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Well, there was an Intellivision computer. Two, actually: The Keyboard Component and the Entertainment Computer System. That said, none of the AD&D games for the Intellivision required either.

There was a version of AD&D Treasure of Tarmin for the Mattel Aquarius Computer, though.

Well, there was an Intellivision computer. Two, actually: The Keyboard Component and the Entertainment Computer System. That said, none of the AD&D games for the Intellivision required either.

There was a version of AD&D Treasure of Tarmin for the Mattel Aquarius Computer, though.

"Non-interactive, long, drawn out, cinematic cut scenes.": Over 10 years old.

"Unrealistic release schedules.": I don't even know how old that one is.

"Timed exclusives.": 30 years old, and usually done for budgetary reasons.

"Rabid fanboi 360 versus PS3 frame by frame game comparisons.": 30 years old, albeit with different systems, and less in-detail, but I do remember fairly detailed comparisons of SNES/Genesis.

"The yearly $60 sports games that feature incremental improvements and roster changes.": 10+ years old.

I mean, not that these aren't good points; I agree with most of them. Seems weird calling them "recent", though.

The article claims that cargo truck driving has never been done justice in a game, so I think the author must have missed Truckin' on the Intellivision. You had to manage your loadouts, gas, and the routes you took (which included many of the major U.S. interstates), and you could carry multiple loads simultaneously, even if they were slated for different destinations. And the best part -- split-screen 2-player competitive mode, where you raced to make the most money in the least amount of time. You'd even see the opposing truck drive by you if you passed on the interstate.

An awesome game for its time -- and it was all about cargo trucks.

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."

Compared to the terrible port Nintendo made for Intellivision the Colecovision version was pure gold.

Not too shabby for the COnnecticut LEather COmpany.

Compared to the terrible port Nintendo made for Intellivision the Colecovision version was pure gold.

Not too shabby for the COnnecticut LEather COmpany.

For a while, superior graphics and sound made Mattel's $300 Intellivision (and a succession of rebadged versions) the major competitor to the Atari VCS. Mattel's product was the first console to use a 16-bit microprocessor, but poor controllers and--more importantly--a lack of third-party games limited its success.

And many [Colecovision] units came bundled with a near-arcade-quality port of Nintendo's Donkey Kong.

Previewed at the 1983 Consumer Electronic Show (CES), the Odyssey 3 Command Center held out the promise of an improved keyboard, a built-in joystick holder, a voice synthesizer, and a 300-baud modem.

From my reading, the "innovation" is supposed to come in tuning the game's difficulty automatically to the user's performance, not merely the idea that a game should be between "frustrating" and "boring".

This can be a good idea, but it's worth pointing out it's not new at all. I recently started in on a task that I've had planned for a while working on the same basic idea, only applied to a learning program (can't even call it a "game"): Dynamically deciding which new concepts to introduce when, depending on how well and how quickly the user has mastered the previous concepts. The only odd thing is how few "learning" programs use this idea. It's not a new one.

In gaming, the idea is older than many Slashdot posters. While I wouldn't be surprised somebody can pull out an Atari 2600 game that uses the same principles, I can name the Intellivision game, Astrosmash as using the same basic idea. As you do better, the game gets more difficult. As you do work, the game gets easier. It very naturally slots into a difficulty level that can suck you in for hours. (It is probably a good thing nobody has really studied how to make an addictive game deliberately, excepting maybe the MMORPG people although I still that that's accidental; it would probably be surprisingly easy to make a truly addictive game if you tried.) I played this just a couple of years ago and it was even in the PS2 era capable of being quite addicting, because the game never ended.

Follow the link; there is a funny story on the bottom about the accidental combination of some Intellivision features and limitations, a scoring contest for money, and the fact that it's essentially impossible to lose a game of Astrosmash even for a complete novice.

Mattel has already tested the computer waters

First of all, it has three Blizzard games

Diablo II, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft

It has Halo.

