Retronauts - 735: Intellivision

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

It's the closest thing to the real thing! Kevin Bunch and expert guests Tom Boellstorff and Braxston Soderman talk about the Atari 2600’s chief rival, the Mattel Intellivision. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

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Hello, and welcome to the only podcast to feature the utter destruction of a planet. We're talking about the Mattel in television this episode. This was a contemporary and a competitor to the more popular and arguably better known, Atari 2,600. And that rivalry kind of ran through the whole of the 80s, which is very, like, interesting and unusual, I feel like. It was very much known for its complex game. games, superior graphics, et cetera. And joining me for this podcast are the folks who literally wrote the book on the Intellivision. So who do we have with me on the other side of the line here? I'm Tom Bellstorff from the University of California, Irvine.

And I'm Braxton Soderman, also from the University of California, Irvine. And you two literally wrote a book about the Intellivision, which came out last year by my reckoning as of this recording. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I came out last November. So it's been like seven, eight months basically since it came out, which is a huge relief and we're so excited. Yeah, we were working on it for many, many years.

And it was wonderful to actually see it out there and people talking about it and buying it and, you know, just wonderful to get our ideas. finally out there. Yeah, so your book is in television. God, what's the full title? I should grab that off the shelf before I started recording.

Oh, a video game system battled Atari and almost bankrupted Barbie. That was it. I remember the almost bankrupted Barbie part. I'm like, there's more to it than that. But yeah, it's a fantastic piece of work.

I hope you two are very proud of it because it's an excellent resource just learning all about that machine. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we are very proud of it. And it was so much fun to do the research and write and write it. And we are so excited to talk to you about it because it really was, it turned into a huge labor of love and we learned so much. And there's actually a lot of really interesting, important stuff that comes out of in television's history that's relevant to the current era. And you too, like you talked to literally everyone you could find who is still alive

if I remember hearing correctly and got to dig into like a lot of the files that still exist, like the internal documents. It's very impressive as someone who has tried to do the best he could on that same front with other companies. Well, I, so I'm actually an anthropologist. I'm in the Department of Anthropology. And so I did research originally in Indonesia and I have done research in virtual worlds like Second Life.

And Raxton, you know, comes from a media studies background and is, is way more versed in that history than I am. But we've had conversations along the way where my experience as an ethnographer served us well because Braxton would sometimes comment, you just don't give up, Tom, you're going to find these people. And you just like, you know, we're fearless looking into it. And, you know, there's a few people we were unable to find. But we did find about 150 people.

And to be fair, those people were just incredibly. generous and welcoming and helped us make connections as well. The level of collaboration in this project was really touching. And I think, yeah, I mean, but we got lucky too, right? Because we're in Irvine and one of our contacts in another department, informatics department, you know, hooked us up with Bill Fisher, who was one of the programmers, you know, from Mattel Electronics and application software. And it turned out that in television productions was just 10 minutes from us, 10 miles from us. So our minds were blown and we were able to connect with Bill Fisher and Stephen Rooney and we're able to go and meet them and talk to them. And after getting

to know them, they opened up their archive that's Keith Robinson, who had passed away by that point, another programmer that worked on television at Mattel Electronics. He had collected a bunch documents. So this was really our entrance into learning about the system having access to all these documents and these programmers, they called themselves a blue sky rangers, right? When I talk about that, started hooking us up with other people in the community. So that was like, you know, ground zero for the research to begin. I mean, to give you a sense of that, when we began the project, we knew very, we both grew up playing in television, but we didn't know much more than that about it. And the company could have been based in Boston for all we knew or Miami.

And it turned out to be based in, you know, Hawthorne originally near Los Angeles. But then the legacy company in Costa Mesa so close to our university. And can you imagine going a 10-minute drive to this little strip mall where this company now where Bill Fisher and Steve Roney were. And they show us a room that is maybe 10 feet by 10 feet, a small windowless room, packed, packed with filing cabinets, thousands of pages of documents from the company. We couldn't believe our luck. It was incredible, just incredible. That is extremely lucky.

It is always exceptionally nice when a resource just happens to be in your backyard when you're doing this kind of research. So you mentioned that both of you grew up playing. in television. So I did want to ask, like, what is your background with this machine? Well, I mean, I played it as a small child. It was the first of the video game system that I got, maybe when I was five years old. I believe the story in my family was that my grandparents brought it back from Hong Kong, but I'm not quite sure if that's true or not. I guess I should have figured that out during the research, too, if they were producing them. But in any case, I just fell in love with it.

I loved the strategy games, you know, early on. I played a lot of Utopia and the advanced Dungeons and Dragons games and the sports games. They were really kind of complex and there was a lot to figure out. And so it just engaged me for a long, many, many, many hours. You know, I have recollections of my mother being angry because they wanted to watch TV. And back in those days, you know, the console was hooked up to the, family television in the living room. And so we had to negotiate when I could play and when the TV would be used for watching TV.

And it was just, you know, so that was my introduction in television was when I was five years old. And yeah, yeah, I was born in 1969. So I'm a core demographic, right? I was 10 years old, 11 years old when television came out. I was living in Oklahoma with my dad. And it just was like unbelievable, like at that. moment. I hadn't owned a system beforehand and, you know, knew about Atari. And it just was like, it blew my mind. I mean, it was just incredible. We didn't own a computer, obviously at that point.

So it was a point of entree into an entire world. And many of the games that Braxton's talking about, you know, Dungeons and Dragons, Sea Battle, I mean, SpaceX, so many of these games were really crucial, informative to me and Utopia as well. And for me, as anthropologist, after my Indonesia research, I wrote a book called Coming of Age and Second Life that is an ethnography of the virtual world second life that came out in 2008. So it was an early, you know, 4A that I'm still very interested in digital anthropology. But in that book, I have a history chapter. And on page 41 of that book is a screenshot of Utopia, where I talk about how in terms of the prehistories of virtual worlds and where do these things come from, where does the metaverse come from and all that,

that for myself, but more broadly, Utopia was actually in a very early moment in this kind of simulating a whole world, you know, kind of situation, of course, with incredible constraints and creativity. And so it was a special thrill for me to be able to interview Don Daglo multiple times and really, you know, learn more about that game. So I had a kind of history in that. And then, you know, basically what happened is 10 years ago, more than that, possibly now when Braxton was newly hired at Irvine, I took Braxton out to coffee at the Starbucks and one thing led to another and we found out that we had both grown up with in television and that led to the idea of maybe writing an article about it or doing this

and that. And then one thing led to another and here we are through this ongoing journey together. Really snowballed for you, huh? Oh, we had no idea we'd be doing a 411 page book when we started this thing. I'm not sure anyone really sets out to write a 411 page book, but it'll happen to you, right? Maybe Postoid it or someone, but yeah. Well, I think, you know, part of the reason is that, and maybe we'll talk about some of these things, is that Intellivision wasn't just the video game console that we grew up with, right? I mean, I had the Intelli Voice add-on or extension, as we call it, right,

which had digitized voice for some games. But then we discovered, you know, there was play cable, there was the keyboard component, you know, there was the, you know, the ECS computer add-on, right? And so we just realized, and then the handhelds too, we just realized that there was so much material and Intellivision was really connected to all these things that we just got excited about researching all of it and talking about all of it. So the book kind of ballooned as we expanded our scope. You know, I'm fine with that. I fully understand. You're like, well, got to add in more details to make this make sense. Got to contextualize everything. As for myself, I mean, I'm 42. I did not grow up with the Intellivision in its heyday.

You know, I was born when it was on fire and falling apart. But, you know, I remember reading about it in a book I got from the library from like 1982 called the Winner's Book of Video Games. And I was reading about it, and I'm like, wow, this thing sounds really cool. I would sure like to try this out sometime. And fortuitously, like, I don't know, six months, maybe a year after I first read this book, my grandmother comes to visit, and she just has this big box that has an Intellivision in there and Intel Voice and, like, I don't know, 12 or 13 games that she bought at a church sale for like $15. So, you know, I remember playing it quite a bit as a kid. and, like, really, really fighting it fascinating, you know,

because there were games in there that, like, I knew, like, pitfall, stampede, and there was, like, the sports games, PGA golf was in there. I think, I think baseball. And then, like, stuff I'd never really heard of. A microsurgeon was in that box. Wow. And that's, like, a very strange and cool game that obviously did not exist on the 2600.

So, yeah, it was very cool. I remember I had a friend in high school, like one of my best friends. She happened to also grew up with it in television. So, like, we used to, like, just go play games at each other's houses in, like, the late 90s, having a grand old time. So, yeah, I have a very soft spot for the television, even though it is a little bit of an underdog for the era, if you will. Yeah, well, and, you know, one thing that we talk about in the book is, in general, for

anything I write and for any research, I don't like to justify it by saying it hasn't been studied before because it's sort of saying there's a hole in the ground and I'm going to fill a hole in the ground. And we say in the book, we don't justify this simply because it's been understudied. But it really has been understudied that people forget that in its day, you know, three million units sold. It was, you know, 30% of the market behind Atari. But it still was quite a cultural phenomenon. When I was, you know, going through that period, it was on TV. It was all over the place in a way that has been quite lost, you know, given Atari, you know, sort of winning that console war and the effects of the crash. And so it really is a case of a hidden history that

is really valuable and very informative because in its time, it was very significant. Move the images Three dimensions A B false up No, we're in television You see I told you this question was easy If you thought in television You're absolutely correct

You're absolutely correct And you mentioned a little bit ago about the sort of handheld electronics that Mattel did around the same time as the television and before that, which, you know, I don't have it in front of me, but I remember growing up with their little baseball game and having a grand old time. with that. But yeah, do you want to talk of it about what led Mattel to, you know, forming Mattel electronics and making these handheld games and the Indian television? Sure. Yeah, I think, yeah, the handhelds are really important. We didn't have a lot of time in the book to write about them, but we hope to write more about them in the future. But that was really the kind of stepping stone too in television. But it's interesting because we thought that

was the narrative. Like the first handhelds came out in what, 1976, but really 1977. And then 1978, their football handheld really blew off at the Christmas. And so we thought that that was a stepping stone doing television, but we actually discovered, you know, a document from January of 1976 where the people in Mattel toys had this department called preliminary design where they came up with new toy ideas and new toy concepts. And we wrote about that in the book a little bit. And they had a document with two ideas for, you know, kind of computerized toys. One was a microprocessor computer game system, right, like the Intellivision, like Atari with cartridges, right, and a microprocessor. And the other one was

calculator-type games, right? So they were going to build these handheld games based on calculator technology, right? So really, they had this idea for a programmable game system in late 1975, early 1976, well before Atari came on the market, right? But, and it was actually, if you look at the document, the document was much more substantial in support of the programmable game system and calculator games or the handheld came at the end, right? But they decided to go with the handhelds because, well, they were a toy company, right? And so, these made more sense to them. They were smaller. They were cheaper. They, you know, could be made out of plastic and Mattel knew about that, right? It was much more familiar to them. So even though the price

points of a handheld game was like, what, $30 or $20 or $30 at the time, which was more than a Barbie, more than hot wheels or something like that, it was still within kind of the realm of imagination for them. And so they started to research how to make these handheld games based on calculator technology because calculators were all the fad in 1973, 1974, portable calculators. So their idea was how do we repurpose this technology and to make something that's entertainment and kind of like a toy. Yeah. Yeah, I remember playing with calculators when I was a kid in the 70s, once again, having been born in 1969, and it is an interesting twist that it was the second fiddle in their sort of visioning. But another piece to that is from very early on, and we'll talk,

we can talk more about this in a bit. The idea for Intellivision was going to include this computer add on the keyboard component. So it was a huge lift for this company. And the handhelds were more familiar. And also, Mattel had a long history of doing technology and toys, going back to like Chattie Kathy, where it had like a disc that the doll could speak. and with a range of toys, they actually were known for being very innovative in sort of putting technology in toys. And so even for the handhelds, they did have to have outside help. The chips came from Rockwell. They worked with this company APH to do the handhelds, but it was much more possible for them to do it in house. And just like within television, this was not just a new

product, but a whole new product category. And when they made the original meeting with Rockwell to get these calculator chips, they asked for a requisition of 20,000 chips with a special clause that Rockwell would be required to buy back any chips that were not used. So that was sort of their scope. And within six months, they sold like over a million, right? I mean, they had no idea it would become so huge.

