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(Image credit: Atari)
Atari hastoday announcedthe purchase of the Intellivision brand alongside “certain games” from Intellivision Entertainment LLC. This is a melancholy coda to the early days of home consoles in the West, where in the US market especially the Atari 2600 dominated the late 1970s scene. Intellivision was one of Atari’s main rivals, almost entirely because the machine had the backing of Mattel (these were the days when videogames were sold in the toy section of stores), and launched its first console in 1979.
The concept of a “console war” didn’t really exist, but the competition was real. Mattel had been working on the Intellivision (the name is a portmanteau of “Intelligent Television”) since 1977 and launched with a big-money ad campaign directly comparing the system’s capabilities to those of the Atari 2600. The hardware sold reasonably well, but Atari’s 2600 remained well out in front (this was years beforethe 1983 crash), and Mattel would quietly spin-out the business later in the 1980s, with consoles being manufactured until 1990.
The Intellivision IP is certainly in-keeping with that focus, and Atari says it will “seek to expand digital and physical distribution of legacy Intellivision games” as well as “potentially create new games” in the future.It’ll sell you a t-shirtright off the bat though. The deal includes the rights to over 200 titles from the Intellivision portfolio alongside all relevant trademarks.
There’s no indication yet what games Atari may be interested in bringing back, though you’d hope it would look at the Intellivision’s quirkier exclusives likeDraculaand Microsurgeon. The inclusion of the Atari-owned Digital Eclipse in the press release is notable though: retro specialists with a great track record that produced theAtari 50th anniversary collectionand more recentlyLlamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Some sort of Intellivision collection with added historical context would make sense.
“This was a very rare opportunity to unite former competitors and bring together fans of Atari, Intellivision and the golden age of gaming,” said Wade Rosen, Chairman and CEO of Atari.
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“Uniting Atari and Intellivision after 45 years ends the longest-running console war in history,” said Mike Mika, studio head at Digital Eclipse. Which may be rather overstating things. If this were a great gladiatorial contest then the crowd left decades ago when both competitors were already out on their feet. But a win is a win and, for all the grizzled Atari fans out there, perhaps this is worth celebrating.
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