Secondly, it *does* have "genre-busters"

for instance, Black and White, trucking sims, train sims, or THE Sims.

I think you had this gripe about how gaming was so much better "in the olden days" all thought up and probably half-written before you even glanced at the article in question.

• Launching the NES in the North American market after every domestic console manufacturer had essentially imploded.
  
  
• Launching the Gameboy when the dedicated handheld market had been reduced to crowd of lame, widely cloned twitch games.
  
  
• Introducing the Virtual Boy, which went against almost every preconceived notion we had about how games were played. (Many see this as a failure, but I believe thh lessons learned here went a long way to making the gimmicks of the DS pay off.)
  
  
• Putting off the move to optical media with the N64.
  
  
• Putting off the move to online gameplay with the Gamecube (especially since the hardware was there).
  
  
• The bizarre combination of hardware that is the DS: two screens, touch screen, wi-fi, and even a microphone. Admit it, most of us are still surprised just how well this has done!
  

FYI, on the Intellivision Lives! disk. Apparently, all the games on the Lives! CDROM are actual ROMs from the system. So you should be able to copy them to a MythTV system, -OR- track down an original Intellivision system (just got mine; man is Blackjack addictive!) and purchase a used Intellicart to play the games on the original system.

Part of the reason why they do this is that the company was founded by the Blue Sky Rangers, the original Intellivision development team. So they know the Intellivision inside and out. With all the psuedo-companies parading around as the original thing these days, one has to give the Blue Sky Rangers kudos for actually being the real thing.

Now if only we could get them to produce this cool idea instead of this stupid thing.

FYI, on the Intellivision Lives! disk. Apparently, all the games on the Lives! CDROM are actual ROMs from the system. So you should be able to copy them to a MythTV system, -OR- track down an original Intellivision system (just got mine; man is Blackjack addictive!) and purchase a used Intellicart to play the games on the original system.

Part of the reason why they do this is that the company was founded by the Blue Sky Rangers, the original Intellivision development team. So they know the Intellivision inside and out. With all the psuedo-companies parading around as the original thing these days, one has to give the Blue Sky Rangers kudos for actually being the real thing.

Now if only we could get them to produce this cool idea instead of this stupid thing.

Agreed, I'd never heard of this company before. What does it take to post stuff on the Internet, like maybe in some of the foums where people talk about these ROMs?

Really, I'd buy old ROMs on a CD for my MythTV, if I only knew where!

Interestingly enough, we get this G4 TV channel with our deprecated Comcast cable. On it, was a show called Icons, which had two great episodes that really caught my eye -- one looked at music-related games like Parappa the Rapper and DDR, and the other episode was on the Intellivision, which I thought was really neat, having had one. Intellivision Lives!, is this the way to success for old game companies?

I'm currently saving my pennies for one in nice condition. What do you think, should I grab the original Intelli or the Intelli II? I'm kind of leaning toward the original myself. Detachable controllers are nice, but the incompatibilities are annoying.

Now if only the Intellicart was still available. ;-)

http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/games/cr edits/colecoint.shtml

Anyone remember the controllers!!!!

That's the point I think is being missed. After everything is said and done, the thing is still, design-wise, pretty much a glorified PC. Microsoft has come out with a proprietary platform which they're using the gamer market to propagate. They can gradually add other functionality to increase it's market.

What, you mean kinda like this?

The fact of the matter is every console is pretty much a "glorified PC" (or a "dumbed down" PC, depending on your perspective), and every single time - yes, every single time a new console is released, the manufacturer claims that it's going to do this, that and the other thing eventually, or that it's going to converge a whole bunch of devices into one. This is true going all the way back to the Odyssey II and Atari 2600, which also promised PC functionality. The Sega CD and NEC Turbo CD were the first (or among the first) to then promise home entertainment functionality once optical storage became the norm.