And that is important to the story because what ended up happening then was that the success of the handhelds basically bankrolled the development of Intellivision and sort of allow, Mattel electronics to become a sort of independent division within Mattel. It really was the handhelds that made that possible. Yeah, and they sort of, so it sounds like they really got the necessary experience

and, you know, time in and connections with this handheld that sort of helped them work with this bigger lift. And there were a few programmers of handheld games that ended up programming games for Intellivision like Rick Levine. and some of the, not all, but some of the management and marketers also transitioned into Intellivision. So it also helped sort of build skill sets within the company. Yeah. And, you know, the late 70s, that was a time period where TV, console games were kind of moribund, I think, is the best way to describe it, like 78, 79, and handheld electronics.

Those were the big fad sellers at the time. I think that approach probably worked out for Mattel, and frankly, he was probably driven a little bit by Mattel with the success of football, I feel like. Yeah, it's, you know, we write about this a bit is that, you know, what's known as the great video game crash of 1984 is most historians see that as the second crash, right? There was a first crash that happened in the late 1970s around handhelds in the first generation video games. And so there had been earlier experiences with this, you know, issue of the kind of self-contained video games like Pong sort of running their course. Yeah, and programmable games, you know, as it turns out, a more expensive system does not sell as many units as a little Pong machine. So, yeah, definitely shook out a lot of people from that market. And yeah, so we do know a fair bit.

about the development of Intellivision. I mean, your book goes into it and at length, of course. I remember when I was researching it myself before I had the opportunity to look at your book.

Dr. David Chandler, he worked it with Mattel on the Intellivision Project. He had his own website where he posted just like a bunch of internal documents that he had held on to, which was very informative. It talks a lot about how it's,

how the company was sort of focusing this machine, sort of targeting a whole different market from what you saw from Atari and Fairchild and all these dedicated manufacturers, which I thought was very, very interesting. Like, they were the first people to really think about, well, this is a home console. Like, we don't necessarily have to be married to arcade-style experiences, do we? And I thought that was very, it was very interesting to read about. Yeah, and you can think about too, like they're building this in the context of Mattel, right? A toy company who for decades, their business had been making products for the home, right?

Where kids would play with their family in the living room or the rec room or, you know what I mean? And so in some sense, it's not a huge leap that they would, you know, the crucible in which in television was formed was in this company, that their expertise was in designing play for the home, not like the arcades or something like that. And so, yeah, Mattel never really had an interest in the arcade so much. They actually made an electronic pinball machine was one of their early 1970, or their mid-late 1970s endeavors. But that's about it when it came to the arcades.

They're like you said, much more focused on thinking about what's gameplay like in the home, you know, and when you can play for longer. when you don't have to keep putting quarters in the machine, when you have a more sophisticated, you know, set of interfaces and technologies that's, you know, what can you build in that situation? Yeah. Yeah, that figure of David Chandler is very, very interesting.

And that early development of Intellivision, sort of the two key people in some sense, are Richard Chang and David Chandler. And Richard Chang came up from within Mattel going back to the 60s, had a background in acoustic engineering, helped design a lot of these talking doll toys. He helped with this Octagon organ project with sort of a key figure in doing technology and toys together within Intellivision. And as this move forward, David Chandler had no background in toys. So it was an unusual hire.

He had done a video game, but he had worked for a military contracting company and helped design the guidance system for the Minuteman missile, really did not come out of toys at all. And so had a very different vision for Intellivision that was about a kind of vision of home interactivity that would not be limited to gaming. And that really was not quite the same vision that Richard Chang had and some of the other folks had, although they harmonized, obviously, that there was a different emphasis there. And that's a very interesting impact of Chandler in the design of the television system

and even the hand controllers that sort of mimic phones of the time and are designed for a lot of interactivity. The design of the console, you know, he was very involved with. That website that you're talking about was actually done by his son-in-law Dennis after David had passed away. And the documents that are in that are, some are about the design of television itself and some internal presentations that Chandler did. And there's also a lot of interesting negotiations that happen around other possibilities around interactivity. So it's sort of a bit unpredictable what you find in those kinds of archives, but it's very interesting because during the, this time, like in France, Minitel was in existence in some of these early sort of interactive online like home finance and banking kinds of things almost. And we know from those archives

and from interviews that Chandler and some other executives at Mattel were really interested in possibilities around that kind of home interactivity for which gaming and play was an element and a point of entree in a sense almost. But it was a really interesting vision of interactivity. that was getting played around with in this moment. I think, just to add on briefly, I think Tom is right that, you know, pointing out that in the popular kind of reception of the history of Intellivision, Papa, Intellivision,

Chandler, right, because of this website and all these documents that he put out on it, you know, became known as the father of Intellivision or Papa on television. But really, you know, if you read our book, you realize that, like Tom said, I mean, Chandler wasn't coming from the background of toys. I think he came into the Mattel context, and he really kind of soaked up these kind of ideas that they had about what in television would be.

I mean, there were other people like Richard Chang and especially a marketer named Jeff Rockliss, who was a key person who already had these ideas about what this home system might be and how it could work differently within the home, you know, in 1976 before Chandler was hired. You know, Glenn Hightower from APH is another person who was already, you know, working with them. So there were lots of people that were talking about, you know, what in television would become. And so it wasn't like, you know, Chandler's vision, you know. I think that we learned that he soaked up a lot of this. But he brought a lot of his own ideas, too. Yeah. So he didn't just roll in and like, all right, here's what we're going to do, everybody.

He definitely came in while there was something already going. So you're saying we could really just pin all of the weird. keyboard component concepts on Chandler's in his team. Yeah, it's true. Although, you know, we have heard that they were thinking about the keyboard component even before. That's, Chandler got there. Like Rockless, apparently, was somebody who was really interested in that. There was a system we mentioned very briefly.

I think it's called the video spawned system, which was shown in the CES. of 1976 summer CES, right? So at this time, Mattel Electronics was working with Rockwell International to make the handheld games, right? And Rockwell was building this other system, which is strangely similar in its kind of vision for what a home kind of computer, keyboard, video game system would be with thought games and health products and things like that. So I think that we never were able to find a connection between those two things exactly. I'm just trying to suggest that there was potential for the stuff to kind of be in the air even before Chandler got there. Just as another example over in Mattel Toys, they actually developed something called the teach and learn computer. And we interviewed Bob Netsker, who's one of the key designers of it.

That was a very simple, you know, almost like a speak and spell, you know, without the voice kind of thing. that once again thinking about sort of play, linking to education, linking to this kind of computing. And so, you know, computers were in the air. And a big thing that we talk about in the book that I think has not been talked about in terms of video game history enough is that the home computer, the arrival of the home computer had a fundamental effect on home video game systems because that was coming into the home at the same time that Vio games were moving out of the arcade, computers were moving out of the mainframe and out of the office into the home.

And there is a huge debate across multiple industries about are home computers going to play games or are game consoles going to do computing and sort of moving in both directions and a lot of experimentation and debate about which way it's going to go. And so Chandler definitely had a lot of influence on that keyboard component and on these ideas. But it was absolutely in the air.

Mattel had already done this teach and learn computer, for instance. And more broadly, sort of in society, this question of how is computation coming into the home and video games and home computers, the PC sort of being these two things coming together, but that were clearly very different. And so are they going to combine? Are they going to remain separate? And one sort of thing that often has been lost to history as well is like within television, when Jeff Rockless, who Baxter mentioned and other people were visioning and marketing and

talking about in television, the metaphor and the analogy that was by far the most dominant one was the home stereo as a way of thinking about a home device that you could add accessories to, like a turntable and speakers and a cassette player and two extra speakers and a subwoofer and that it was a kind of home interactive thing, and also the VHS, you know, video cass. These kinds of things were coming into the home at the same time. So it was a very exciting but uncertain time with multiple technologies entering the domestic sphere

and it being really unclear which one was going to become the foundation, if any. You know, I wouldn't have really thought about the stereo is like the point of comparison. But yeah, I can see the very. vision with that. Yeah, yeah. It's very clever. When Rockless was still with the company in the late 1970s, if you look at

some of the early kind of promotional articles they did in like Interface magazine or something, there's quotes from Rockless in there talking about the stereo as the model for what in television would be with all the add-ons, you know, and stuff. And also like getting cassettes

is like buying a new album. You know, it's like getting the new Rolling Stones album or whatever. So it also fit because when you own a stereo, you're buying eight-track tapes or cassettes or records, but you're sort of buying these things afterwards that let it play new things, right? And that fit very well with the idea of new video games that you would get, you know, for the first time with these second generation video games. So that was another reason why the stereo was a really compelling analogy because

after you purchase the stereo, then you would buy all this music for it. Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah. You also mentioned the controller a while ago, and I find that really, like, I find it very interesting because, you know, it's got a reputation nowadays that I feel is not entirely unearned, but also not entirely earned. because, you know, if you've never seen an Intellivision controller, it does not look like something you'd expect. Like, it's got these two buttons on each side of the controller.

Functionally, those are only three buttons because two of them do the same thing. Then you have a 12-key keypad in the middle of the upper part of the controller, and then below that, you have a disc that spins around, and you push it in on the sides, and it has 16 directions. The keypad, you can, like, put overlays onto it, which is kind of interesting to give you, like, different inputs per game. But, like, it's wired up very strangely, like, some of these overlap with one another. So you can, like, use the keypad, or you can use these side buttons in the disc, but you can't use them both at the same time or else it'll freak out. And, like, it's, I remember as a kid playing, you know, like stuff like the Frogger port.

or pitfall, thinking like, wow, this controller is not that great. But if you play it with a game that's really designed for the hardware, it's really, it's really nice. Like, it works really well. So something like, you know, the sports games work really well with this controller, the strategy games like Sea Battle that you mentioned earlier. Like, works fantastic. I love that game with that controller.

But, yeah, it's an acquired taste, I think is the best way of putting it. And I think it really speaks to this idea of, like, well, what is play at the home? Like, what does that look like? Like, you, if you're not feeling the need to emulate a joystick and button or whatever, like, how do you approach human input? So I like it from that perspective. Like, they, they zigged when everyone else zagged, except, I guess, RCA, and that's a whole mess. Yeah, they certainly were.

we're envisioning it to be more than arcade kind of style play, right, with the 12 button interface, you know, learning programs, other kinds of programs they were imagining that people would do with the system. So television was always imagined from the very beginning as something more than a video game system or to be built with the potential for that. But you're right, the hand controllers, you know, the disc and action buttons don't work at the same time and so forth. Like, we have a great story in the book. I think it was Ken Smith, who is designing basketball. In basketball, you have to stop moving to pass the ball, right? Because you're using the disc in order to pass, so you have to hit the button. So you stop moving to pass the ball, which is obviously for basketball,

kind of makes sense sometimes. You stop. You pass. That happens. But at other times, you pass when you're running, you know. And I think Smith talked about how then designing hockey, right, which game later he's like okay you don't stop in hockey right to pass right you're always moving so he got rid of that idea that you would have to press the the button the side button right and or the the keypad button i forget which one but you know he he he changed his design device um hockey so he could because of these controller problems and you know what the learning games on the system are pretty good for learning games i gotta i gotta give them credit their solid little experiences.

