Tech Nostalgia: Intelligent Television (Premium)

When Atari announced its VCS video game machine in 1977, established game makers rushed to offer their own alternatives. Magnavox was first to market in 1978 with its Odyssey 2 console, though it was only moderately successful and didn't attract a single third-party game title until 1983, by which point it had already lost the video game wars. But Atari's most formidable competitor was Mattel, which had previously pioneered a successful line of electronic handheld sports game machines under its Mattel Electronics sub-brand.

The resulting product, called the Intellivision Master Component, would not outsell the VCS, but it would go on to outsell the rest of the market before the crash of 1983. That success was the direct result of Mattel Electronics' unique take on home video game machines. Where Atari created the VCS as a way to bring its successful arcade video games into the living room, Mattel Electronics wanted to offer a product with better visuals that offered more sophisticated and longer-playing games. Indeed, David P. Chandler, "the father of Intellivision," saw Intellivision as a modular system that could be upgraded to a home computer.

"Hardware [is] designed for software, not vice versa," Mr. Chandler wrote the system philosophy section of the original Intellivision design document. "Video games will always be the heart of home systems but are dead-ended as a standalone product. Videos games [also] provide the best base for home computers [because they are] friendly [and] non-threatening … Mattel has been (maybe still is) in a unique position to make the home revolution happen in a valid way."

After a two-month delay triggered by indecision over which chipset to use for the new console, Mattel finally reached an agreement with GI to use three of its chips: a 16-bit (!) CP1610 processor, which ran at 2 MHz, an AY-3-8900 STIC (Standard Television Interface Chip), which supported a screen resolution of 160 x 96 and 8 hardware sprites, and an AY-3-8914 sound chip that delivered three channels of sound. Combined with the system's 1.456 KB of SRAM and 7 KB of ROM, the Intellivision Master Component was a significant step up from the Atari VCS. And with the design specs in place, Mr. Chandler worked with a very small team throughout 1978 and 1979 to bring the Intellivision hardware to market.

It took a while. After missing the 1978 holiday selling season, Mattel finally introduced the Intellivision Master Component to the world at the 1979 Winter CES in Las Vegas that January with the tagline "Intelligent television." The strange original name of the product was due to Mattel's plans to create a modular product line that could be expanded into a home computer system via a Keyboard Component and access an early online service called PlayCable. Mattel marketed both hardware products at the show, and again at the Summer CES that June, leading to legal issues after the Keyboard Component was never released broadly. Most peop...