When I was a very young child my parents had a Mattel Intellivision for some reason, I think that it may have been a wedding gift.  We had a handful of games like Pac-Man, Pitfall, Beauty And The Beast and The Empire Strikes Back to name a few.  I remember the games being incredibly difficult.  Naturally being a child and the level of difficulty didn’t help retain my interest for too long.  I hung up the paddles for good. Until one day at the Goodwill near my parent’s house.

I found one of these bad boys just sitting there in great condition and at the price of only $7.00 I knew that I must own it.  I also even found a game, Bowling, Mint in box with overlays and everything.  If you’ve never played an Intellivision before you don’t know about overlays so here’s a lesson:  Note the number pad on the attached controllers, a plastic insert slid in through the top and the controls for the various games would correspond with the numbers.  It wasn’t like today where all games have the same basic controls; most games had different controls.  Unfortunately most games you find today no longer have the overlays so what may work with Tron Deadly Discs won’t work with Star Strike, you just have to figure it out by playing.

When I got it home I tried to plug it in and it turned out that I needed an adapter so I could plug it into my standard coax input in on the back of my television set.  I had to order one from eBay but it only took a few days and the fee was nominal.  As I went to juice it up the picture was awful so I gave it to my friend Dustin who is a fellow video game historian and also had worked in a video game store.  He said that he could clean it and get it running like new again.  About a week later I got it back and it was in perfect working condition.  He even gave me a couple of games.  I played it though the night, and by through the night I mean for about thirty minutes.  It was as hard and boring, mostly boring, as I remembered.  But in my defense I have been really spoiled by modern gaming technology.

It’s not surprising that this console didn’t do very well.  The graphics weren’t as good as the Atari 2600 and the overlays were a case of “seemed like a good idea at the time”.  However I’m still glad that I own one and can play this piece of history whenever I want.