Yeah, just to add a couple points to that, I mean, the difference between Atari and Intellivision is just encapsulated in the controllers, right? The one red button and joystick, that idea of the arcade and bringing the arcade home versus the television controller that really is like a telephone, a home telephone in a sense, an object of the home, but also an object of intelligence because of its complexity that allows for intelligent complex games that look more like board games or have kinds of strategy like you're saying that would not be possible with the joystick and the button, right, as well as the arcade vision of a game that just takes, you know, two or three minutes to play.

And in terms of the reputation, you know, we know from our interviews as well as documents that in Mattel, who is legendary as the top company for market research, did a lot of market research on the hand controllers and found that people did not like them. Even back in the day, they were not that popular. I mean, opinions were split, but in general, they were not popular, even in the market back then. So it's, you know, that sense of frustration with some aspects of the play. But they also, you know, people did like it in many ways, the things you could do with them. And one interesting thing that happened within application software, which was the division inside of Mattel Electronics where people were programming new games,

is that the programmers themselves ended up basically hacking the console to create a program called Mr. Color that used the hand controllers for graphic design. Prior to that, they had a very unwieldy device, the GDC, the graphic development system, that sort of, they only had one of it, and everyone had to take turns sharing it. It was very cumbersome. And so with Mr. Color, you could use an Intellivision as it, its own development tool. Imagine trying to do that with an Atari VCS with a single button and a joystick, right?

So it's a really interesting testimony to the possibilities that, you know, became thinkable with that hand controller. But you're right, to be fair, that the overlays were very creative and there was a lot of interesting aspects to that. But the market research itself showed that the hand controllers were not popular. one yeah just quickly one thing we mentioned in the book too is like um the fact that uh you could use both of the hand controllers at the same time right and so at the end of some of the manuals of these games they would say like tips for learning or a variation of play and like it would encourage you to try playing tron

deadly discs with two controllers you know what i mean or play with a friend so there was there was these these moments of like possibilities for co-op play you mentioned and microsurgeon in the beginning where you're like fighting diseases and a human body. And I think in that manual too, they say that well, one person can control the ship and then the other person can shoot things, right? So there was

these kind of strange moments for a co-op play. I personally never really played that way, but that was something that we didn't really expect when we were doing our research and we're like, oh wow, this is unique. I remember playing Nightstocker with two controllers because that's another one. And

it sort of like gives you kind of like a robotron sensation where you're moving with the one and like shooting with the other one at the same time. It's nice. And it's funny, like you're talking about Mr. Color, which is very fascinating. And I think, you know, being able to use the Intellivision as its own dev system after a fashion really speaks to like its design because like that first wave of of game systems, programmable game systems, they're very like memory starved. Like the, Channel F, I think, had 64 bytes to work with or something like that. The 2600 has like 128 bytes of memory and it has to like create its own screen, scan line by scan lines. Like

half of that's basically accounted for already. But even something like the channel F or the studio too, like they have to, they're using a bitmap, right? They have to draw the whole screen with that memory. So everything like kind of chunky and slow to update and it's kind of limited. But, like, the Intellivision, like, it came out a couple years later, came out late enough that it has more memory than those machines. I would say a functional amount of memory. And the way it's designed, like, it has its microprocessor, which is like CP 1610, it's very strange, very unusual design. And it's not really, it wasn't designed for the Intellivision, like it existed already. So it wasn't really suited to running a game system on its own.

So they sort of developed, I guess, I consider it like a prototypical graphics card, the stick, the standard television interface chip. So, like, it's drawing the background. It's got eight moving objects. It can move at a time. Plus, you have graphics RAM. You have graphics ROM, which has, like, custom, has predefined characters built into it. So you're saving memory there. And it is your scratch pad ram too.

And you have an operating system. Like, unlike at 2,600, again, you have an operating system that you could pack into and operate and do all sorts of interesting stuff with. So, like, it's kind of a forward-thinking design to me. I think it's doing a lot of things that systems would do down the line, but it was doing them much earlier. and in like a more bit to late 1970s way. Yeah, I mean, part of this, what you're talking about too, fed into the whole idea that in television would be a quote-unquote sophisticated system, right? Bringing these kind of new possibilities to video gaming and something like the operating system that you're talking about, what they called the exact, right? That was the whole idea.

Let's onboard on a ROM chip, 4K, a little bit more than 4K of code that would be useful for. for all the games out there, right? So then your cartridge would all of a sudden be, have a lot more space for graphics and gameplay, right, if you did this. So, you know, the idea was that, you know, you might have 4K cartridges for video games, but with 4K on board, the Intellivision itself and a ROM chip, really you have 8K game, you know what I mean?

So you can have a lot more power, a lot more graphics, a lot more gameplay. And so this was, you know, part of the vision of their sophisticated, you know, home play that would be lasting idea. Yeah, you don't have to. Well, just to quickly add to that, the Intellivision cartridges were originally 4K, 4K, 4KKK instead of kilobytes, right? Because it was this 10-bit decal system. But they originally 4K. Later on, they had 8K and 12K and even a couple larger, which seemed very big at the time.

But the exec was originally designed to save space in the sense, like Braxton was saying, that it allowed you to get 8K of gameplay out of a 4K cartridge in a sense through these shared routines and procedures that it made possible. And one thing that's really interesting in terms of the history of video game design is that over time within the application software and also over at APH where they were programming in television games, The exec also eventually became a kind of shared foundation for game design that sort of set certain kinds of parameters around common ways to do games and certain things were easier to do with the execs. Certain things were harder to do with the exec. And so it created a shared kind of aesthetic and approach to game design. And later on, as those cartridges got bigger in particular,

there were ways that you could bypass the exec to get, for instance, faster gameplay because the execs slowed things down. But it really played a very interesting role for sort of game designers when that itself was also a kind of new job, so to speak. It gave a kind of shared foundation in the company for game design. And you know, it's one of those things where you don't have to put the Running Man Sprite in your game necessarily. You don't have to waste that memory on that animation because it's already built into the system. system, like, as well as all these other aspects. One of the interesting things is the running man is actually not built into.

Oh, really? Yeah. So they just were using that because they had the Sprite. Yeah. You know, which is interesting, but they did a lot of thinking about, you know, Grom, which was graphics, read-only memory, right? So these were, like, supposed to be patterned images that would be reused in many different games, right? and that would be burnt into the system

so you couldn't change it, unlike graphics, RAM, right? Which was random access memory, so you could make those changes in that graphics. So, but they did a lot of thinking about what should we put into this, you know? And, you know, for example, we had one story where at first they were going to put in like, you know, spades, diamonds, hearts, and clubs, right? Because they thought they would be making card games. But then they decided not to do that because they're like,

actually, that's very limited for the future. and how many games are really going to use this. So they scrapped that idea and went for more abstract things and lines. But I think the running man, too, like they figured that a lot of games would use their own sprites because they had graphics ram. They would design their own running man or running girl, you know what I mean, in the future games.

So I think that's why it actually didn't end up in Grom. Yeah. Just to add to that, like, or you might have a spree, ship instead of a running man, right? And the exec was programmed primarily by David Rolf, who also programmed baseball and Las Vegas poker and blackjack. And he told us, we interviewed him several times, that in some ways those two games very much influenced what he was thinking of in terms of the exec. And like those background, you know, images make up like the baseball field in baseball, but they're also the tunnels in advanced engines and dragons, for instance, those

kinds of shapes. And there were these tradeoffs about what you would or wouldn't include that also reveals sort of the original thinking of what people thought games would be like for Intellivision that was very much influenced by board games, sports games, strategy games like C-Battle. So one of the most consequential decisions that was made in that regard was that they decided to not have a scrolling module in the exec. So the exec does not do scrolling, which if you think of arcade games,

scrolling is a big thing, right? But that was actually not put in the exec, because you have a static playing field for poker, for baseball, for C-battle, for the space battle, for all these kinds of things. So scrolling always had to be done on the cartridge, and it could often be a real challenge, especially in the earlier cartridges, because you had to do that each time.

And that's an interesting sort of fork in the road, when they couldn't put everything in the exact, they decided to not have scrolling in there. It's always funny, the things you think about after the fact. They're like, oh, man, that would have been helpful. Like, I've talked to the folks who designed the $2,600 and the common link in every single conversation I've had with all of them is, I really wish we had not saved a couple of pennies and put a line on the cartridge port for, like, reading and writing so that we could have

had bigger cards without jumping through all of the weird hoops that we had to do. And I'm like, you know, that's fair. Yeah, and I think, you know, when you know about when Atari soft, right, began to make games for Intellivision, right, port some of the games from Atari to television format, some of the programmers were head hunted away from Metal Electronics, Rust Half, Mark Kennedy, to work for Atari. And they told us they took the idea for the exact, right, and wrote a bunch of life. library of code or whatnot, that they would put on each of the cartridges for the games for

Intellivision. And they did include a scrolling code in their version of what the exec might be on these cartridges. I mean, I guess they would have to. I mean, Defender was on the system, and that's a scrolling game. And it runs really well. So yeah, a couple of quick other things I wanted to note is like a lot of this early work was done at APH, the programming work, that is. I mean, the design work and everything that was at Mattel. And I'm very fascinated by the, like, the process of making these early games where Mattel would in-house, like, do the art and the game design and then send it to APH to sort of put that together into a program.

It's a very interesting process to me as an outsider from the industry. But it sounds like something that, like, still kind of happens today, you know, when you, have publishers working with developers. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. So APH, that stands for applied physics, which was a major at Caltech. And all the staff were Caltech graduates. Some of them were still in college. And the company had done work for Robert Abel Films and other, you know, they didn't only do

video games. They did a bunch of technological consulting. and they ended up working with Mattel to actually help design the handhelds and they worked with David Chandler, you know, they helped design the actual hardware, the original hardware. They played a big role in that as well as the games.

And in some cases, the actual game, even the game design was done at APH. So like Ken Smith, who did Sea Battle, that idea, he came up with at APH. As I recall, that was not thought up, at Mattel. Now, when he wanted the shape of the ships and of the coastline, this is a game where you're in the ocean with islands, you know, fighting other ships, Mattel staff would help out with that graphic design. But the actual gameplay was really done at APH. And we know that they would sort of

shoot ideas back and forth and propose game ideas. APH would have meetings at Mattel and they would propose games. Mattel would propose games. So it would go in multiple directions. And especially in the early years, the early Mattel staff would also go to APH because they had all the hardware to program and sort of work over in a back corner at APH before Mattel, you know, built up its own infrastructure for them to have computers for doing work inside of Mattel. So there was a lot of driving back and forth between Hawthorne and Pasadena in those early years because it was primarily done with pixel paper and, you know, handwriting and things being taken back and forth.

