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TVTranscript
00:01They challenged the most powerful video game company in the world.
00:05Well, when Atari was first introduced, Mattel started putting together something to compete with it.
00:12Presenting Intellivision.
00:15But then when it went through the roof, they said, okay, we've got to do this, we've got to come
00:18out with this.
00:19And triggered the world's first true console war.
00:23Intellivision was so much better than Atari. We had stronger hardware, greater graphical power than the Atari.
00:30We would find Intellivision more sophisticated.
00:32They prevailed when others failed.
00:36When the video game industry collapsed in 83 and everybody got out of it in 84, Intellivision survived.
00:42Intellivision was the one game system that kept going.
00:47This is the spectacular story behind Intellivision.
01:01In the mid-70s, gaming is still in its infancy.
01:05The Atari came out, I believe, in 75 or 76.
01:10It was not initially that successful.
01:14It did well.
01:16It was popular with a lot of kids wanting it and everything.
01:19But it wasn't as popular as Nolan Bushnell thought it was going to be.
01:21I think they manufactured 800,000 and they sold 300,000 the first year.
01:25The world's greatest arcade video games are now the world's greatest home video games.
01:31They're only from Atari.
01:32A company named Atari is keen.
01:36The Space Invaders was introduced and then everyone said,
01:38Oh, I want to play Space Invaders on Atari.
01:41And then suddenly it just went through the roof.
01:44And then along came Atari.
01:46The biggest thing that Atari did was get computers in people's homes.
01:51Atari put more computers in people's homes than any PC manufacturer was even close to,
01:57by a factor of 100 or more because they learned the idea of you sell the application and not a
02:02computer.
02:04But a challenger to the throne rises from Toyland.
02:08Well, when Atari was first introduced, Mattel started putting together something to compete with it.
02:14But then when it went through the roof, they said,
02:16Okay, we got to do this. We got to come out with this.
02:20Mattel creates an electronics branch called Mattel Electronics
02:23and introduces the Intellivision to a test market in Fresno, California in 1979.
02:30And in 1980, it's ready for release.
02:33Presenting Intellivision, the home video system from Mattel Electronics.
02:38Propelling the industry's first big console war.
02:41For the first time in the video game industry, there were two systems at one time that were out there
02:45competing with each other.
02:46Intellivision, the world's largest toy company, battling Atari, bought by Warner Communications.
02:51Boom, it's going to be a big business thing, big stock thing.
02:54Ooh, what's it going to be? What's it going to be?
02:56There's a growing library of Intellivision programs to involve every member of the family.
03:00And for families, it was no longer a question of, hmm, should we get a video game system?
03:05And that was, hmm, which video game system should we get?
03:08And now the sales for both, Atari and Intellivision, went way up.
03:12And so, boom, they're going up.
03:13I'm back to Pat.
03:14Go for it, Dad.
03:16The competition just became really intense.
03:20The toy company responsible for Barbie doesn't take their new gaming system lightly.
03:25It was a more sophisticated system because Mattel figured that being this big, prestigious toy company, they would compete with
03:36Atari by saying,
03:37theirs is a little toy thing that you play some arcade games on.
03:42Ours is going to be a family educational and entertainment center.
03:47Intellivision can change your family's life.
03:49We are going to have this machine that you will later be able to put a computer keyboard onto it.
03:55Available in 1981.
03:56And you will be able to put a modem on it.
03:58They were talking in 1980 about, you know, a modem for the Intellivision to be able to get online and
04:04to get information and to do all this stuff.
04:06So they were really positioning it as this big family unit.
04:11It can change your family's life.
04:17The technology isn't cheap, but you get what you pay for.
04:21And so it was more expensive. It was $300 compared to $150 for the Atari.
04:25But they had this image behind it.
04:29The Intellivision was so much better than Atari and stopped me now before I go on.
04:35The Intellivision, like now, if a hardware platform has a year to cook longer than its competition, every year there's
04:42a real advantage.
04:43So we had a stronger hardware, greater graphical power than the Atari.
04:47And the ColecoVision, which came after us, had some enhancements over us.
04:50So it was simply a moment, when is that stake driven into the ground?
04:54And that's what the designers have to work with.
04:57The reason people liked Intellivision more than Atari was that the graphics were better.
05:02It just looked better.
05:03The Intellivision for its time was a very powerful machine.
05:06Mattel decides to milk its hardware advantage and brings in a celebrity to sell the Intellivision to the masses.
05:17And so instead of trying to position it as the big family center, they instead just started doing commercials where
05:24George Plimpton, who was known as a sports writer, came out with a television set with Atari showing, Atari baseball,
05:33television showing and television baseball.
