Lock 'n Chase - Licensing Explained?

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 3:48 AM, DZ-Jay said:

I knew I saw this before:

 

 

FROM THE AUDIENCE: ...well I was wondering about the reluctance to use arcade games. Because ColecoVision came in and started doing arcade games. Was there a decision, "Let's never do arcade games"? BurgerTime was great, of course, and it was very successful, but I was just wondering why more weren't done sooner?

 

ROBINSON: That was just money. That was just what Mattel was willing to pay...

 

DAGLOW: And they beat us to them. The licenses were mostly gone before we got to them.

 

ROBINSON: We tried. Mattel got in there and tried to fight for some of the licenses; we just lost. We didn't put up enough money; we didn't fight. See, the thing is, that was a way for any company to get into the market. Parker Brothers or SEGA who came in late into the home market, that was a way for them to get in there: just drop a whole lot of money on a license. No money left over to do actually a good game with it...

 

So it was a bit of both.

Robinson is simply not right here. That it wasn't "just money" is clearly belied by the myriad expensive licenses Mattel did obtain, many of which weren't used. In 1980 it even shelled out a small fortune for a fully paid-up license to Microsoft BASIC.

 

Daglow managed to interject, "The licenses were mostly gone before we got them," before Robinson cut him off. That's not right either—going into 1981 Atari and Mattel were the only two game companies in town, and an examination of Atari's offerings clearly establish that it hadn't cornered the market. Prior to that Mattel would have had no other competition; there was no need for it to have "got in there and tried to fight for some of the licenses."

 

The timing, which y'all can easily verify on your own, just doesn't jibe with these assertions. And we all know since boyhood that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Here the truth is that the answer to the above-posed QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: Was there a decision, "Let's never do arcade games"? is, quite simply, "yes."

 

From the beginning, Rochlis and Chang stated in clear, simple English that they wanted to distance Intellivision from arcade-style games. Numerous arcade-style games were proposed and even prototyped (graphics for one of these even sneaked into one of the catalogs under the title Arcade), but they just weren't interested. Rochlis even thought Space Battle too arcade-like and only accepted it reluctantly, treating it like a poor stepsister to his darlings Blackjack & Poker and Roulette, Slots & Craps. Although Space Battle was ready in time to appear in the January 1979 promotional video, Rochlis chose not to use it as a launch title. Finney even prototyped a version he called Space Battle, Arcade with multiple waves of attackers and non-volatile memory for scores, but that just royally pissed Rochlis off.

 

So why the discrepancy? Well, Robinson and Daglow arrived at Mattel after the decision points in question and even then weren't highly enough placed to have first-hand knowledge of management's machinations. Daglow didn't arrive until after Minkoff, Sohl and Levine had completed Astrosmash, Snafu and Bowling. He started at the bottom: his first assignment was to write a series of Keyboard Component applications programs in BASIC. Robinson came a good while after that, taking over TRON Solar Sailer from Daglow when Daglow was made a manager. I submit that Robinson and Daglow were simply making inferences, and if pressed would certainly admit as much.

 

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with making inferences. The only reason it's a problem here is that the positions of Robinson and Daglow are such that listeners/readers are prone to take these particular inferences as fact.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 3:48 AM, DZ-Jay said:

just drop a whole lot of money on a license. No money left over to do actually a good game with it...

This statement is also off-base. At this point in time a programmer's base salary would have been insignificant for a project like this. There would even have been enough spillage to afford him a chair.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 5:42 AM, DZ-Jay said:

I can never figure out the motivations and mechanics of Space Battle

That's sad. The game presents you with a pattern of incoming attackers, different each time, and you have to quickly assess it and figure out how to strategically dispatch your less able computer teammates to hold off the lesser threats while you, the ace fighter pilot, apply your own superior eye-hand coordination to personally wiping out the most immediate threat. On top of that, you're pressured by object impermanence: the fact that you're engaged in one place doesn't prevent your teammates from being blown blasted to bits in another. Strategy under pressure, blood-boiling shoot-em-up and nerve-wracking anxiety all in one game—now that was something new in 1979. What's not to like? All in 4K, too.

 

What's not to like, of course, is that like many of the other early games, this one doesn't begin to get fun until you master the controls well enough to be able to play it without looking down. That takes a while. For those for whom that was a problem, there was Astrosmash. Although Astrosmash represented the epitome of everything Chang was trying to avoid, it did sell a million copies.

