pink's chili dog so we can get to work?" "Sure
thing," Fred replied, picking up the phone. Joey had a hard time
explaining when Fred Jones's bill arrived and it included not only
a charge for six Pink's chili dogs, but for the limousine and
driver Fred had hired to chauffeur the dogs to the studio.
FUN FACT: Midway through development, Activision released an Atari
2600 game called Space Shuttle -- A Journey Into Space. A
brainstorming session was held to come up with a new name for our
game. No new name was decided on, but the list that came out of
the meeting gives some indication of just how these brainstorming
sessions tended to go:
+ Earth Orbiter
+ Shuttle Orbiter
+ Orbitrak
+ Shuttle Mission
+ Mission Orbit
+ Open and Shuttle
+ StratoRover
+ Mission Control
+ Shuttle Pilot
+ Shuttle Commander
+ Star Pilot
+ Shuttle Off to Buffalo
+ Shuttle Diplomacy
+ In Space You're Asked
+ Shuttle Cock
+ Take This Satellite and Shuttle It
+ BullShuttle
_____________________________________________________________
Convoy
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#4163/UNFINISHED]
Design/Program: Vladimir Hrycenko
plus voice credits
MARKETING DESCRIPTION
Player controls an "18-wheeler" rig on a cross-country journey.
Player receives instructions over his CB radio with regard to
deliveries and road conditions. Player must successfully complete
all assignments. One player game.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Little progress had been made on Convoy before the designer,
Vladimir Hrycenko, left Mattel. No one was excited enough about
the project to take it over, and it went into permanent limbo.
_____________________________________________________________
Quest
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#4463/UNFINISHED]
AKA Voice D&D
Design/Program/Sound: Bill Goodrich
Graphics: Monique Lujan-Bakerink, Eric Wels, Connie Goldman
plus voice credits
DESCRIPTION
A medievel fantasy role-playing game, with the voice of the
Dungeon Master sending characters on a series of quests.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Bill Goodrich, a Dungeons and Dragons aficionado, set out to
design a cartridge that would truly capture D&D gameplay.
Unfortunately, development kept being postponed so that Bill could
program sound effects and music for higher priority games, such as
BurgerTime. Quest was only half- complete when Intellivoice was
canceled. Although never far enough along for licensing talks to
begin, it was generally assumed that Quest would be one of our
official Advanced Dungeons and Dragons titles.
_____________________________________________________________
World Series Major League Baseball
ECS CARTRIDGE [#4537]
Voice enhanced. Credits and description are on the ECS GAMES page
(under construction).
_____________________________________________________________
Woody Woodpecker
INTELLIVOICE CARTRIDGE [#4551/UNFINISHED]
Based on the Walter Lantz cartoon characters
Design/Program: Karen (Tanouye) McConathy
Graphics: Monique Lujan-Bakerink
Voice of Woody Woodpecker: Gracie Lantz
plus voice credits
DESCRIPTION
Buzz Buzzard has kidnapped baby animals from the forest and hidden
them in his house. Woody must peck his ways through the walls to
rescue them.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Originally, Karen McConathy used the Mad Magazine cartoon "Spy vs.
Spy" as her inspiration for the gameplay: Woody Woodpecker and
Buzz Buzzard battling through Woody's treehouse using increasingly
bizarre and complicated weapons against each other. Early in the
game's development, however, a real Spy vs. Spy game was announced
from another company. Marketing directed the game be changed to a
voice Kool-Aid Man game, only with Woody. Midway through
development of the revamped game, Intellivoice was canceled.
FUN FACT: The original cartoon voice of Woody Woodpecker, Gracie
Lantz, recorded new dialog especially for this game.