05:35And this was very radical for the time to directly show your competitor in a TV commercial.
05:40An aggressive marketing campaign ensues.
05:43George Plimpton just said, look at Atari basketball and Intellivision.
05:48You can tell the difference.
05:49I think Intellivision plays much more like real basketball.
05:52And it was brilliant to use the sports things because this was new.
05:55People didn't know video games that well.
05:58People hadn't grown up with video games.
06:00They were relatively new.
06:01Arcade games were still considered a new phenomenon.
06:03But everyone knew what a sports game was.
06:06If you try them both, I think you'll find the clear winner is Intellivision.
06:11Compared to Atari's graphics, these were so realistic.
06:15And they capitalized with that.
06:17They had commercials showing how well their baseball games were to Atari's baseball games.
06:23So everyone could look at that TV set and look at that baseball diamond and say, that looks like baseball.
06:30We don't know what this Atari thing looks like, but it's not baseball.
06:32It was the sports games that immediately set us apart.
06:37And the comparison campaign pays off big.
06:40Immediately, the sales started jumping once they started doing that campaign.
06:45That was in 1981.
06:47And very quickly, Mattel was able to grab about 20% of the market.
06:53Mattel will need to do more than just step up to the plate if they want to bump Atari from
06:58that coveted top spot.
06:59But their next approach may be a little uncivilized.
07:05Sales of Mattel's Intellivision are great.
07:07And a big part of that is due to a library of quality games such as NBA basketball.
07:14NHL hockey.
07:19AstroSmash.
07:23Amtron Deadly Disc.
07:26On the Intellivision side, I'll name some of our favorites.
07:32AstroSmash is easily just a game that is the most simple game in the world, but it's just completely addictive.
07:38It's just a gun shooting up.
07:42Asteroids falling.
07:43That's all there is to it.
07:45There were three and a half million Intellivision.
07:47There was one million AstroSmash.
07:49Some of the other games we've had for Intellivision.
07:51Night Stalker.
07:52It was a game the people after 20 years remember.
07:59One truly groundbreaking Intellivision title is Utopia.
08:03Utopia was a game that Don Daglow did.
08:06I had gotten the idea from the combination of having been a junior high school social studies teacher
08:11and watching the movie Attack of the Killer Shrews.
08:16So I know that doesn't sound like it should go together.
08:19That's where the game idea came from.
08:20And Mattel wanted to have a diverse range of things in their line.
08:24And they took a chance and let me build it.
08:27The idea of Utopia is there are two islands on the screen.
08:30And in those days that's all you got were nice steady things on the screen.
08:34And your job is to run your island in the way that makes your people happiest.
08:38It was a game where you had to figure out how to plant crops on your island and keep your
08:43people happy and all of this.
08:44And it really was the first sim game.
08:47People have referred to it as Civilization 0.5 because it really is kind of the beginning of all of
08:53those things.
08:54All of these games now with Civilization and with SimCity and The Sims.
09:00It really can be traced back to this Intellivision game that Don created back in 1981.
09:10And for the men and women who create these Intellivision games, remaining anonymous is part of the deal.
09:17Mattel Toys that owned Mattel Electronics didn't want the programmers to be known.
09:23Didn't want our names out there because they were afraid that Atari or Activision, one of the other companies would
09:28steal us away.
09:29So everything had to be anonymous.
09:31They wanted to hide our names. In-house I was fighting to get credit for my people actually on the
09:37boxes.
09:38But what they actually wanted to do is they wanted to hide who we were so the competition would not
09:43recruit us away.
09:44And every good secret organization needs a good alias.
09:48We did an interview with TV Guide in 1982.
09:52And they sent a gentleman named Howard Polskin to interview us.
09:56But Howard Polskin was told you have to change their names in the interview.
09:59And all of our names were changed.
10:01And the writer wanted some sort of a description, a group description for us.
10:07And we didn't have one really.
10:09We were application software at Mattel Electronics.
10:14And application software didn't sound sexy.
10:16So the writer said, how about you guys call yourselves the Blue Sky Rangers because we talked about having Blue
10:25Sky Sessions.
10:26Because he heard that our brainstorming sessions were called Blue Sky Sessions.
10:30Where we'd try and think up new ideas or new ways to play games.
10:33And the name took and has stuck ever since.
10:37Blue Sky Rangers.
10:38And our Vice President, Gabriel Baum, he didn't like that.
10:45He said, I hate that. That's stupid.
10:46But the marketing people at Mattel, the publicity people at Mattel said, let's go with it.
10:51Let's give them something. Let's give them something that gives them a hook to write the story.