 

WJI

 

On 2/7/2017 at 7:36 AM, DZ-Jay said:

Correction: I meant to say Space Hawk as a bad game, not Space Battle. Sorry.

Fair enough. But I like what I wrote, so I withdraw it as a reply to your post and let it stand on its own.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 7:57 AM, carlsson said:

I wonder how Epyx got away with the C64 game they released in 1984.

Policies can change quickly and dramatically when personnel change and companies are hemorrhaging money and staring death in the face.

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 5:42 AM, DZ-Jay said:

Then, of course, ... the strange existence of Horse Racing: a game too frail, awkward, and pedestrian for the gambling aficionado; and just too weird, seemingly inappropriate, and just plain lame for the video game-obsessed 8 year-old.

And yet elsewhere on this forum we read,

On 10/13/2014 at 9:38 PM, Mazerati said:

yup believe it or not back in the day my family was in the horse racing industry and Intellivision horse racing was very popular amongst the people in the industry and the gamblers...at the time this was the only horse racing game out and the fact that it looked and played great helped...i know many people that bought the system just to play Horse Racing in fact the horse racing game is the main reason my dad bought me the Intellivision for Chriatmas and it was my 1st cart

Chris Hawley devoted a summer of his life to create, tweak and polish a game deserving of that review.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 6:08 AM, mr_me said:

The Intellivision is not a toy, it says so on the back label.

Yeah, but in a much larger font it says "MATTEL."

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 6:08 AM, mr_me said:

I guess they were trying to appeal to adults.

Right with Eversharp.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 6:33 AM, carlsson said:

... with strong brands like Barbie ... as part of Mattel, where were the Intellivision games based on those IPs?

Barbie was a flagship brand whose virtue was jealously guarded. Mattel Toys was not about to give the unshowered, disheveled upstarts at Mattel Electronics even the smallest chance to muck up their precocious teen sensation. Rochlis didn't have anywhere near the gravitas to challenge Wagner on this point and Denham, a Wagner protégé, was predisposed to side with Toys and wouldn't have wanted otherwise.

 

Toys was wrong in one respect—the upstarts may have appeared disheveled, but they showered every day before coming to work.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 6:19 AM, Denicio said:

i had zero interest in any MATH fun....i sucked at math and i sure as hell was not gonna play it on my game.

Children's Television Workshop's staff had definite ideas about teaching math to unwashed kids, and these are embodied in the Math Fun cartridge. The APh crew had the temerity to think they too might know something about learning math and begged, cajoled and offered alternatives, to no avail. One alternative, Math Rocks!, was an absolute blast. Even you would have loved it.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 6:33 AM, carlsson said:

with strong brands like ... Hot Wheels as part of Mattel, where were the Intellivision games based on those IPs?

This connection and many others like it did not escape notice. The short answer is that many are called but few are chosen, and tomorrow is another day.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 2/7/2017 at 7:02 AM, intellivotion said:

... but Tutankham has 4 different mazes that are much larger than the screen and they show as you walk toward the right side

 

Nigh Stalker has ONE maze...

Night Stalker came out two years earlier and fit in 4K.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 4/7/2021 at 11:22 PM, Cee Cee said:

For whatever reason, Mattel Electronics made ZERO mention anywhere on or in its packaging of it being based on an arcade game. Bump 'n Jump is the only one I recall them doing this for. They didn't even do it with the one huge arcade hit they licensed, which was of course, BurgerTime. 

The suits believed that arcade players recognized games by title and didn't particularly care about the name of the manufacturer/distributor. They further believed that because arcade game manufacturers didn't advertise to the public and Mattel did, players would come to associate the game titles with the Mattel name rather than with that of Data East. This subtrifugal identity appropriation was convoluted from 1982 on with the idea that on Mattel was going to position its titles as being platform independent. None of the implementations were to be considered canonical, not even the arcade version.

 

WJI

[+DZ-Jay]

On 7/6/2023 at 7:26 AM, Walter Ives said:

The suits believed that arcade players recognized games by title and didn't particularly care about the name of the manufacturer/distributor.
 

 

That sounds about right.  When I was a kid in the 80s, I recall seeing names like Bally Midway, Nintendo, Williams, Atari, etc.; just because those names were plastered in commercials, posters, and the arcade cabinets themselves.

 

However, I would not have been able to tell you who made what, or with which "brand" a game was associated.