The reality is people just don't care. A few do, and those are the kind of people that sued Mattel when they never actually released their promised keyboard component from lack of interest (they only had something like 4,000 orders, which meant they couldn't get the component cost low enough to make a profit). Those people can be very vocal. They're the real hardcore. They're on the internet complaining when companies don't release promised add-ons, they're the ones that always have to be the contrarians when someone like me points out that they're the minority.

But they are the extreme, extreme minority. I agree with the parent poster who said as soon as the next hot console comes along, gamers will abandon the Xbox 360, because it really is about the games and only about the games, and it always will be. This is not going to be some great window into the living room. It is simply the console of the moment, and in five years it will be forgotten like every other console of the moment. MS is not creating some sort of home entertainment "standard" with the Xbox 360.

It never ceases to amuse me how people say the exact same things every time a new console is released. "It's going to do all these great things besides playing video games! It's revolutionary!" Ha! So in other words, it's just like every other console ever.

The same I/O lines were used to read the disc/buttons (16-position disc encoded in 5 bits, plus 3 for the action buttons) and the keypad (a 4x3 matrix); occasionally, the software would get it wrong and interpret the disc/buttons as a keypad key. The classic example of this was the game Space Hawk, in which the combination of disc and button inputs occasionally triggered the "Hyperspace" button (from the keypad); Mattel "fixed" this by riffing a line in the manual about how your spaceman might occasionally hit a "black hole" that would send him into hyperspace, just as if you'd hit the key.

(See also this site for more Intellivision info.)

the Intellivision was a base 10 system


No, it wasn't. The Intellivision's CPU was actually a 16-bit processor. The common misconception of the Intellivision as a 10-bit system comes from the fact that since the majority of it's commands were 10 bits long, the game cartridges used 10-bit ROMs. The CPU also handled 8-, 14-, and 16-bit commands and data. When the occasional 14- or 16-bit command was used, it would be stored in two 10-bit words (a bidecle) with the excess bits ignored.

I should point out also that the bit width of the famicom-on-a-chip makes no difference for the Intellivision 25-in-1 game unit, since the hardware is NOT running an emulator. Those games are all re-written (or ported) to run on the famiclone hardware.

For technical information on the Intellivision, from the same people who programmed it back in the 80's, visit the following link:

http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/hardware /intelli_tech.html#systag

I had an Odyssey, and let me tell you, it was pretty darn cool back in the day.

Both the Intellivion and Colecovision. However it probably wouldn't work today because of the underlying software (such as the BIOS). Of course we shouldn't overlook Bleemcast which while only playing three PS1 games (even with graphical improvements) before Sony sued them into oblivion.

Only then it was called Burgertime?

Sounds like The Sega Channel ...and even that wasn't a particularly new idea:

Playcable dates back to '81. News for nerds, stuff that was a neat idea 20+ years ago. :)

-JDF

Recognize

If the firmware update was intended to break Real's hack, why did they not release it for all players, instead of about half of them? Most likely, this is just Real's hack breaking, which is not surprising since it is an unsupported format masquerading as Apple's licensed files.

Uh-huh. Just like Microsoft's Windows 3.1 beta accidentally broke when running on top of DRDOS back in 1991, right?

I remember reading about how Intellivision had hacked the Intellivision 2 to try and prevent competitors such as Coleco from selling games to work on their console. Mattel actually tried to hide what they had done, for fear that they would be sued for anticompetitive practices.

It's just the same thing with Apple. They've got a nice little bundling deal going, and they don't want Real to be able to sell music to work on it without making the files wholly unprotected, which the RIAA could never accept. I don't see any reason why Real wouldn't be in a position to sue over it.

No problem. Unless you've got a GameCube, of course.

As a fan of intellivision, I discovered intellivisionlives It is some kind of official intellivision emulator with lots of games. Even they have a xbox game.

/me rolls eyes

Of course the game can be won with non-miliatry means, that was the point of my issue with calling Utopia a "Real Time Stategy" game. The RTS genre's defined by heavy unit manipulation in real time; Utopia's semi-turn based. You could only control one unit at a time, which had to be a naval unit. Land units were "terrain," not units. Buildings had limited resource requirements and were built instantly, yadda yadda yadda.