10:55So how about instead of you guys call yourself the Blue Sky Rangers, he just says, you are the Blue
11:00Sky Rangers.
11:02Gabriel said, I guess I can live with that.
11:04You know, because yeah, okay, whatever.
11:07So, since we knew Gabriel hated the name, we of course adopted it as our logo.
11:13I designed the logo for the Blue Sky Rangers.
11:16I put his face on it.
11:17In the article, they changed his name to Hal.
11:19So we have in how we trust around this logo.
11:22And that became the generic name for those of us who worked on games at Mattel.
11:33And as the years go by at Mattel, some of the Blue Rangers begin to move on.
11:38When the industry started, it was very strange because now we were getting paid to do what we loved.
11:44And we would look at each other and go, what happens if they find out we do this for free?
11:48The best description that anybody ever did of what it was like to program at Mattel was that it was
11:54like living in a college dorm.
11:58There was always people there 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
12:01So you could walk in there at Sunday morning, 3 a.m., shout out, anybody here?
12:05And somebody would pop up from a cubicle, yeah, I'm working.
12:07Most of them were single.
12:09Just about everybody was under 25.
12:11So there was a lot of socializing together.
12:13A lot of people became roommates.
12:15The relationship started and broke up.
12:18So it was a very intense time, not only professionally, but also socially with this group of people.
12:23And everything was such a frontier because there wasn't a large body of existing games.
12:27So if you got an idea, it was easy to have an idea that was new that had never been
12:31done before.
12:32But despite more powerful hardware, better graphics, and a talented staff, the Intellivision sales still fall short when compared to
12:41Atari's.
12:42Television at first was competition.
12:46Unfortunately, that's all they had were sports games that looked really nice.
12:50But most of the game were two-player games, nothing that was really solitaire.
12:54And Atari had all these arcade games.
12:56Is that everything? It's not everything. You can get nearly 300 different cartonry.
12:59And eventually, Mattel started releasing some arcade games, but they didn't have the licenses that Atari had.
13:08Intellivision's arcade games were slower than Atari's.
13:11So eventually, Atari won in that battle.
13:16Atari was the main player.
13:18Atari probably outnumbered all the other companies by probably four to one.
13:21But that's off the top of my head.
13:23Discover a world beyond your wildest dreams.
13:26It becomes clear that dethroning Atari isn't going to be easy.
13:30So in 1983, Intellivision plans another attack and releases...
13:34Intellivision 2.
13:36There are even plans for an Intellivision 3, but the blueprints are scrapped when the competition becomes too much.
13:42Over 430 games.
13:45The problem was there was just too much product out there.
13:48You have dozens and dozens of software companies releasing garbage.
13:53And of course, as more and more companies got in, there was more and more game supply and just not
13:59enough demand to support that much.
14:02There was too much product for store shelves. They had to start being marked down.
14:06Most of those games wound up being sold at $2 and $3 a piece at discounters.
14:12And here we are coming out with $30 or $40 products.
14:14No matter how good a game was, it was very difficult to sell a game for $30, $40 when you
14:19could go in for $30, $40 and get 15 games.
14:22Even if they were all terrible.
14:24And Johnny's dad goes in at Christmas and he can buy him eight cartridges or he can buy him one
14:29cartridge.
14:29And he says, well, I don't know the difference. I'll buy him these eight that are in the front bin
14:33and wrap up more gifts for Christmas.
14:36And ours that were still front-line good products didn't sell.
14:39You have these third-party companies. Can't sell their stuff. They're going out of business.
14:44Unlike the industry today, a third-party publisher who publishes a PlayStation game, Sony gets a cut of it.
14:51Back in 1983, if Activision did an Intellivision game, Mattel didn't get anything from it.
14:56What do they do? They dump all their goods at cutthroat prices.
15:00Now you can get games for $5.
15:02It was a very difficult paradigm for them to beat.
15:06And things are about to go from bad to worse.
15:09It was really the demise of the business and we unfortunately didn't see it coming.
15:16By 1983, store shelves are overflowing with second-rate games.
15:21Prices are falling and the industry is totally freaking out.
15:29A lot of people just got burned. They just got tired of getting all these bad games.
15:34So that drove people away from video games.
15:41There were no checks and balances for quality in those days.
15:44So a lot of really bad games got out there in the early 80s.
15:48And so the whole thing collapsed.
15:54But even as everything crumbles around them, the Intellivision manages to stay on the shelves.
16:00When the video game industry collapsed in 83 and everybody got out of it in 84, Intellivision survived.
16:10Intellivision was the one game system that kept going.
16:14To keep the Intellivision selling, a bold move is made.
