Retro Rerun Roots: Intellivision

My parents were gamers.  Big time gamers.  I often half-joke with people that my mother was playing Atari and Intellivision games while I was still in the womb.  We played board games as a family all the time, and when I got older, I got the neighborhood kids to play board games on my front porch throughout the summer and weekends.

As I've gotten older, and I've moved from place to place, I still carry this giant box with me everywhere I go.

This definitely looks like it's out of the early 80s.

It's the Intellivision.

What's... that?  You say?

Well, back in 1979, this video game console was released by Mattel Electronics as a direct competitor to the Atari 2600.  It never got quite the same following as the Atari did, but it had better graphics, and more control options than its more popular cousin.  Where Atari was an amazing console for playing basic arcade games, Intellivision enabled you to go deeper into games, with more complexity, more options, etc.

Since my childhood, I have carried this "Tele-Games Center" box with all of our family's old Intellivision games, instruction manuals, and controller overlays here.

The system I got off ebay a few years ago. The rest is from my parents.

These are the very games that my mother and father spent hours and hours playing.  I remember my mother talking about how she and my father played the knight and wizard of iMagic's Swords and Serpents for hours and hours until they finally beat it.  The ending was just a dragon and then some text behind the dragon, so they were surprised that mother further happened and actually wrote to the developers to find out if there was something they had missed.  They wrote back to tell them they haven't.

That's a knight holding a sword. Really.

I remember my sister, father, and I trying hard to work through Tropical Trouble, a side scrolling "Pitfall" like game with all sorts of hazards to navigate.  It was exciting and frenetic.  I loved it.

The red thing on the right are supposed to be your girlfriend's pants... I dunno either.

My mother's favorite game had to be Bomb Squad, though.  This is a "crack the code" sort of game.  Some mad bomber has set up a bomb and you have to figure out the code.  You select various parts of the digit to see if they are or are not included in the digit, and then do a "mini-game" (depicted below) where you have to modify the circuit in some way to find out if it is included or not.  If you fail, you lose all information about that piece and can't continue.  What made the game delightful, though, was the fact that it used the Intellivoice module, a component dedicated to voice synthesis.  Throughout the game, phrases like, "20 minutes to blast!" and "The code! The code! Figure out the code!" and "Up more! Right more! WRONG PART!" are uttered.  These became part of our family lexicon.  If we had 20 minutes to get somewhere, my mother would quote this video game all the time.

I always thought that soldering iron looked like a duck.

My favorites had to be Space Spartans and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  Why?  Because these two games both gave me ample space to imagine myself in an alternate world, which was one of the primary motivators for me playing video games anyways.  In Space Spartans, you had control of a starship, and similar to the modern day Artemis: Bridge Simulator, you had to defend a series of star bases from attack.  You had various systems, and I would spend all day just turning the systems on and off to hear the Intellivoice unit tell me their status.

Pew pew pew!

AD&D was probably one of the first stealth/adventure games. You were trying to get to the misty mountain to retrieve a crown.  To get there, you had to find your way through various mountain dungeons.  Once you entered a mountain, you'd be presented with a screen like the one below, where you'd have to wander around looking for items to continue forward, like a boat to travel along rivers, and arrows to fight enemies.  As you wandered the maze, monster tracks and audible sound cues clued you in to what sorts of dangers lurked nearby.  I spent many a day listening carefully to the audio, in fear of the horror that lay around the next corner.  It actually is pretty exciting and fun, even today

You have no idea how scary this was.

As you can see, this game system is a small obsession of mine, especially since I have been carrying it around for ages.  I'll be getting an Intellivision Flashback unit soon, and I'll give a report on that possibly.  But until then, I have my old giant system to cart around and play with.

One of the first things most people notice when they look at the system are the controllers.

It's got hard edges and hard to push buttons, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?!

For whatever reason, Mattel Electronics decided that the joystick was too simple, and instead decided to recreate that most ergonomic of video game controllers: A digital telephone dialing pad.  It was painful to hold and even more painful to play games with.  For "arcade" type action, there were four buttons along the sides of the device that one would press.

Honestly, although it sucked for arcade games, it was a delight to use for more complex games.  The little overlays I mentioned actually slip over the controller and give you a custom interface for every game you might want to play.

This was surprisingly hard and would often crinkle the overlays.

Frankly, I love it.  Whether I'm delving into dark dungeons

Count Arrows did an audible
count of your arrows.

or performing surgery as a miniaturized vessel inside a body

Surgery is SIMPLE!

or turning systems on and off on a space ship

Computer, raise shields!

What I loved was the amount of options and complexity this enabled.  Our family didn't have a computer at that time, so this was the next best thing for me.  I *loved* all of those buttons and would just play games to push them over and over again!

Atari may have had the better controller for playing games, but for sims and adventure games, this was much better, IMO.  It still could have used a lot of work, though.  But hey, this was pre-NES days.  Nobody knew what this stuff would be like yet. :)