Look, Don himself considers Utopia to be a "sim" not an "RTS", more like Civilization than Starcraft. The Intellvision WAS supposed to have a tactical strategy game, but it didn't make it to market due to management shortsightedness.

I have both an Intellevision, as well as the offical INTV emulation package. Utopia's more closely related to political theory, since the goal was to maintain a statistical population. It was NOT intended to be a military game, but included military content as part of a larger whole.

That would be Don Daglow, who at last reckoning would be at Stormfront Studios. He was the primary programmer of the Utopia game.

Calling it an RTS would be kind of stretch, though. While it had the same diversity of resources/buildings that games like Warcraft and so on have, there were no real military units beyond a couple of boats and terrain tiles representing rebels. There was little opportunity for tactical play, or even basic "rushing."

Remember, no matter how new and innovative you think an idea is, somebody else probably thought of it before you.

Well, while the first 32bit arcade games weren't around until 1990 or so, I believe your 16bit console had been around for 5 years or so already.

Even better would be the Intellivision controller. In fact when I first saw the iPod that's EXACTLY what I thought of =)

Strange, I remember playing 'Burger Time' on my lovely 'Intellivision' game console. Thanx mattell.
Never saw burger time on the c64. A great game that I haven't seen mentioned was Boulder Dash!

Don't forget the Intellivision keyboard.

Coleco's promise to bring a computer module to their ColecoVision system ended-up killing them, despite it being a decent (but buggy) system, which was also available as a stand-alone computer (the ADAM).

But it's different this time: the XBox already is a PC, more-or-less. Since we've all standardized on this (horrid) PC platform, they have a much better chance at success with a PC-based console, especially these days when everyone wants a sleek black "media box" in their living room.

Only problem, they may not be first...

Learning to expand an existing OS, and there are plenty of small ones to choose from, will teach you much more than building your own one from scratch.

Wow. Talk about splitting hairs... Miramax is Disney; the MacBU is Microsoft. Regardless if it's one "entity" or many in the eyes of the tax people, it's still one "company" to the public at large.

As for Mattel, the way the Blue Sky Rangers say things, Mattel Electronics was an autonomous unit from the company. If this made me sound vague, gomen ne.

Hah! You're right. But come on, give me credit for at least not thinking that the history of video games begins with the Nintendo 64.

Check it out.

Ha! Kids these days.

Try at least as far back as Astrosmash, an 1981 Intellivision game.

It keys the difficulty to the number of extra lives you have. At the lowest level it's almost impossible to lose, and extra lives are handed out generously.

I think it's actually good in a way they backed off from this; once you start playing this game it's hard to stop, because you almost inevitably have to leave a game in progress, either by powering off or by deliberately dying enough times to lose, which is about as easy psychologically.

This is at least a candidate for "first", though I wouldn't be surprised if someone comes up with an Atari 2600 game that used it (before 1981).

I'm also somewhat surprised the arcade games didn't do more of this; this dynamic difficulty level is much more addictive then the monotonically increasing (and always huge) difficulty employed by modern games.

My mom fought off the other moms in K-Mart to get me one of these. Parsec and the Speech Synthesis module rock. Too bad on that Atari, Intellivision ruled.

I'm even more doubtful, I remember this...

Then again, maybe third time's the charm?

Atari and Intellivision had been going for a few years before Coleco got in the game. I believe Adventure for Atari VCS was out in 1978.

http://www.atariage.com/2600/history.html
has a bit more.

Also more
on Intellivision. Out in 1980, so Atari had 2+ years as the king, then about 2 years of sharing with Intellivision, then Coleco hit.
Atari VCS was out in 1977. Coleco entered the market in 1982.

BTW, I wish people would call it the Atari VCS, which is what it originally was. It wasn't referred to as a '2600' untill there was a '5200' to upgrade to.