 

As far as my 9 year-old self was concerned, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Joust, Space Invaders, etc., were all made by wizards out of pixie dust and black magic, and came to my town from the far away lands of Thereaboutsia and Whereverstan. *shrug*

 

As an adult, I also can say the same thing about movies and their studios.  It is a rare occurrence when something like, "Megabux Studios, LLC. presents ..." sparks any recognition or interest in me; whereas, "from the producers of Awesome: The Movie ..." most definitely would.

 

 

On 7/6/2023 at 7:26 AM, Walter Ives said:

They further believed that because arcade game manufacturers didn't advertise to the public and Mattel did, players would come to associate the game titles with the Mattel name rather than with that of Data East. This subtrifugal identity appropriation was convoluted from 1982 on with the idea that on Mattel was going to position its titles as being platform independent. None of the implementations were to be considered canonical, not even the arcade version.

 

WJI

Interesting.

 

   dZ.

[mr_me]

On 7/6/2023 at 7:24 AM, Walter Ives said:

Robinson is simply not right here. That it wasn't "just money" is clearly belied by the myriad expensive licenses Mattel did obtain, many of which weren't used. In 1980 it even shelled out a small fortune for a fully paid-up license to Microsoft BASIC.

 

Daglow managed to interject, "The licenses were mostly gone before we got them," before Robinson cut him off. That's not right either—going into 1981 Atari and Mattel were the only two game companies in town, and an examination of Atari's offerings clearly establish that it hadn't cornered the market. Prior to that Mattel would have had no other competition; there was no need for it to have "got in there and tried to fight for some of the licenses."

 

The timing, which y'all can easily verify on your own, just doesn't jibe with these assertions. And we all know since boyhood that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Here the truth is that the answer to the above-posed QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: Was there a decision, "Let's never do arcade games"? is, quite simply, "yes."

 

From the beginning, Rochlis and Chang stated in clear, simple English that they wanted to distance Intellivision from arcade-style games. Numerous arcade-style games were proposed and even prototyped (graphics for one of these even sneaked into one of the catalogs under the title Arcade), but they just weren't interested. Rochlis even thought Space Battle too arcade-like and only accepted it reluctantly, treating it like a poor stepsister to his darlings Blackjack & Poker and Roulette, Slots & Craps. Although Space Battle was ready in time to appear in the January 1979 promotional video, Rochlis chose not to use it as a launch title. Finney even prototyped a version he called Space Battle, Arcade with multiple waves of attackers and non-volatile memory for scores, but that just royally pissed Rochlis off.

 

So why the discrepancy? Well, Robinson and Daglow arrived at Mattel after the decision points in question and even then weren't highly enough placed to have first-hand knowledge of management's machinations. Daglow didn't arrive until after Minkoff, Sohl and Levine had completed Astrosmash, Snafu and Bowling. He started at the bottom: his first assignment was to write a series of Keyboard Component applications programs in BASIC. Robinson came a good while after that, taking over TRON Solar Sailer from Daglow when Daglow was made a manager. I submit that Robinson and Daglow were simply making inferences, and if pressed would certainly admit as much.

 

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with making inferences. The only reason it's a problem here is that the positions of Robinson and Daglow are such that listeners/readers are prone to take these particular inferences as fact.

 

WJI

What's considered expensive?  Atari reportedly paid over $20M to license ET.  How much did Mattel Electronics pay to license Rocky and Bulwinkle.  I remember hearing that the sports licenses were somewhere in the order of low five figures.

 

Daglow is not wrong.  Atari reportedly licensed all future Namco games along with Galaxian.  So they had Pacman before the game was programmed.  Coleco licensed Donkey Kong before the game came to North America.  Yet Parker Brothers was able to come in and get Nintendo's Popeye, and Atari took Mario Brothers.  You'd think Coleco would have been in on those games but must have been outbid.  So Robinson might not have been wrong either.

 

Even when Mattel flipped their policy in 1980 to do arcade games, their initial strategy was to do them without licenses.  Richard Chang asked John Sohl to program Asteroids, as with Space Armada they thought they could do it without licensing. When Mattel Electronics finally started licensing arcade titles in 1982 they were competing with Parker Brothers, Coleco, and others.

 

Daglow may not have started as director but he was there, at Mattel in late 1980.  At the time he was part of a small game developer group headed by their new manager Gabriel Baum, VP of application software.  Unfortunately we haven't heard a whole lot from Daglow.  Robinson put up the Intellivision Lives web site decades ago.  I don't doubt he would have been happy to have people contact him with corrections and more information.