And that relationship with APH continued right up to the end, right up to the crash. They were involved with IM Network, which was making games for Atari and other kinds of ventures. And so the APH relationship was very crucial early on, but it actually continued all the way to the crash. The contract was not terminated until April of 1983, which was when sort of the biggest set of layoffs happened prior to the real crash happening in February of 84. But APH had a contractual relationship and was doing work with Mattel up until August of 1983. Yeah. Some of the graphic

designers talk about how they would have to, you know, if APH wanted hockey players or basketball players or something like that, you know, it would take a long time for them to, you know, design on pixel paper at Mattel, at Mattel, and then send them to Pasadena to have them, you know, installed and hand-coded into the system or whatnot. And then they would only see it later on what their kind of images look like on the screen and then make adjustments and have to send it back and have it, you know, put into the programming again. So it was, this is before they moved programming in-house. And Mattel then have the technology.

to do this kind of thing. But that obviously changed in 80, 81, when they started bringing more people into Mattel Electronics. Yeah. I don't know that's enough. I don't know. I feel like that's enough technical turkey under the hood. I'd like to get into some of those things,

This machine's debut, like, they announced it originally in May 78 to, they announced that they were going to show it off at the summer CES. That didn't happen. It got delayed because of issues with the chipset. Like, it just straight up wasn't ready, as I understand it. So it got reannounced at the winter CES in 79th, January. I believe there's a demonstration reel that's on. on YouTube from the Blue Sky Rangers. It's very much worth checking out.

You see some, like, fairly early versions of the games and everything. So it got its test market at the very end of 79, very limited release, extremely limited release, barely even counts other than if you happen to live in, like, what, the Bay Area. Fresno, actually. Fresno. Fresno, yeah, specifically Fresno. but it started getting a little more available early in 1980 and by the summer it was like nationally available and the early advertising is really fascinating to me based on what the advertising became very shortly thereafter because when you think about the

television and advertising you're probably thinking of them bringing in a sports writer George Plympton to go out there and talk about how Intellivision is just much better than the Atari counterpart. It's a very rare, like, head-to-head comparison of product in the video game space. But that wasn't really the focus at all early on. Like, the first, I know, six, seven months of advertising, especially when it was still, you know, rolling out in test markets, is that this was expandable into a keyboard.

They focused very heavily on the keyboard component. And as I understand it, they shifted focus because that wasn't really moving the needle. Like, people did not really care about the keyboard expandability, really. Yeah, those are the John Geyer commercials you're talking about. And so you're making a lot of really interesting points. So CES is the consumer electronic show, which even back then by the late 70s was the biggest such event in the country. And for Mattel Toys, Toy Fair was known as the big sort of convention. CES, the Consumer Electronics Show is the big one.

It still happens now every year in January. There was a period of about 15 years where it would happen twice a year. And there was a winter and a summer CES. Originally there was not and now there is not. It only happens in January. But there was a period of, I believe, about 15 years when there was a summer CES in addition to the winter one. And that's why you're correct.

the possibility would be to do a summer CES, which was usually in Chicago, complementing the winter CES, which was usually in Las Vegas. And as we said before, the technological challenge of doing the keyboard component, sorry, of what's known as the master component, of Intellivision itself, setting aside this computer thing, the keyboard component, just the master component itself, what we now think of as Intellivision, was by a factor of 10, more expensive than anything Mattel had ever really sold, you know, with a couple exceptions, was so complicated and was also a whole new product category.

So there were a lot of delays, a lot of complications with it, and not even mentioning for the moment the keyboard component, which had even more problems. And so there were these delays. And then they actually had a history of test marketing in Fresno, California, which is in the Central Valley, and they test marketed it then in 1979 in several department stores in Fresno. And Fresno was popular with the market research staff at Mattel because it was a mid-sized city, but it was not that well known outside of California, so it was easier to hide products from the competition when you didn't quite want the public to find out in this wider public, in this

pre-internet era. You could test market something in Fresno, and most people didn't know where that was, if they didn't live outside of California. But it's actually only about three, four hours drive from L.A. So for the L.A. company of Mattel, they could actually drive up to Fresno, you know, in like four hours or whatever. So it was convenient for them. But it was considered not necessarily a backwater, but not well known so that they could test market these new devices. And you're right. The original advertising with the John Geyer family, sort of no competition, no comparison with any

other system, talking about the games, but also a lot about home finance, very boring commercials. And this is a company, Mattel, that pioneered TV advertising for toys. They were legendary. And they had this long relationship with the company, Ogilvy and Mayher. So the switch, which we talk about in the book a lot, to this George Plimpton figure, who was a sports journalist, but was also known for being very intelligent and sort of philosophical, founded the Paris Review, the journal, and going with that person, but simultaneously making the very risky decision to piggyback off of Atari. Atari had the lead. They were in the market.

They got in ahead of time. They were $100 cheaper. They were taking over. And the train had left the station, as you say, and they made the risky decision to do hardcore comparisons as a way to take advantage of their greater visibility in market share. of Atari's greater visibility in market share and try and show how Intellivision would be the better choice. And, you know, in an era where we talk about console wars and even Google versus Apple and all of these things that are still happening, it really was the first console war was not Nintendo versus Sega. It was Atari versus Intellivision. And those comparison commercials were a massive

success. Intellivision never displaced Atari. They were always second and had about 30 percent of the market share, but compared to what they had before with the John Geyer commercials, it was going to be going bankrupt, basically, if that was the path. Yeah, I think they had an existential crisis in the summer of 1980, right? It just wasn't movie in the product, and, you know, they didn't, they didn't have an identity, you know, it wasn't, in television as a home computer, what does it do? Oh, it's, you know, do you have education for your kids? you have exercise, you know, the keyboard component wasn't even out yet.

It was just promised in the future type thing. So they were like, they had to do something. There was like a, you know, a palpable sense of urgency. And so September of 1980, they hired Frank O'Connell and they just came up with this plan, this brilliant plan to like compete directly with Atari on national television. The timing was great because 1980, you know, February, was it February, no, it was March. It was March 1980 when Atari published Space Invaders, and that was the game that really, like, sent the $2,600 into the stratosphere. And, you know, suddenly Atari was in this situation where it couldn't manufacture enough product.

And if you can't find a $2,600, oh, look, there's an Intellivision on the shelf here. Hey, I saw these commercials. These games look better than what Atari's got. Let's just get one of these instead. So, the timing very worked out. That's so cool. We don't have a sentence about that in the book, but I wish we had known that because I definitely would have added a couple sentences about that because that fits in with the rivalry. Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, between 77 and the end of 79 Atari sold like 1 million VCS units, and they sold that many, if not more, in 1980 alone. So, like, Space Invaders was huge for them. And Mattel piggybacking in the summer makes total perfect sense to me. Like, that was the logical thing to do. But, like, you know, they weren't piggybacking on everything. Like, they, they were, like, doing some really innovative stuff. Like, I know in your book you talk a fair bit about play cable, which, you know, we mentioned earlier in the episode. And, like, this is, like, really fascinating.

It's a system for basically downloading games through cable to your system, kind of like the Sega channel did, like, a decade and a half later. So this was not something that had been done prior. I know there had been discussions, particularly with like Ralph Bayer early on in the 70s, about how we could use cable for video games. But these mad lads, they did it. Yeah, and they were doing it in 1978, right? I mean, like, I don't know, Tom, if you want to talk about it, you might know a little bit more about that. But right, by 1978, they had this idea for it, which was, you know, a year before

or Intellivision was test marketed. They were working on this, you know? So it's fascinating. Yeah, it's one of those interesting things that, you know, as a kid, neither of us knew anything about, you know, play cable, obviously. And it's one of these stories that you get so often where it's a mix of serendipity, opportunity, because the chip, the 16, C.P. 1610 chip that was the main chip in television was made by a New York company called.

General Instrument that had a division, Gerald, that was doing cable TV, and it was through Gerald that they originally proposed this play cable idea. So it sort of ended up being a connection between Mattel and General Instrument that they already had this established relationship with because GI was making the chips for television. And it was a really interesting technology. Charles Degas, you know, Czech Degas sort of created the technology. He had come in from General Electric into Gerald. And it was an amazing technology that, you know, was done in several cities around the U.S. and in Canada. It never had a huge amount of subscribers, but it was a pioneer this idea of downloading games that you could then play right off of your

video game system. Yeah, we didn't talk about General Instrument a lot. Really, in television, and we say in our book, was a collaboration between General Instrument who designed the chips for Intellivision, really, the technology that we talked about briefly came from General Instrument. And then Mattel, who was like the marketing magic and, you know, on the creative kind of side and component to these things. And then APH, who really helped up with the technology, too, but also the software.

and those things. So they all kind of came together. But, yeah, GI had all these other businesses like Gerald. And so they were coming up with this idea. What I always found fascinating about PlayCable, it wasn't for GI and Chuck Degas and, like, people working there. It wasn't like this idea for a great business. Like, we're going to make millions of dollars by downloading video games to the council.

You know what I mean? GI had its eyes on the future. They knew that downloading online banking information, shopping information, all this kind of stuff was coming, you know. It was already happening on certain two-way cable systems or like in France and other places, right? And so this was kind of a test run for them to video games would be a digital package, a digital content that they could supply to the home. But, you know, they were hoping that this would transform into much big.

bigger businesses well beyond entertainment and games. You know, games was a stepping stone to this, you know. And a similar way that David Chandler, who helped design, you know, television and the keyboard component was envisioning Intellivision, that games were just the master component, the heart of the system, but it was just a stepping stone to the future of television being a home computer attached to your TV that would help you with banking and shopping online and all these other things. It's also a really interesting window into sort of the emerging video games industry, right?

Because PlayCable, which was this technology, but it was also the name of a company, PlayCable was actually a subsidiary of general instrument, not a Mattel. And they were based in New York, not in California, right? And they had created this technology and this collaboration with Mattel where you're downloading games onto your television. And they hired actually Mickey Mantle, the famous baseball player, sort of playing off of Plimpton to do commercials for play cable. They had brochures and very prominent in these television commercials and brochures was this idea of why spend hundreds of dollars on these $25 cartridges when for

1999 you can have 30 games a month for free with play cable. So get play cable and then you don't have to buy cartridges anymore. And you can actually trace as the months unfold, the executives at Mattel starting to say, wait a second. You're telling people to not buy cartridges, but that's our model for making money from Intellivision. And you can see the sort of wheels turning about sort of alternative visions that you might see nowadays with Netflix or going to a movie theater, right? Where they realize, wait a second, this is potentially cannibalizing the whole idea that we have for why we're developing these games. And that led to conflicts then where they would only

give, you know, play cable older games or, you know, these kinds of issues. But it's very instructive and really interesting because you see in this historical moment when you have cartridges for the first time and now this downloading for the first time and the sort of technology happens before the sort of economics are hammered out, so to speak. And then you see within these companies and between these companies, lights start to go off, so to speak, about how, wait a second, we've got a problem here about how are we going to make money off of this if, you know, this is our model. And you see these two models sort of emerging and clashing in the context of play cable,

which is really illuminating. Yeah, it's funny because, you know, the company was also partnered with Mattel. It was GI company, but they were in partnership with Mattel because they were working with in television. But some of the people that worked at play cable, right? Gary Stein, right? And other people we interviewed were just like, Mattel wouldn't even return our phone calls, right?

They hated us, right? And so it's such a weird thing. Like, a part of the company is just totally, Mattel doesn't even deal with them so much. Sown it on Grata. I do think it's funny, the way you describe it, it's kind of like the same tensions you hear about now with Microsoft's GamePass.

