Atari acquires Intellivision

[the_antithesis]

Atari acquires Intellivision

So, this is big news, if you remember video games from before the NES. It's akin to Coke buying Pepsi. Although there's more to it than that.

For the last couple years, Intellivision was owned by Tommy Tallarico and he'd been wasting his time with a thing called the Amico.

It's kind of a long story, so here's a couple long videos.

One about Tommy himself that touches on the Amico debacle

This one is about the Amico scam in general in a kind of timeline.

tl;dr Tommy Tallarico, who I guess is kinda famous for making music and sound effects for video games, like Super Tofu Boy, bought the rights to the old 70's/early 80's console, the Intellivision with the idea of making a modern game console, about ten years too late for the Android boxes that were coming out in the wake of the Ouya's failure. This console has been a cavalcade of failure where, so far, the product to have come out is empty boxes for some of the games for this system. Despite all this, they continue to say they will release the console after about five years of delays and failed crowdfunding.

Part of the problem with the whole Amico thing is the Intellivision branding. It got the attention of older gamers who remember that system, and lead to the controllers being a non-functional mess to make them similar-looking to the original Intellivision controllers. In demo event, they usually just have people link their cell phones with the console since it's more reliable.

But, in the end, launching a video game hardware company was simply a bad idea. That the console still hasn't come out just makes it more scam-like. But it was never going to be a success.

And now they don't even have the branding they used to have.

Atari buying the brand, which includes 200 titles, apparently, is one of the better outcomes. Atari has been doing well with their own brand and now they could do the same for Intellivision. This is better than a crypto ho buying it to make NFTs out of it, as I heard at one point.

This is a load off of my mind. It means the legacy may be somewhat safe and if they release some kind of controller, because intellivision controllers don't map onto modern controllers very well, this will keep the game available. Which is all I care about.