Intellivision

~ the obituary ~

I was born in 1984, the year Mattel shut its electronics division, so this console was already a discontinued product before I could read. What reached Turkey a few years later were Atari 2600 clones and then Nintendo clones, and the Turkish word for a games console settled as "atari" no matter which machine was under the television. Mattel's box never showed up here at all.

Mattel test marketed the Intellivision in the fall of 1979 and went nationwide in mid-1980 at $275. It was the first serious competition the Atari 2600 had. A General Instrument CP1610 drove a 159 by 96 display, and the controller was built around a sixteen-direction disc with a keypad you slid printed overlays into. The advertising was unusually direct: Mattel hired George Plimpton to stand between two televisions and point out which picture looked better.

The approach worked. 190,000 units went out in 1980, more than a million in 1981, 1.8 million in 1982, and the total passed 3.75 million consoles by the end of 1983. Then the crash took the entire category with it. Mattel Electronics lost $394 million that year, and on 4 February 1984 Mattel sold the business for $20 million to investors including Terrence Valeski, who had run its marketing.

That group became INTV Corporation and it kept the console in production for six more years while the rest of the industry pretended 1983 had not happened. INTV sold mostly by mail order to people who already owned the hardware and repackaged the machine as the INTV System III. Twenty one new titles went out under its name, bringing the library to 124 games. In 1990 it agreed to become a software vendor for the NES and the Genesis, which meant its own hardware had to go. The bankruptcy came the same year and the company closed in 1991.

~ the case file ~

~ the keyboard that never shipped ~

The Intellivision was sold from day one as half of a computer. A Keyboard Component was going to attach underneath and turn it into a home machine with a cassette drive and a real programming environment, and Mattel advertised it from 1979 onward while missing every date it set. A limited release finally happened in late 1981, in Seattle and New Orleans and nowhere else, and the component was cancelled in August 1982.

Two years of advertising something that did not exist drew the Federal Trade Commission, which began fining Mattel for false advertising after enough customers complained. Mattel agreed to buy back the keyboards it had managed to sell, and Compro, the contractor that built them, sued for $10 million over the units it was never paid for. The replacement was the Entertainment Computer System, rushed out in late December 1982 with six games, and it satisfied the regulator rather than the customers.

~ games down the cable ~

PlayCable is the part of this story worth keeping. From 1981, a joint venture between Mattel and General Instrument sent Intellivision games down cable television lines into an adapter you rented from your cable company, with a rotating selection and no cartridges to buy. It reached a modest number of cable systems and closed in 1983, which puts a working game download service two decades ahead of the ones that stuck.

Intellivoice was the other swing. A speech synthesis module from 1982 that cartridges plugged through, it gave four games actual spoken dialogue at a time when consoles beeped, and Mattel quietly phased it out in August 1983 after those four.

~ the brand after the console ~

Keith Robinson, one of the original Mattel programmers, formed Intellivision Productions in 1997 and gathered the rights so the games could be sold again, and the team behind them finally got a name in public as the Blue Sky Rangers. Tommy Tallarico bought the brand in 2018 for a new console called the Amico, which took pre-orders, missed several launch dates and never shipped. Atari bought the brand and the library on 23 May 2024, and announced a small plug-in console called the Intellivision Sprint in October 2025.

None of that is this console. A name can be sold as many times as somebody wants to buy it, and the machine that sold 3.75 million units under a Mattel logo stopped being made in 1990.

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