It's like, oh, well, if we're selling this, then people aren't buying the games. You know, is that okay? The more things change. Absolutely. It's one reason why the history is so valuable and interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why PlayCable didn't do well, too, because people are like, well, do you have this? Do you have burger time? You know, the latest game? And no, right? Yeah. So it's hard to sell. Yeah. And then I remember, I don't think it was brought up too much in your book,

but I know we've gone back and forth about TV POW quite a bit. And that was sort of an interesting arrangement, like a local TV station set up where people would call in for the local TV show and they would be running in a television game. And then every time you yell pow into the phone, like an action would happen like it would shoot a shot or something depending on the game. And that I find really fascinating since that whole process started with Fairchild for the Channel F and like even got off the ground. around a little bit with the Channel F, but clearly, like, it was much more expansive with the Intellivision effort after Fairchild, you know, well, you heard it first on the podcast, late breaking news. You heard it first on this podcast. We are working on an article about TV power right now. I was actually working on it today, Braxton, because we actually have a whole bunch of stuff

that we couldn't fit in the book or that we could only, you know, talk about somewhat succinctly because 411 pages was very generous of MIT press but they drew the line and we had to draw the line as well for purpose of focus. But we could tell you a lot about

TV power but very briefly because I was just working on it today and Braxton can tell you more if you want. So what TV POW was was developed by this guy, Mark Kempner and the core technology called the POW box would allow a video game system

to translate a sound pow into pushing a button basically. And the key technology in that patent actually was to eliminate side tone. That's actually what the key development was. So in an old style telephone, for those of you who remember them, though you still get

this with an iPhone or a phone nowadays, there's the main sound of like us talking right now, but then you hear your own voice as well. It's not dead if you know what I mean. You hear your own voice, which keeps you from talking too loudly, right? That is known as side tone, and that's put back so that the speaker doesn't speak too loud, knows that they're talking.

Some of that side tone leaks back into the main channel, so to speak, to the other caller, which doesn't really matter normally. But if you're doing this TV pow game, these games always had a host. There was always a host at the television station that was encouraging the players and telling them you're doing great you know fire again and that chatter through the side tone could accidentally activate the the pow and so the technology would take out the side tone so that the host wouldn't accidentally fire the thing that is actually the key technology behind tv pow and tv power was done as segments in regular programming that's what you've seen on youtube however

there are for 13 episodes of a stand-alone 30-minute game show called say POW that was done in Los Angeles in 1979, between October and December 79, directed by Sidney Cohen, who we just interviewed back in April. And Sydney found one of the 13 episodes, which we have not put up on YouTube or anywhere yet. We want to try and make it available. But we've seen the only existing 30-minute standalone game show using this TV power technology. We're hoping that Sydney or someone else will find some of the other 12 episodes in their attic. We actually do have one existing episode. And what's so fascinating about TV POW and SayPow, both of these things, using the power-bell-ox technology, is it's been acknowledged even prior to us that in many ways this is the origins of what we would now think of as Twitch, right?

And online streaming and e-sports and that kind of thing. This was one of the very, very first examples. There was a thing in Germany called Telashvila that did something a little similar around this time. but this was quite early and a really interesting technology. And so we do talk about it a little bit in the book, but it's not in television specific because the technology was originally developed for the Fairchild Channel F system. When Fairchild went bankrupt, Marf Kettner switched to Intellivision,

but he kept the Fairchild. And if you look even at this one episode of the TV show that we mentioned, or if you look at TV POW excerpts on YouTube or whatever, you'll see there's almost always a mix of Fairchild and in television games that are used. So it's actually not in television specific. It's super interesting. So stay tuned, and we're going to have more out about that. There you go.

We're recording this in July. Yeah, in July. So it will be a few months, but we're still writing it, but we're very excited. So if this episode goes out after the article, I will make sure to link it in the show notes. Yes, absolutely. So yeah, TV Pal, very fascinating. I'm very excited to read that piece about it. Yes, it's very cool. It's very cool.

One of the things that we're talking about a little bit is just how it opened up the space of play to, you know, a different kind of demographic, you know, like especially Saipa and some of these other inserts where callers, you know, where it could be women working at home, you know, or very small children playing the game and so forth. So we tend to think about video game play as play happening around the television at home or in the arcades and so forth. But this was a completely, you know, unique kind of play situation where somebody could play video games with their telephone from home. You know, they didn't even have a system at home maybe. So it's a, we don't talk about this kind of interaction or interface with a video game. So it's a whole new kind of different kind of play that was happening. in the 1970s and early 1980s. Yeah, we could talk a little bit about that.

You know, this was an era where game marketing wasn't so focused in on boys and young men as it was during the NES era and the 90s and well into the 2000s and on. Game companies were kind of more agnostic in their marketing towards, you know, who their audiences were and who they were trying to. to get to play their games, at least at home. I mean, the arcade space is sort of its own beast in that regard. But, yeah, like, it's very interesting that the Intellivision never saw anything to sort of speak to those sort of child demographics who would be playing with their toys, like Barbie or Hot Wheels or whatnot. Did you dig up anything that sort of describes why that is?

Yeah, for that, yeah, for sure. I mean, that's a really interesting question and something we wanted to find out. Why didn't they make an Intellivision game for a Barbie game for Intellivision, right? It seems like the obvious thing that would take place, right? I do think I disagree a little bit about what you're saying. Like, the marketing was more agnostic towards, in terms of gender. That's fair. I mean, compared to how it was later.

But it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, a utopia here. Right, right, right, right, right, right. But, yeah, I guess I was leading into saying that for television, older boys and male teens and the male adults were always the kind of core demographic. Like, actually, we have a document from 1977 about the handhelds, right? And that their marketing was towards, you know, men and boys and teens. Right. That was the core demographic. And that's why you saw these sports titles, right? And then action titles and other things like that. So even at Mattel Electronics, the focus was always on men and boys, right? And they knew that was a problem early on. They had marketing testing that said that, you know, we need more more kind of software for women and girls and players. Right. So they, Mattel was aware of this, right? And because the company is very old and was very good at, marketing and they knew how to make toys for girls and, you know, understood girls' play patterns and so forth, like Barbie was a huge hit, right? They wanted to kind of solve this problem,

but I think that in our book we talk about, you know, Mattel knew about this problem, Mattel electronics and in television, and they tried to make a few games and so forth, but they never really went full bore into developing games for women and girls, for example. I mean, just to add to that a bit, like, I wish you were more right than you are, unfortunately, about the gendering of that, because even in the early days, it was not. And one thing we're trying to add to that history is that in video game history, the link to toys is underappreciated in how it shaped video game history. And one issue is that even to this day, if you walk into a Walmart or whatever, you can find the girls' toys. and the boys toys like just look for the pink aisle kind of joke you know still applies the incredible degree to which toys are gendered and what's really interesting is in metalle going back to the

1960s and this way predates the electronics or and in television is that boys toys and girls toys were not only two different kinds of products it was almost two different companies with different executives and different staff and different test marketers and at the very top it met and Ruth Handler and Elliott Handler and a few other people, that boys' toys and girls' toys were almost two different companies inside of Mattel. And there was very little done around cross-gender toys or cross-gender play, even when their own market researchers were raising their hands and saying, actually boys are playing with Barbie sometimes.

Actually, girls are playing with Hot Wheels. And it's very consequential that very early on, Mattel electronics and in television in particular and the handhelds were basically assigned as boys' toys. That was a hugely consequential decision that happened very early on. And within the mentality of Mattel, once something has been put into the boys' toys bucket, so to speak, it is segregated from girls largely. And even when you can make these new games, it really was a struggle.

And there were actually a lot of female programmers and executives at Mattel and in Mattel electronics and a lot of data showing that girls were playing these games. But it really was a barrier. And then what fed that even more was a jealousy and conflict between the Mattel Toys Division and the Mattel Electronics Division because there was about a two-year period when Mattel Electronics was making more money than Mattel Toys, right? Intellivision was bringing in more money than Barbie and Hot Wheels combined, and there was the sense that maybe this was the future and that Barbie and Hot Wheels were on their way out. So even when Intellivision had an auto racing game as one of its very first games originally released, it was not labeled as a Hot Wheels game, even though it was cars driving around

on a racetrack. And a big reason for this was that Mattel Toys did not want to be playing, so to speak, with Mattel Electronics. And the only example of a kind of collaboration that happened between toys and electronics around a video game was really only at the very end quite close to the crash. And that was Masters of the Universe, He-Man. It was really the only case where you had a product from the toy side that turned into a game. And that only happened very late. And also from its beginnings, He-Man, Masters of the Universe, was a very like multimodal things. It was a TV show. in addition to a toy.

And so it sort of lent itself to that kind of collaboration. But other than that, it really was quite segregated. So the segregation of toys from electronics, and then within toys, the segregation of boys' toys and girls' toys, had huge consequences for the gendering of video games that we still see to this day. Yeah, I think one point you made, too, about children, too. Like, one reason they didn't make a Barbie or a Hot Wheels game is because they were pitching to a more,

quote-unquote, sophisticated audience, right, with the hand controller. We talked about this. This is called Intellivision, intelligent television, right? And so, and they were trying to position themselves and differentiate themselves from Atari, which was associated with the arcades and younger players, right? They could pick up this joystick and use it, right? And so that was another reason that, yeah,

They weren't going heavily into making children of video games for children, which is weird in the context of Metalla toy company. You know what I mean? So that's, I always found that fascinating. Yeah, they did the electric company, you know, educational games and a few other things. But their core demographic for marketing was more of the teenager demographic. Yeah, I could see that. That's all fair points. And, yeah, it is unfortunate internal politics kind of screwed us out of what would probably have been a very good Barbie game.

Yeah, I always think it's funny. We didn't write about this in the book. But I think in 1984, a Barbie game was made by EPEX software, a computer. They, like, after Mattel Electronics crashed, you know, and they sold it off, they gave their license for Barbie to make a video game to, is that how you say, epics software? And that was being run by Michael Katz, who came from Mattel, right? And so had connections with Mattel people to get that license. So I always thought that was kind of sad that, like, you know, just after the crash, there was a Barbie and a Hot Wheels game that were created.

But it wasn't for Intellivision, for the Commodore. For what it's worth, another reason for they're not being a Barbie game. And Mike Winstock, who is one of the heads of legal at Mattel, who we interviewed and some other people talked about this is that in the early in the 80s and 70s in particular the toy side was incredibly protective of Barbie you know the Barbie movie only happened you know like three years ago right um they were incredibly protective of Barbie and one thing that that the head the former head of legal at Mattel was telling us is their internal conversations in the 70s and 80s were thing were so there was an attempt to make a Barbie Broadway show and they were

approach to do a Barbie Broadway show. And they had internal discussion saying, you know, what if the star, the Barbie person develops a drug habit or has some scandal, it's going to put a stain on the Barbie brand, right? We can't have Barbie being identified with a particular human being, you know, this kind of thing. There were so many proposals being made back then to do Barbie movies, Barbie musicals, all this other kind of stuff. And they were incredibly protective of that IP and of Hot Wheels as well to some extent. And so that was an additional factor beyond these others that we've mentioned was it was so central to the company's success and identity. Right. They were very, very protective. You can, that's fair. I think we all agree that

television had great graphics, but they were worried about what, how are you going to make, you know, Barbie look good in these eight-bit rudimentary graphics. It can't be done. And so, like, they were worried that it would tarnish the brand. That's fair. Oh, man, now I'm just thinking about how good a Barbie Broadway musical would have been. Really, really disappointed now. Maybe there's a script floating around somewhere, because from what Mike told me, I'm not sure how far along it was, but they had a pitch.

