The console war, although absurd, is not new. While it is true that fighting over which video game player appliance is better or worse makes little sense, the truth is that these types of quarrels have always been present and one of the oldest and best-known cases is that of Atari and Intellivision. Some 45 years have passed since this battle began and today, it is finally over.
As?
Atari buys Intellivision. This was announced by the company founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972. Atari, considered the mother of the video game industry, was the creator of Pong and the Atari Pong console and dominated the market until Mattel (yes) in 1979 , the toy company behind ‘Barbie’) launched Intellivision.
Thus was born the first great console war: Atari 2600 vs Mattel Intellivision. And at that time, neither one nor the other cut corners in the slightest, but we’ll get back to that. For now, let’s see what this agreement means which, if it had occurred in the 80s-90s, would be equivalent to PlayStation buying Xbox today, in 2024 (although well, PlayStation is Sony and Xbox is Microsoft, it would be a bit more complex but the analogy is understood).
Mattel Intellivision | Image: Wikimedia Commons
I’ll keep your things. As Atari explains in a statement, the purchase of Intellivision means keeping 200 titles and franchises in its catalog. According to the company, “Intellivision Entertainment LLC will rebrand and continue its business of developing and distributing the Amico-branded game console with a license from Atari to continue distributing new versions of Intellivision games on that console.”
On the other hand, work is being done on the relaunch in physical and digital format of Mattel classics and a reinforcement has been announced for the Amico console (which should have been launched in October 2020 and well, we are already in 2024) and the app Amico Home (which is on systems like Android). These are Intellivision’s family gaming platforms that will of course receive the Atari classics. Be that as it may, what is not known or revealed is how much Atari has paid to acquire its competitor.
console war. As we indicated before, Atari and Intellivision started the first console war. Atari had the Atari 2600 and its great competitor was Mattel’s Intellivision. It boasted of being more powerful and having better graphics and, to convince the players, it hired the actor George Plimpton to speak well of his console. Remember the Mac vs PC videos? Well, before those there was this one:
Not only that, but Intellivision published an eight-minute video in the middle of GamesCon comparing itself to Atari. They were other times. In any case, fortune smiled on Atari and ended with Intellivision, whose history is full of changes of hands, licenses, etc. In fact, the original Intellivision was discontinued in 1990 with between 4.5 and five million units sold.
So which Intellivision are we talking about? In order not to turn this into a chronicle of Intellivision, we can go back to the most recent. Let’s say that the current Intellivision is, really, Intellivision Entertainment, a company founded by Tommy Tallarico who, in 2018, bought the rights to the Intellivision brand and its games in order to launch a new console (the Amico that we mentioned before).
Be that as it may, the truth is that this is a most peculiar event and an end to one of the longest running wars in the world of technology in general and video games in particular.
Image | Wikimedia Commons, Unsplash
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