Gaming It Lives! The Intellivision Amico Discussion Thread

I'm an old-school gamer; and my first console was the Intellivision, which was in a way the first true rival of the Atari 2600. I don't expect this thread to be overly active, but at least I'll try to keep it updated with any news; most of which involves the new "Amico" console that is scheduled to be released in 2020. It's an interesting concept. I highly doubt that the developers expect it to rival any of the next-gen consoles from Sony, Microsoft, or Nintedo; but it'll still have a small market with the nostalgia folk like me.

 

I follow an Intellivision FB group, "Intellivision Invasion" which featured that. I think the news about EJ is all right; though it's not really a nostalgic venture for avid Intv gamers since EJ was initially a Sega Genesis/SNES installment. I'd be more thrilled to see a remake of some legit Intv classics like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Night Stalker, and Tron Deadly Disks. An Astrosmash remake would floor everyone for sure.

 

I still have an original Intv II console in my basement; as well as an Intellevision Flashback console that I've played with a couple of times. The Flashback console is nice because it includes the original controllers with disks and keypads.

 

The Intellivision kinda got swallowed up by the ubiquity of the Atari 2600. For every kid I knew w/an Intellivision, I knew five+ w/a 2600. I doubt I ever played one more than a handful of times. As I understand it, some of that disparity came down to Atari being more appealing due to having the far bigger game catalog. Something like 3 for every 1 for Intellivision. Of course a lot of those were made by third party developers, and the QC wasn't exactly high on a good number of them, as I can attest from personal experience. Re: the latter, it seems that Mattel was starting to close that gap w/their catalog, but then the combo of the release of the ColecoVision and the Atari 5200, w/their superior graphics, and the video game crash of '83 sorta sealed its fate.

I love retro gaming (primarily the 8-bit era), but I'm really overdue to give the Intellivision a whirl. That plug-n-play is probably the way to go for a casual novice.

 

Well the Intv was really unique in that it featured the disk + numerical keypad as its controllers. Atari got more of the attention because, as you said, the bigger game catalog; but Intv's graphics for the most part were superior to the 2600. And I don't even know why my parents decided on buying the Intv for my brother and I as opposed to the 2600, but we had a pretty nice collection of games, especially the addicting ones like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and of course Astrosmash.

 

Intellivision had the 1st video game that I ever played that had an ending, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

 

Wait, that had an ending? ...looks on Youtube.....


Oh yeah, that ending lol.

 

New trailer released for the Intellivision Amico, which will be released October 2020.



You can a few re-imagined games such as Astrosmash and Night Stalker later on in the trailer. The game demos are shown at around 1:50.

 

Astrosmash remake

 

The thing about this new console is that they're not banking on it being a Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony competitor. Marketing suggests it will be an "affordable" family console; which means it'll be geared towards a slim niche market that's much smaller than the big three are. And that market includes the nostalgic people who grew up with the original system and it's familiar games like Astrosmash. Of course, I showed that video to my dad and he told me he still prefers the original game from 1981 lol.