So I don't know if they had a full, if there's any lost Barbie songs from that Barbie thing. I don't know how far along it got that that would be fun to find. That's something for the lost media, folks. You know, forget about SpongeBob commercials. We want the Barbie musical. So we've talked about the crash and how it impacted, you know, Mattel Electronics a fair bit because, as your book title does mention, it almost bankrupted the company how badly things went for them. Because, like, you know, up through or up into 82, I don't know if it's through 82 necessarily, but, like, things were going very well for Mattel Electronics. They're going very well for the industry generally.

but, you know, 82 is the year that production at Atari finally caught up to demand. And this was like an ongoing issue that Atari had. And, of course, Atari had so much of the market itself. So what happens to that affect everybody. But, you know, from what I understand, his story in Alex Smith, he talked to a lot of the Atari marketing and retail distribution folks. And the story he got basically was that retailers were ordering more product than they, that Atari could give them. And they were doing this deliberately after a certain point because that way they would get the amount they actually wanted. But this sort of skewed what Atari expected their production numbers should be.

And once they actually caught up to production, suddenly all these stores had way more copies of games than they actually could sell. and that sort of drove the price of everything down and that was very bad for something like the Intellivision which was more costly to produce and at the same time this was the same period where Calico came along and suddenly they had the most advanced graphics and sophisticated quote-unquote games

and that really sort of made things go very poorly for Mattel in that regard so not a great time I think you shared with me an internal sales chart from like that goes up through mid-83 and it's just a nosedive in terms of sales and like there's stuff getting returned. Like Patel's trying to smooth systems with rebates that are causing them to lose tons of money on just the hardware. It's a mess.

One of my favorite things about doing research, maybe my favorite, but one of my favorite, obviously if you're going to call it research, is the unexpected, is that you find something that you weren't expecting to find. Because if you only find what you're expecting to find in a way, it's not research, right? Like, that's one of the real joys of doing research. And I really feel like we had a real finding and unexpected finding or a learning for us around the crash. Because from the internal data and interviews and documents and everything that we've been able to find and looking at the industry more broadly, although overproduction of consoles and of cartridges played a role in the crash,

we're quite certain that actually was not the number one factor and that, you know, sometimes that is getting overemphasized and the, you know, the ET cartridges in the desert and the over-production that linked to that, but I would actually say the number one reason for the crash is not overproduction. The number one reason for the crash is the personal computer. And if you look at those graphs that we have that are plummeting, that what's missing, if you only have one line, is look at what's happening to the PC, to the Apple 2 and the PC Jr.

And the Commodore 64 and everything else at that time, they aren't going down. They're going up. And you saw the emergence of personal computers that could play good enough video games that you could get that and do a whole lot more than with a standalone console. And Calico, with Calico Vision, had this atom computer. computer add-on, right? And in television and even Atari with attempts they made with their computers, tried to do the home computer through the video game direction. And they lost the

home computer to the video game direction, one, out. And that rise of the personal computer and the home computer played a huge role in the crash. And the companies that didn't have a personal computer that was doing well. And, you know, Mattel had this home computer called the Aquarius that they just basically relabeled from another company that they tried to sell. And, you know, many of these video game companies made attempts. And, you know, in the case of the keyboard component, it was part of the original vision of Intellivision. And so, but there's a really interesting history here that we still see to this day when we look at PC gaming compared to using an Xbox or a PlayStation or whatever, right? This is still with us, this relationship between

computers and consoles when it comes to video games. And, you know, from what we can see, that played a really big role and probably a bigger role than overproduction, although obviously the two are linked and each sort of magnified the other. And I'm not saying that overproduction was not an issue because it was an issue. But I think the rise of the personal computer, is a big factor in the crash. You know, so I have heard that. And my feeling is that, you know, there was the price war that was going on in 1983 between Commodore and Texas instruments that really drove down the price of at least

the quote unquote low end of the market and sort of crushed out. So many of the competing computer systems, I think Apple sort of got away with it because they pointedly ignored that entire section of the market with their Apple too they're like nope this is how much it costs you know live with it but what I've found interesting is that like the computers yeah they sold really well but like they never reached the same sort of heights in terms of market saturation or maybe not market saturation is the word I'm looking for but in terms of like consumer pickup as as consoles did like I think there was a Obviously, a lot of companies, you know, migrated to computers because they felt like this was the safe haven from the storm, right?

But my feeling is that there was not a recognition until maybe the mid-80s, that these are really like two different demographics of people wanting different experiences, right? Like, you know, a game console is very different from a computer because you just pop in a cartridge or what have you and you're off to the races. But a computer, you have to set up and you have to, you're probably going to get a more, you know, complex experience. So I think it is a factor. I just, I don't know. I don't know. How I would, I don't know if I would call either one of them like the driving factor,

but they were definitely big factors. I think, yeah. I mean, I think this is a great conversation to talk about. But one thing to add, too, is I think the crash was different for different companies. You know what I mean? So in Mattel's case, too, it would be its own idiosyncratic kind of crash with all these kind of different factors and variables contributing to it. And, yeah, 1982, you know, with the rival of like Colico Vision, right?

And they lost money in Christmas, 1982, right? And in our book in the last chapter, we do talk about how they were pumping money into advertising like Mattel does. they were pumping money into researching the next gen system and all these different things like, you know, games for Intel Voice, the ECS, you know, the system changer, all these, you know, these plans that they had. And they ended up losing like $20 million in Christmas, 1982. And they were overestimating, you know, the market potential of Intellivision at that point with these other systems coming out and so forth. So those, the, the, The cartridge of glut, like Tom was talking about, and then home computers also show up. But it was also kind of this kind of overestimation of like the possibilities for Intellivision and their, what we call the overextension of their kind of hardware research and other things that caused a lot of chaos in 1983, the fallout from that loss during the Christmas season of 82.

Yeah, one interesting piece of that thinking about like specificity to Mattel or to some of these companies as well is one thing that came out in a lot of our interviews with marketing folks and executives, but particularly marketers, where there would just be a sense of bafflement is that with rare exceptions, the whole toy industry, they were built around the idea of fads, that toys basically would have a three-year lifespan. You know, you come up with the pet rock, the hula hoop, slime, whatever. It's a big hit. Every kid wants it for Christmas. And by the next year, it's sort of on its way out. And that's why you invest so much money in research and development coming up with new toys is that the toy industry was legendary for being built around fads and that most

toys were designed around a three-year lifespan. And even longer lasting toys like Barbie that was because of all the new outfits and the Barbie camper and the Barbie this and the Barbie that and new hot wheels like hot wheels as a brand endure but you'd have a new car a new truck a new race track come out and so you know Mattel as a company was very much designed around massive research and development come up with lots of toy ideas you throw spaghetti on the wall to some extent you get a few hits that you're going to make a lot of money but you do not bank on the idea that that toy is going to be making money for five or 10 or 15 years you sort have a three-year time frame till it's in the clearance bin, so to speak. And some of the folks we

talked to just expressed bafflement that even among some of the executives, they would have this sense that sort of gravity no longer applies when it comes to video games. And this idea that there's statements back then from some of the executives that we foresee, you know, that toys are sort of on their way out and there's no downside to video games. They're on a permanent upward trajectory, you know, that kind of idea. And some of the marketing and other folks at Mattel just sort of throwing up their hands saying, we have decades of experience, you know, that toys don't last forever. And maybe this isn't a toy, but it's still a product. And so there really was, you know, I don't know if hubris is the right word, but there was an excitement

that this is just going to go up and up and up forever, you know, for that. For that, you know, for that 18 month period, like you said, you know, when it was just making so much money hand over fist and every game was making money and they couldn't keep up with demand and Atari couldn't keep up with demand. And there was this sense that this will never end, even though within the company, they knew these things end. Yeah, it was, it was kind of delusionary a little bit. I mean, they were, they were in conversations with Motorola to make a next gen chip, right? They, people engineers at a toy company. We're designing a massive, you know, chip microprocessor called magic for the next generation system, you know?

We've gone from Barbie and Hot Wheels to a micro processing design company, right? They were buying, you know, superconductor companies or, you know, it was, yeah, they had maybe, maybe there was a little bit of delusion of grandeur that they would be the next IBM. But, you know, they weren't alone in that. I remember reading Phil Orbane's book about Parker Brothers and the history of that company because he worked there. I think he was in marketing and he was deeply involved in their video game division and he wrote in there about how, you know, Parker Brothers had this long history of being very, like, you know, careful about its moves and careful not to like overproduce anything. And then they had this big hit with the electronic games, the handheld games. and then that went bust, so they had to put all of their eggs into the video game basket just to, like, you know, keep going as a company.

And, you know, because that went really well, suddenly the guy higher up than all of them at their parent company, which I'm blanking on the name of it, but it was like a food company. But they are like, no, we have to go all in on this. You know, even if there's, you know, red flags, nope, make a bunch of product. We're going to sell through it. Don't worry about it. pretty much almost killed the company, just like it almost killed Mattel. So, you know, it was a hell of a time.

We really did gain a real appreciation for market researchers and marketers. You know, we interviewed so many of them. And a few of them, you know, had a technology or engineering background. Many of them didn't. But they were very skilled at the pulse of the market, like what people were one thing. I mean, not perfect, obviously, but they were really good. And Mattel was known as having the best of the best in that regard. And they had some real insights about this and about sort of how products work, you know, that what goes up is it's going to come down.

Yeah, there's a real dearth of reporting and, like, interviews with people who worked outside of, like, game development when you look at these histories, you know. There's always really interesting stories to be found from, like, the executive side of things and the management and sales and marketing. And, you know, they often get vilified by the developers because the developers are, you know, doing something else completely different and maybe didn't agree with their decisions. But, like, these people had their own world of expertise and they were kind of doing the best they could. In the eyes. You know, I will say in a sense, you know, the, they were not wrong that the Intellivision did kind of keep on going. And it did, you know, the good times did not last forever, but apparently the Intellivision

did. Because in 84, you know, Mattel threw in the Tower. on this massive money losing pit and ended up selling off the rights to the system and its inventory to marketing exact. Terry Valeski, he pulled together an investor group to continue

selling this stuff through storefronts where he could and mail order business. So you got INTV corporation out of that. And after a couple of years, he starts having steady enough sales that he's introducing new games.

Some of them were, like, European developed titles that didn't come out here. And then he's contracting with outside developing companies like real-time associates to finish games that had been started at Mattel and weren't completed in time. And then eventually to write new software. And like that keeps going until they kind of run out of money for the Intellivision in the end of 89 and the company closes up in 91. And like, that's like a whole afterlife for the system.

And frankly, a lot of the games that come out in that last little period are like, they're really, really good. They're fantastic games. They absolutely are. Well, and so Velaski hired Roger Rambo, who was an executive from Mattel to be sort of head of like logistics. And they had a building, I think it was an El Segundo, with just sort of three staff, Roger, Terry and like an assistant, I think. And on the ground floor, they would do like repair work on Intellivision consoles and then they had their offices upstairs. was done mostly through mail order, real-time Associates was actually run by Dave Warhol, who was a former Mattel Electronics Program, so it was still, in a sense, in-house.

And many of the best in television games came out under INTV. And, you know, what happened was application software, this division inside of Mattel that was creating new games. And then there was the French group that you're talking about that eventually became the nice ideas group. But just within the application software group at Hawthorne, we know from the flow charts, what's called the golden rods of development, that at the time that the company suddenly closed down and went belly up, there were, I can't remember the number off the top of my head, but 25 or 30 games in development. Some of them were within days of being ready for release. Some of them were in a month or two and just needed some QA.

Some were still very early on in the visioning kind of stage or whatever. But there were a bunch of them. I don't remember off the top. I had the number. But what they ended up doing basically was working over this new technology of the facts and phone. And they basically rehired the former Mattel employees on an hourly contract basis. They didn't work in an office with them. So it was like a home office kind of situation.