Edited July 8, 2023 by mr_me

[+Black_Tiger]

6 hours ago, DZ-Jay said:

That sounds about right.  When I was a kid in the 80s, I recall seeing names like Bally Midway, Nintendo, Williams, Atari, etc.; just because those names were plastered in commercials, posters, and the arcade cabinets themselves

 

I was too young to pick up on game publishers during the Mattel Electronics Intellivision run, but Romstar stood out to me bitd as a name that meant an arcade game was my kindvof game.

 

Of course, they were the best at the time because they licensed the best games from Japan from publishers not named Sega.

 

By the time I became aware of Romstar, their name on a console game box would have sold me. But it never would have been on the box and I was already familiar with all of their games and sought them out by title for console versions.

[BSRSteve]

2 hours ago, mr_me said:

Daglow may not have started as director but he was there, at Mattel in late 1980.  At the time he was part of a small game developer group headed by their new manager Gabriel Baum, VP of application software.  Unfortunately we haven't heard a whole lot from Daglow.  Robinson put up the Intellivision Lives web site decades ago.  I don't doubt he would have been happy to have people contact him with corrections and more information.

Yes, Keith would have been happy for corrections and more information, and  I would be happy with that as well, as long as the corrections are well-sourced or documented. Keith and I started in late 1981, with Keith about a month after me. 

 

I remember seeing Q*Bert in the arcade one lunchtime with Bill Fisher, and we both thought that would be a great game for the Intellivision. Of course, we discovered it was too late. My memory is that Daglow might have rejected it, but it might also have already been gone when he looked at titles from Gottlieb.

[+DZ-Jay]

17 hours ago, Black_Tiger said:

 

I was too young to pick up on game publishers during the Mattel Electronics Intellivision run, but Romstar stood out to me bitd as a name that meant an arcade game was my kindvof game.

 

Of course, they were the best at the time because they licensed the best games from Japan from publishers not named Sega.

 

By the time I became aware of Romstar, their name on a console game box would have sold me. But it never would have been on the box and I was already familiar with all of their games and sought them out by title for console versions.

 

There were some brands I did recognize, but it was rare.  I imagine the same would be for others as well.  Would you agree that, in the general case, most kids would identify games by title rather than by producer or publisher?

 

18 hours ago, mr_me said:

Daglow is not wrong.  Atari reportedly licensed all future Namco games along with Galaxian.  So they had Pacman before the game was programmed.  Coleco licensed Donkey Kong before the game came to North America.  Yet Parker Brothers was able to come in and get Nintendo's Popeye, and Atari took Mario Brothers.  You'd think Coleco would have been in on those games but must have been outbid.  So Robinson might not have been wrong either.

 

Even when Mattel flipped their policy in 1980 to do arcade games, their initial strategy was to do them without licenses.  Richard Chang asked John Sohl to program Asteroids, as with Space Armada they thought they could do it without licensing. When Mattel Electronics finally started licensing arcade titles in 1982 they were competing with Parker Brothers, Coleco, and others.

 

I took that comment from Mr. Ives differently.  What I understood from it was that Mattel absolutely had made a decision earlier on to not get into the arcade game licensing business, and that such decision had nothing to do with cost nor availability of licenses, because there was little competition in the early days of the Intellivision.  In short, it was purely a business decision, shortsighted as it may have ultimately turned out to be.

 

Moreover, that by the time Mattel decided to join in the fray, it may have been too late, with most licenses already gone by then.  This last part somewhat aligns with your comment:  if newcomers like Parker Brothers and Coleco decided to shortcut their introduction into the market by licensing games early on, it may have been early enough for them to actually get them in such broad scope as to include exclusive access to future games from some publishers.  Your own comment suggests as much.

 

This doesn't make Messrs. Robinson and Daglow wrong per se -- but it suggests that their account is at best incomplete:  the situation was quite more complex than simply "the competition had already taken all the licenses" or "Mattel was too cheap to bid for them."  Mattel's position appears to have evolved over time, as it reacted to a rapidly changing market, and it made good and bad decisions, just like any other larger corporation.

 

Yes, their change of heart about arcade games may have come much too late to count, but that in itself seems to belie the common narrative that they just could not get any good licenses -- it came too late because, as Mr. Ives account suggests, for the greater part of that early formative (and ultimately, determinative) time, they did not wish to.

 

     -dZ.

 

 

[+Black_Tiger]

1 hour ago, DZ-Jay said:

There were some brands I did recognize, but it was rare.  I imagine the same would be for others as well.  Would you agree that, in the general case, most kids would identify games by title rather than by producer or publisher?

That's part of what I was saying. I wasn't the average young player, but picked up on some publisher names.