16:18The Senior Vice President of Marketing for Mattel Electronics, Terry Valesky,
16:23looked at the numbers and said, there's still a demand out there for video games.
16:26Everybody's getting out of it, but people still want to play video games.
16:30So he put together a group of investors.
16:33They bought the rights to Intellivision from Mattel.
16:36IN-TV is formed, and the Intellivision lives on.
16:40The console that dared to challenge Atari's dominance ends up outliving it.
16:45They continued to make the consoles.
16:47They continued to make new games from 1984 through 1990.
16:53The company actually lasted until 1991.
16:56So Intellivision went through the entire decade of the 80s, which no other system did.
17:01I mean, Intellivision at the end was competing on the shelves with Sega.
17:05And of course, Nintendo.
17:10The Steam eventually runs out, and IN-TV closes its doors in 1990.
17:18But Keith Robinson manages to buy the rights to all things Intellivision, and keeps the legacy alive.
17:24He also becomes the unofficial record keeper.
17:27As Intellivision was going out of business, as Mattel Electronics was going out of business, I, like, took all of
17:32the files.
17:33As people were being laid off, I said, I'm going to write a book about this.
17:37And so they gave me their personal files, and they gave me all this stuff.
17:39And so I had amassed, like, three file cabinets full of material saying, okay, great, I'm going to write this
17:44book.
17:45But then, like I say, Intellivision didn't die, continued to work on it.
17:49And he directs his creative juices into another medium.
17:53In 94, I got really enthralled by the World Wide Web.
17:57I start setting up a website.
17:59I'll take some of this material that I was going to write a book, I'll put it on the web,
18:02see if anybody's interested in that.
18:04And the public reacts.
18:07A thousand people a week were coming to read about Intellivision.
18:10And pretty soon I go, maybe there's still an interest in Intellivision.
18:14People kept emailing us and saying, is there a way to play these games on a PC or Mac?
18:22So Keith gives the public what they want, and Intellivision Lives is born.
18:28So myself, Steve Roney, who was another programmer at Mattel, we bought the rights back.
18:35It's about the rights to Intellivision, all the games, put together a product, Intellivision Lives,
18:41which lets you play most of the old games from Mattel Electronics from my TV Corporation on the PC and
18:47Mac.
18:49The Intellivision Lives CD becomes more than just a collection of games.
18:53It becomes a part of history.
18:57Put it out there for sale on the web and have done real well.
19:01And there's been a huge interest in the games.
19:04And we're just trying to recreate that whole experience of what it felt like to be working on those games.
19:13They've come to the GDC pretty much every year to kind of keep the history of these old game systems
19:19alive
19:19and keep the roots of where our industries come from on center stage.
19:23And I think that is important for us as an industry not to forget where we came from.
19:29First of all, for a lot of people, it was part of their childhood.
19:31So there's that special bond, a childhood to think of something you played and enjoyed,
19:36especially if it's something you played with your brother or your sister or your friend.
19:38Well, I think it's nostalgia, you know.
19:40For me, they all remind me of, you know, what it was like to be a kid, you know,
19:44and how pure everything was kind of back then, you know.
19:47And I think that what we see today with the PS2 and the Xbox,
19:50I mean, some kids are playing that now and 20 years from now,
19:52and we're like, oh, do you remember the days, you know.
19:53There's always that, do you remember the day kind of story.
19:56Do you remember this game or, you know, and it's just a part of the social fabric of life.
20:03The reason why Intellivision survived the crash in 83 was because it had loyal fans.
20:08Thanks to a renewed interest in classic gaming and to those who refuse to let it go,
20:14Intellivision literally lives on.
20:16They were games which were really handcrafted.
20:20Because we had a few months, one programmer, one game,
20:24you had a chance to really work on and polish your game as a very individual experience.
20:29One person was in charge of the whole thing, and the games were small,
20:32and it was just a thrill to work on.
20:36But perhaps the biggest testament to the true success of the Intellivision
20:40lies in the people who were there when it all began.
20:43We get together, we still swap stories, and every year somebody new that we didn't know
20:48or hasn't been to one of the reunions shows up, and we get to include them.
20:51So the Blue Sky Rangers keeps growing.
20:54We still, 20 years later, we have reunions at a certain pizza parlor in Poplar in California,
20:59where the gang used to go.
21:01Sometimes in Northern California there will be a satellite reunion.
21:05But after 20 years, a lot of us are still friends, we still are together,
21:10we still see each other all the time.
21:12A lot of us have worked together off and on during the years.
21:14And we just have a great time getting together,
21:16because we have that common experience that transcended everything in our lives.
21:21all our two years.
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