From the article:

The more complex games are made even more difficult to play by the compromised controller setup. The Intellivision had intricate controllers featuring a numeric keypad. Certain games required the use of the keypad and a special printed overlay to indicate command functions -- something impossible to replicate on PS2 or XBox controllers. To compensate, a single button press brings up an interactive onscreen image of the Intellivision controller, complete with the proper overlay for the current game. It's a nice touch, but not as helpful as it could be -- the controller graphic obscures a large portion of the game action (which doesn't pause), and the overlay text is hard to read even on a large television. This makes even the simple act of choosing menu selections unnecessarily difficult; inputting keypad entries during the actual gameplay is even harder.

Ok, I know from having had one myself as a kid that the "average" Intellivision game would be quite playable on a modern console controller, as a lot of them just used the directional disc and the fire button. However, some of them would be just plain impossible given the cumbersome "chording" you would have to do with an XBOX or Ps2 controller to get all of the key combinations.

Take a look at this image of the Intellivision to see what I mean, or this one of the Intellivision II.

A game like TRON Deadly Disks would be almost impossible to play. (BTW, don't hassle me on interchanging "disc" for "disk", as "disk" was what they used in the game.) In that particular game, you had to use the whole keypad, as you could either throw your disk (using the fire button and aiming with the controllers directional disc), or hold onto your disk and block with it. But when you blocked you had to press the number on the keypad in order to block in the appropriate direction. Try doing that while remembering that (a fictitious example) A + B + Left trigger corresponds to "1" on the old numeric keypad, which you then have to remember corresponded to "block diagonally up/left" in the game. Ugh.

I'm sure they have tried to pick games which used the least number of buttons, but to really recreate the experience for me, I wish this (and the direct to TV versions) came with a replica of the original controller, so that I could actually play everything the way it was meant to be played. The ergonomics and the logic of the way the controls are laid out, even for relatively simple games, would get screwed up pretty quickly as well. Even the direct to TV versions come with some bastardized version of a modern controller, reminiscent of the PS2 or XBOX


Mechanik

From the article:

The more complex games are made even more difficult to play by the compromised controller setup. The Intellivision had intricate controllers featuring a numeric keypad. Certain games required the use of the keypad and a special printed overlay to indicate command functions -- something impossible to replicate on PS2 or XBox controllers. To compensate, a single button press brings up an interactive onscreen image of the Intellivision controller, complete with the proper overlay for the current game. It's a nice touch, but not as helpful as it could be -- the controller graphic obscures a large portion of the game action (which doesn't pause), and the overlay text is hard to read even on a large television. This makes even the simple act of choosing menu selections unnecessarily difficult; inputting keypad entries during the actual gameplay is even harder.

Ok, I know from having had one myself as a kid that the "average" Intellivision game would be quite playable on a modern console controller, as a lot of them just used the directional disc and the fire button. However, some of them would be just plain impossible given the cumbersome "chording" you would have to do with an XBOX or Ps2 controller to get all of the key combinations.

Take a look at this image of the Intellivision to see what I mean, or this one of the Intellivision II.

A game like TRON Deadly Disks would be almost impossible to play. (BTW, don't hassle me on interchanging "disc" for "disk", as "disk" was what they used in the game.) In that particular game, you had to use the whole keypad, as you could either throw your disk (using the fire button and aiming with the controllers directional disc), or hold onto your disk and block with it. But when you blocked you had to press the number on the keypad in order to block in the appropriate direction. Try doing that while remembering that (a fictitious example) A + B + Left trigger corresponds to "1" on the old numeric keypad, which you then have to remember corresponded to "block diagonally up/left" in the game. Ugh.