But they basically worked with these folks to finish the games that they had in development. And these were some of the best in television games that would have come out under the Mattel Electronics name had the company existed a little bit longer. Because like I said, there were five or six of them that were within weeks of being ready for release. And in fact, you know, they shut down in February of 1984, in January of 1984, which is when the winter CES consumer electronics show happened in Las Vegas. Some of these games like Hoverforce were actually shown at that January CES. A number of them were shown. They were good enough, close enough to being done that they could be shown. And then the company shut down.

And they came out a year or two later. And, you know, an opportunity in this regard for INTV is that when the crash happened in Atari and Calico and television, all these folks shut down, there was about an 18-month period where there were almost no consoles on the U.S. market because Nintendo and Sega hadn't come in yet. So like Christmas of 1984 in particular, and even into 1985, there was not much out on the market, right? And so there was an opportunity here because there were all these people who still owned in televisions, and they also sold new television consoles, but they could sort of use this mail order primarily method to sell some of these games. And as you say, perhaps they continued doing this for about eight years. Yeah, my friend from high school, who I brought up earlier, her family got a lot of

their television games through INTV, through the mail order catalog. I remember her telling me about it. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, I did too. I actually have a, I found the Sprax, and I forgot I even had it, but I have an I-N-TV, like, you know, mail-order brochure from when I was in high school, that I still have it with my address in Lincoln, Nebraska on the back because I, you know, in, you know, I was in high school from 85 to 87, and so I was playing in television and buying games from I-N-TV back then. I was in elementary school, and I remember in 1980. six probably it was when all I was hearing about was Zelda and Mario and these great mushroom worlds and everything. And I didn't have a Nintendo, but we got one really quick and then the Intellivision went to the closet.

Yeah, the INTV, it did go on for a while, but it really, from what I know from our interviews, was most successful in the earlier period, like 85. to 86 because you still had a lot of people who had in televisions who had not yet gotten a new system and these games you could roll out. So they hung on longer, but they, especially in that first couple of years, they, they were fairly successful. Yeah, my understanding is that the sales, like, they got back into stores around like 86 on the strength of like these sales. And then that kind of ended in 88 when sales kind of failed because all of a sudden you're repeating. Just to throw in a couple of things. Part of this as well is Glenn Hightower from APH actually approached IANTV with an idea for a next generation and television console based on some of the ones that they had been working on of a next generation television console claiming that he could get it to market, that he,

and he showed them a prototype. Dave Warhol remembers him bringing a can of compressed air to spray on it because it was overheating so much while he was demonstrating it. But that obviously never happened. But the other thing is, you know, think of what I described where what's basically happening with real-time associates and this other subcontracting stuff is they're paying whatever it is an hourly amount or whatever for a former Mattel Electronic staff who was halfway through a game they had been working on to finish it basically at

home on their PC and send it to them. But it was all being done this home office kind of thing. So they had no resources and no infrastructure to actually develop brand new games from the ground up where you would get a bunch of people together and have that kind of support and infrastructure that you normally need and that they were accustomed to for doing new games. So I&TV actually didn't really sponsor or do much in terms of brand new games from the ground up. But what they did have was this quite extensive backlog of games that were that were there. And then Mattel had this French subsidiary that became an independent company under Tim Scanlan known as nice ideas because of Nice France after the crash. And in Europe, they continued to produce some games.

And so there was also that connection to I and TV. But inside the U.S., I'm pretty sure they didn't actually develop any new games from the ground up because how would they? They didn't have an office or an infrastructure to bring people together to manage that kind of process. What they did have was this quite extensive backlog of games, really good games in many cases that the programmers had momentum on. They had been working on and they pulled the plug, right? I want to say the last half dozen or so games were like fully original like they didn't use any existing code because I remember Steve Eddinger, he was talking about Chip Shot, which I will say in the computer entertainer newsletter had a, a, a higher rating than Legend of Zelda. Like, they came out about the same time and were reviewed in the same issue.

And the reviewers like Chip Shot Moore. But anyway, he, uh, he, he said an interview, like, I think last year that he didn't really use any existing, like, PJ Golf Code for that. He basically built it from the ground up, him and Dave Warhol and Connie Goldman because they were big fans of golf games. So, like, there were a few of them. Yeah, that one was done from scratch. There were a couple.

There was, like, Commando port, you know what I mean? There were, like, some games that came out and Diner and stuff like that. So there definitely were some games that were. But, yeah, but Tom's right. There was a lot of, there was a lot of material that was coming from free. Yeah, the diner came out of a Masters of the Universe sequel game. The mechanics had been done in house originally. As I said, Diner is very much like a mashup of three different games, like things that had various bits of work.

And they're like, oh, what can we do with this? What I found fascinating about the IN TV was like, you know, Velaski's kind of vision and the promotional materials of like, you know, the insight that, well, the consumer demand doesn't die for video games, you know, when the crash happened, it's still going to be there. So there was some recognition that this wasn't a fad, that this was going to go on and be its own, you know, thing for many, many years to come. But then also bringing back the sports titles, you know, the super sports. stuff. I think that was pretty cool. By this time, the cartridges could be 16K ROM or 12K ROM, whatever they were. So there's more space for like computer opponents. You know what I mean? And it's a little rudimentary artificial intelligence, that type of thing. So there's a lot of interesting, quirky things in those sports games to come up and they're kind of updated. And of course, you know, yeah, baseball, world. Now the title is. It's like World Series Baseball or something like that. World Championship Baseball. with its great emulation of the television set, but televised baseball, right? Yeah, that's a great point Braxton's making, because Intellivision originally got started

with sort of sports games as they're calling card. And that was what showed the intelligence. It's what distinguished them from Atari. They got all those early licenses like NFL football. And then in the sort of 18 months before the crash, there was a big shift towards arcade game. because that was what was selling better. It was to compete with Atari. It really made the overlays irrelevant.

So you had these overlays that were basically just a picture, right? We just press one player or two player or whatever. But by the end, the sort of arcade-style games had really taken over and overwhelmed sports titles. There were very few kind of sports titles in the final years of Mattel Electronics. And so the sort of return to sports is a really interesting move that I and TV did, right, post crash that harked back to sort of the original vision of Intellivision. Yeah, they came full circle. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like some of those sports games were like very, very good for the time, like some of the best. I don't think there was really

any skiing games on the market that were as good as like Mountain Madness. That game is fantastic. Chip shot, amazing, probably the best golf game of the 1980s. Very good. Yeah. Yeah, we heard the story from someone, I forget who it was, but I think the basketball, what was the basketball one? Oh, was it just slam dunk, slam dunk? Yeah, but there were groups in like some Chicago or some other place that had formed tournaments, you know, with all their friends playing slam dunk. Do you remember this, Tom? Yeah, no, Steve Edinger, who programmed that. I might have been St. Louis.

I'd have to look at the interview, but they actually were going to pay him. And I think they never paid. Yes, they never did pay him for it. Because what they wanted him to do, and I believe he did it, if I had to check the interview, was to code their names into the game so they could pick themselves in the game. So they wanted a custom version of the game because they were doing these tournaments and enjoying it so much. He mentioned that in that interview last year. I want to say he said that he even had some of their faces in there. like him and Connie Goldman put that together.

I believe, I believe. Oh, yeah. They never got paid for it. Yeah, I believe he never got a while from that interview. Yes, I'm pretty sure that's the story. But it is a very interesting, you know, thing with those sports games. And some of them, like the baseball one, sort of pioneering a screen within a screen kind of thing, like doing some pretty creative game design things as well.

I think it's interesting. You mentioned early on that Mattel, as a toy company, was very much interested in play and people playing together and how they do that at home. And a lot of these early in television sports games don't have AI opponent, like they're expected to play with another person. And I understand part of that is just because there's only so much room on a cartridge. But also, it feels to be like almost an intentional choice because that's what they were familiar with. And then once you get into the mid to late 80s, people want computer opponents because they're not always going to be playing a video game with another person. And, you know, I&TV sort of is responding to that desire, especially with these sports games that they kind of reissued with a slapped-in AI. You're absolutely right.

So many of the early sports games like baseball, but even games like Sea Battle for Intellivision, not only, do they not have an AI opponent? They have no one-player option at all. Utopia is another example, right? You could try and play it against yourself, but it's very hard. So they really can only be played collaboratively. They have no one-player option at all. There's quite a number of the early games. They stopped doing that, but quite a number of the early games that do that, and it's not only sports games. Utopia and Sea Battle being two examples of other games that have no one-player option at all. And that, And it's not just because your AI didn't exist yet. You're absolutely right. And part of it is about a vision of the home and of domesticity and collaborative play where everyone's around the TV. One thing I also really came to appreciate during the research is for a Mattel at least, I think more than Atari, board games were a real influence on early game design. These folks played D&D with each other. They played other board games.

They love playing, you know, Monopoly, Parchese, whatever kind of thing. And sort of those kinds of games that often don't have a one-player option either, but have an instruction manual, can take hours to play, have a long time for gameplay, involve a lot of strategy, you know, have a board that doesn't scroll. You can, you know, see that influence. And so, you know, I think that also was a real influence in those early, games, which, you know, comes back in some of the INTV releases as well. Even when there is an AI opponent, you do get things like Mind Strike as well, which is

really a board game, right? You know, and it's at heart. Even though it has an AI option, it's really a two-player board game at heart like chess. I would say that I'll just interject real quick, that if you can get another person to play these television games with, they are very fun. Like, they hold up very well. Yeah, for sure. I do think, like what Tom was saying about board games, I mean, it's an understudied, like, aspect of that influence on the, you know, the emergence of video games, too, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Because definitely part of the reason, you know, Mattel expanded into handhelds and then also into Intellivision itself is that they wanted to expand their category of games, right? Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, were better making board games. But Mattel actually had produced games like Jonathan Segal, you know, games for adults. Like, if you look back at the board games that they made in the 1970s, they were for adults. And so Michael Katz told us this, right, who was a market retired in 1975, that they wanted to expand that category, right? And so in television, at least to the upper levels, executives and other things, too, was an expansion of their games kind of category of toys, you know? And I always thought that was fascinating.

Yeah. And board games is an alternative trajectory into this space from the arcade. You know, and board games are something of the home, and they have that temporality of taking a long time to play. They're played in a shared space. You don't think of it as something in an arcade, you know. You think of it in a basement or a family room or a living room. So there really is an interesting.

connection to that. And then the interesting consequence is then that idea of board games pushes you into a certain idea of a video game, right? It pushes you into an idea of a video game that's going to involve turn taking, that's going to involve strategy, that's going to have some kind of complexity. It may have an element of randomness, right? So all of those sort of pieces to it. It suggests a different kind of game than space invaders and asteroids. Yeah. So I'm going to think it's time for a wrap up. You know, I want to talk a little bit about the afterlife of Intellivision after INTV closed up.

And really it comes back to Keith Robinson in television and television productions in the Blue Sky. Rangers because Intellivision Productions was a company that was made up of former Intellivision developers. They bought the rights to the game and the system in its library. And in the late 90s, I think the first one was around 1998. They published Intellivision Lives and then later Intellivision Rocks. And these were game collections. Originally on the PC, Lives eventually got versions on different consoles.

and I think even the DS, Nintendo DS. And these are really interesting because they spent a lot of time. Like, you know, the games were on there, but they also tried to sort of contextualize, you know, what these games were, what they were working on when they were developing them. They had, like, interview segments with the developers. And what makes it very interesting to me is that, you know, Frank Sefaldi of the Video Game History Foundation,

he used to work on these sort of retro compilation. with Digital Eclipse. And he always cites Intellivision Lives as like his inspiration and like gold standard for how he felt old game should be presented. So he sort of took that forward with his work when he was doing stuff like when he was working with Digital Eclipse to do stuff like Mega Man Legacy Collection or the S&K 40th anniversary collection. So I think that was interesting. I have Intellivision Lives on a couple different formats. It's a really great little collection, and I wish it was a little more available now, but what are you going to do?

Yeah. I love that collection, too. Like, you know, I love this connection you're making to kind of retro, or connection to retro collections and things like that. I didn't really realize that in television lives and in television rocks have this kind of influence or whatever, but it's really makes sense, you know, because those CD-ROMs, the versions that I have, you know, for the PC or whatever are filled with like interviews and interesting documents and archives and

histories and timelines you know we i definitely are we both explored these these things early on in our research and we're just you know blown away by the amount of information that that came from there um and yeah so that's that's a great point yeah just to add um you know to keep our 411 page book from becoming 1,411 pages, we really tried to stop at the crash and the intimate tele electronics. And we do talk about INTV a little bit. But beyond that, we really don't talk a whole lot about it.

At some point, you have to have a focus, any kind of book or project, no matter how big it is. But these afterlives have been television and television lives and television rocks and television productions are hugely interesting, first of all, in terms of thinking about time and temporality and video games. And we talk about them in terms of generations and coming and going, but then they come back.

And this idea of retro gaming and sort of what we talk about, a kind of critical nostalgia that's not just romanticizing the past, but thinking about kinds of innovative gameplay and different ways of thinking about gaming compared to the kind of surveillance online gaming that we live with nowadays and other kinds of formats where there's, you know, games or gigabytes and size and what you would do with gameplay when you had so little space, right? David Warhol talks about this very eloquently. It's really fascinating to look at

that and how that helps us think about in television. And then that community was crucial for us in our research. We dedicate our book to Keith Robinson, who was a crucial figure in everything that you're talking about right now and who passed away before we could work with Keith. and before we met him, but we know so many people around him and his parents. And we actually, in his files, because Keith saved the bulk of the surviving documents that we have from inside of Mattel electronics, not all, but he collected from other people. And the biggest archive is really originally Keith's archive. And in that archive was actually a table of contents and sort of draft for a book that Keith had hoped to write. right someday called Crash of the Blue Sky Rangers. And we mentioned that in the book because what's

interesting is in that idea for a book, he didn't want it to just be about who programmed this game, who programmed Astrosmash, who program. It wasn't just about programmers and games. He was interested in the story of the company and the daily life of the programmers and attempts to make new consoles and going to the computer electronics show. And, He had this kind of what we call a platform studies, 360 degree vision for thinking about in television. And just even finding that annotated table of contents was a real inspiration for us and pleasure for us about how he was thinking in such a rich way.

And that shows up in the CDs, as you're saying. So that community continues to be, you know, we are a part of that community. And it continues to be incredibly supportive and health. to us. I mean, as we were writing this book, I cannot overstate the number of moving parts when we're looking at everything from the code to the marketing, to the gameplay, and to have this incredible community that we could put out a question and get advice and help, you know, as fellow travelers, yourself included, we could not have done the book without it. And that includes the former programmers and executives, but also includes other people who are just, you

know, fans of retrogaming and have educated themselves on this so much. And so it's that sense of having fellow travelers is so powerful and important. And because I also study virtual worlds and, you know, I do a lot of work in digital anthropology, a huge danger in this whole tech world, including video games compared to earlier research that I've done in Indonesia or elsewhere, I, if you're in this, I don't think people realize enough, the degree to which there is such a bias towards the next big thing, the next iPhone, the next release, the next operating system that's coming out, forget about what came out before. It's old. It's irrelevant. And this kind of lack of attention to history that is driven by Silicon Valley and by the tech companies themselves, you know, Zuckerberg doesn't want you to think about Facebook from 10 years ago. He doesn't want you to think about Facebook from 20 minutes ago. go, right? This historical amnesia shapes the current predicament that we are in. The lack of historical consciousness and appreciation for history itself. And this kind of retro community is such a powerful counter to that that really helps us appreciate the incredible importance of history

for the present day. And like when I do my non-tech research in Indonesia and I'm talking about nationalism and whatever in Indonesia, the idea that history is incredibly important is just obvious. I mean, it's not even a matter of debate. I mean, what history and how you talk about it, of course. But the fact that our current moment is deeply shaped by history is just so important and obvious. It is simply not up for debate. And the degree to which in the tech world, it is up for debate or up for being sideline, marginalized, not talked about is so dangerous. big. I cannot express enough my appreciation to the retro gaming community, not only for like tips and tricks when we can't figure out how something worked or what you or something came

out or whatever, but just an appreciation for the importance of history to our current moment, right, where we face a broligarchy with incredible power in the United States and globally, this is part of that history. You know, these games are important in their own I'm right, but they are important to understanding our current present and shaping a better future. So I am so appreciative to that community and to that sense of the importance of this history. It's very well said. I don't know that I have a good follow up that doesn't sound much worse than that.

But, yeah, very appreciative of Keith Robinson and the other, the enthusiasts and the historians and everything that they've been working with. Like, I know my own research has been very much helped by other people already, you know, doing some of the legwork. Like, why do I bother rehashing things that have already been done? Like, or in some cases, like, if you can't do it because the person has passed away. Like, I really wish I had asked more questions of Keith Robinson and, you know, Jerry Lawson and folks when I was at the Classic Gaming Expo, like 20 odd years ago. but what are you going to do? At least we have what we have, I guess.

And, yeah, video games do not exist in a vacuum. I think that's very important to note, too. Like, that's something when I put together my book. I wanted to contextualize, like, what these games came out in. But also, like, we have to think about what were FCC regulations at the time. What was going on in government at the time or in industry? Was there a recession, et cetera? So, like, you know, yeah, it's all linked.

You were my love and my friend. I thought the game would never end. You tore out my heart without an pestition. Behavior that's hard to defend. Anyway, I don't know where to go from this. I'm just going to be rambling. But jumping back, I did want to say that, you know, and talk about the retro community.

Like, Intellivision development has sort of continued on. Within that scene, like, people have figured out how the hardware works. They've made their own games. They made a version of Basic for the Intellivision that you can use to program games if you don't want to learn a terrible 1610 assembly language, like poor Braxton did. You told me before we started recording, if I remember. Yes.

Yeah, I'm going to try out all the new tools and everything. Like, you know, we were looking at code from the exact and code from baseball that David Rolf gave us and everything. And we actually had undergraduates from UCI help us. to learn the code. And it was a great kind of research project for them to do these code walkthroughs of various games and it teaches how the assembly code worked

and things like that. But yeah, we spent a lot of time trying to learn how this assembly code worked. And I think that the community today with the television developers have a lot more help at their fingertips and like, yeah, like the basic language and other kinds of tools that people have developed that we're in contact with,

You know, Joe Zabiziac and Zabiziac, I suppose, and Neckle and, yeah, other folks who've built these things as well. So final thoughts on the Intellivision, you know, beyond what we've already discussed, Braxton, do you want to go ahead first? Yeah, I mean, I just think that, you know, television is a really, special system, like Tom and I got engaged in thinking about it because we had this past with the system as kids and teenagers growing up. And that was a great, you know, first step into opening up this whole world of history that, you know, Tom was talking about as being very important and important. So there was a lot of fun studying it. I mean, it was great to talk to, you know, Ray Kastner, who programmed Burger Time.

And I was like, you don't know how many hours I dedicated to playing burger time. And I'm, you know, talking to him on a couple occasions we interviewed him. And it's just so great to have that experience. But on the other hand, too, like, just really opened up my eyes to the thinking about the 1970s and the early 1980s and the kind of technological changes that were happening there. We already talked about the emergence of home computing at the time. but also this convergence between the toy industries, like you were talking about, you know, Parker brothers and Mattel and Milton Bradley,

and they were all, you know, working within the video game space as well. And it's just a fascinating moment in the video game history before the crash. And in our book, we call this age, the age of intelligent television, because what was really happening was thinking about how to make television more participatory, right? instead of us just sitting in front of the boob tube or the idiot box and consuming this, right? All these engineers and TV producers like TV POW even mentioned, right? We're thinking about how to make the television more participatory and interactive. And television, as we learn more about it, with like play cable and the ECS and the keyboard component and TV POW was really, was, you know, just,

part of the zeitgeist and was really an exemplar of this, this moment. And so, um, for me, and studying in television is really a window into the 1970s and 1980s computer culture. And, and, um, yeah, it's just been great to study it. Yeah, it's really, uh, no, it's been an amazing journey that Brax and I are still on, which is really exciting. And an amazing window into that period with, you know, consequences as we said up to the present. And, you know, also I'll just say our in television book published by MIT Press, you can get from your favorite book publisher or wherever a bit. MIT Press has also included it in their open access initiatives. You can actually download the entire book as a free PDF from MIT Press. So you can always, you know,

purchase it somewhere as a paperback book. It has a beautiful cover that was, designed by artists who grew up playing in television, but you can download it as a free PDF from the MIT Press website, and we can probably put that link later in the show notes if people want to do that as well. And we're so thankful that MIT did that because we really want to have the book be out there and be part of these conversations and that makes it more accessible. So we hope that people will enjoy the book and find something useful in it to help think about these issues. Yeah, by all means, check out the book. It is a really fascinating look at

Intellivision and Mattel Electronics and y'all put a ton of work into it and it really shows. I think it's a fantastic piece of a reporting on the history of a very interesting game company and a very interesting game system. You know, I think for myself, like the Intellivision wasn't really like other game systems when I first encountered it. And like at that point. I played, you know, NES. I played a bit of Siggenesis. I knew the Atari. And the Intellivision was just really its own thing. It has its own identity. That hasn't really changed much in all the years since then. Like, the games for it do hold up. They're worth checking out. And especially if you get anything from a magic, like the magic lineup on

the television is some of the best games of that time frame, I feel like. Yeah, during the pandemic, I was playing pinball with my kids, right? Pinball is amazing version of pinball. There's still some games out there that just will suck you in and you'll be playing for a long time. I remember roping in a friend of mine to play a bunch of games for, like, video footage. And, like, we really enjoyed the sports games, but, like, we really got into Sea Battle. That one, that one holds up extremely well. See Battle is awesome.

Yeah, in Utopia, of course. Yeah. All right. This has been Retronauts. This is a Patreon-supported show, Patreon.com slash retronauts. At the $3 level, you get each episode one week early

and at a higher bit rate. At the $5 level, you also get access to Friday bonus episodes, as well as a Diamond Fight, has weekly columns and a monthly community podcast. And we have access to our Retronauts. Discord server.

So if you enjoyed this, by all means, feel free to check out what else we have to offer. So folks, where can we find you? Is there anything you want to plug in addition to your book? Or was that the main thing? That's about it. I mean, look for more articles coming from us. And I will just say as one final thing, since you can get access to the book, if you look in one of the footnotes to the book, there is a little chip.

cheap thing you can do in sea battle that I believe I discovered for the first time. I found no one else who has found this and it involves making a fleet with just one boat and there's a place that one side can hide their boat where the other side can't get to them. So check that out if you're into sea battle and we can play it together sometime. I'm going to clean up in the next tournament. There you go. Yeah, it's been great to talk to you. And yeah, just check out the book if you get a chance and that's where we've put all our thoughts into this over the last 10 years. All right. And as for me, if you need to see what I'm up to, I'm on blue sky atariarchive.org. That's also my website and my YouTube channel and my book. So you can find Atari Archive all sorts of

places. All right. Well, with that, thank you all and play some diner. And so I sit here without ambition, I really need my television. I cannot stand it, this indecision, somebody find mine, in television. I want my, I want my, I want my, in television. I want, I want my, I want my.