I'm sure they have tried to pick games which used the least number of buttons, but to really recreate the experience for me, I wish this (and the direct to TV versions) came with a replica of the original controller, so that I could actually play everything the way it was meant to be played. The ergonomics and the logic of the way the controls are laid out, even for relatively simple games, would get screwed up pretty quickly as well. Even the direct to TV versions come with some bastardized version of a modern controller, reminiscent of the PS2 or XBOX


Mechanik

From the article:

The more complex games are made even more difficult to play by the compromised controller setup. The Intellivision had intricate controllers featuring a numeric keypad. Certain games required the use of the keypad and a special printed overlay to indicate command functions -- something impossible to replicate on PS2 or XBox controllers. To compensate, a single button press brings up an interactive onscreen image of the Intellivision controller, complete with the proper overlay for the current game. It's a nice touch, but not as helpful as it could be -- the controller graphic obscures a large portion of the game action (which doesn't pause), and the overlay text is hard to read even on a large television. This makes even the simple act of choosing menu selections unnecessarily difficult; inputting keypad entries during the actual gameplay is even harder.

Ok, I know from having had one myself as a kid that the "average" Intellivision game would be quite playable on a modern console controller, as a lot of them just used the directional disc and the fire button. However, some of them would be just plain impossible given the cumbersome "chording" you would have to do with an XBOX or Ps2 controller to get all of the key combinations.

Take a look at this image of the Intellivision to see what I mean, or this one of the Intellivision II.

A game like TRON Deadly Disks would be almost impossible to play. (BTW, don't hassle me on interchanging "disc" for "disk", as "disk" was what they used in the game.) In that particular game, you had to use the whole keypad, as you could either throw your disk (using the fire button and aiming with the controllers directional disc), or hold onto your disk and block with it. But when you blocked you had to press the number on the keypad in order to block in the appropriate direction. Try doing that while remembering that (a fictitious example) A + B + Left trigger corresponds to "1" on the old numeric keypad, which you then have to remember corresponded to "block diagonally up/left" in the game. Ugh.

I'm sure they have tried to pick games which used the least number of buttons, but to really recreate the experience for me, I wish this (and the direct to TV versions) came with a replica of the original controller, so that I could actually play everything the way it was meant to be played. The ergonomics and the logic of the way the controls are laid out, even for relatively simple games, would get screwed up pretty quickly as well. Even the direct to TV versions come with some bastardized version of a modern controller, reminiscent of the PS2 or XBOX


Mechanik

Ever play Microsurgeon?

(Sorry, it had to be mentioned.)

This "innovation" reminds me of the Mattel Intellivision game console from the 1980s. Take a look at the front page of IntellivisionLives.com - you can see the plastic faceplate on one of the controllers.

Now that I think about it - the controllers have a very phone-like interface. I wonder where the Nokia engineers got the idea.. ;-)

Were these first person *SHOOTERS*?

If you just care about first person and 3-D, look at "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons--Treasure of Tarmin" for the Intellivision. It was both 3-D and first-person, and it came out in 1982, I believe.

Wanted to mention about the "9" thing - it's actually programmed into the Intellivision hardware. If you press 1, 2, or 3 to start the game instead of the disc, it played at a slower speed. You could also pause the game by hitting 1 and 9 while playing. This sort of put a damper on the "high score" contest, since you could play slowly if you wanted and pause the game whenever it occured to you. The other problem was that the score would roll over into non-number characters above 9,999,999 points.

a lot of information here, and on the downloads page you can get a copy of Astrosmash that will run on Windows/Macs for free. Or you can buy the ROMs on CD, if you want more than the few free ones.

I'm always amused to see people talking about the Intellivision. I had one when I was a kid but I don't think anyone else I ever knew did. There were a few really great games for that system. By the way the overloading glitches you mentioned I haven't heard before.. cool! Someday I will buy another working console and see if my games still work. And that speech-synthisizer thing...

The overlay art on some of the Intellivision game controllers was well thought out and designed too.

Never understood why kids didn't like that about the Intellivision over the Atari - guess it's the same reason people buy Macs & PCs - Macs are superior in just about every way - as far connectivity, design, and interface, yet the crowd goes to what Dick & Jane have.