 

One in particular made me stop to try out a new arcade game if I saw it.

 

But it was definitely arcade games that I'd already tried that stood out or I hoped would appear on consoles.

 

[+DZ-Jay]

1 minute ago, Black_Tiger said:

That's part of what I was saying. I wasn't the average young player, but picked up on some publisher names.

 

One in particular made me stop to try out a new arcade game if I saw it.

 

But it was definitely arcade games that I'd already tried that stood out or I hoped would appear on consoles.

 

 

Gotcha!  The same with me -- I think I sort of recognized that all of Williams games had an interesting common style, with hardcore gaming elements, colorful objects, particle effects, etc.; so seeing that distinctive signature logo on the cabinets attracted me at first sight.  (To watch others play, mind you -- not to play myself.  God, no! I was much too lame to waste my precious quarters on those "manly" games, but I loved watching others play them.)

 

As for playing in consoles, like I you, I looked forward to specific games -- irrespective of who made it.  For instance, I had no idea what a "Nintendo" was -- but I sure as heck wanted with every burning passion in my heart to play that game on my Intellivision!  (That I ultimately got my wish ... well ... that's a different story.)

 

    -dZ.

[mr_me]

21 hours ago, BSRSteve said:

I remember seeing Q*Bert in the arcade one lunchtime with Bill Fisher, and we both thought that would be a great game for the Intellivision. Of course, we discovered it was too late. My memory is that Daglow might have rejected it, but it might also have already been gone when he looked at titles from Gottlieb.

I think I did hear that they passed on Qbert.  Only a small fraction of arcade machines found success, it would have been hard to predict what title is worth licensing.  Atari was preemptive in their licensing already having future Namco games, e.g. Ms Pacman, Dig Dug, Pole Position.  They likely did the same with Williams Defender, Joust, Robotron.  So a lot of the big names were gone as Daglow says.  Frogger is one of the big titles that may have been available and that went to Parker Brothers along with Qbert.

[Rod]

 

On 7/8/2023 at 12:12 PM, mr_me said:

Robinson put up the Intellivision Lives web site decades ago.  I don't doubt he would have been happy to have people contact him with corrections and more information.

 

On 7/8/2023 at 2:44 PM, BSRSteve said:

Yes, Keith would have been happy for corrections and more information

      I listened to a podcast of Keith Robinson where he tells how he assembled the story of the Intellivision by approaching people to tell their stories, when they told him they didn't feel they had anything to contribute, he threw something together on his website, how those very same people kept telling him how wrong he was and how he kept revising his story to incorporate the new information he got from them. (Intellivisionaries episode 9, starting about 2:59:45) He even admitted elsewhere it often took him several iterations to get the story right. You can personally see this in another podcast where Joey Sylvian sits quietly while Robinson tells a story, Sylvian corrects him and Robinson changes the story on the spot to weave them in.

      It seems to me that Keith Robinson mostly wrote and spoke about the Intellivision group within a larger programming department run by Gabriel Baum, plus what happened at Intv after it bought the assets. He only includes scattered bits and pieces about other groups like GI, Sylvania, marketing, Nice Ideas, Intellivision IV, Radofin or even other groups in Gabriel's department like Aquarius programming or PC programming. (not complaining, just an observation.) I've read that other groups were made up of "professional" programmers from aerospace industry who got higher pay, so maybe they were oil and water.

[mr_me]

7 hours ago, Rod said:

 

 

      I listened to a podcast of Keith Robinson where he tells how he assembled the story of the Intellivision by approaching people to tell their stories, when they told him they didn't feel they had anything to contribute, he threw something together on his website, how those very same people kept telling him how wrong he was and how he kept revising his story to incorporate the new information he got from them. (Intellivisionaries episode 9, starting about 2:59:45) He even admitted elsewhere it often took him several iterations to get the story right. You can personally see this in another podcast where Joey Sylvian sits quietly while Robinson tells a story, Sylvian corrects him and Robinson changes the story on the spot to weave them in.

      It seems to me that Keith Robinson mostly wrote and spoke about the Intellivision group within a larger programming department run by Gabriel Baum, plus what happened at Intv after it bought the assets. He only includes scattered bits and pieces about other groups like GI, Sylvania, marketing, Nice Ideas, Intellivision IV, Radofin or even other groups in Gabriel's department like Aquarius programming or PC programming. (not complaining, just an observation.) I've read that other groups were made up of "professional" programmers from aerospace industry who got higher pay, so maybe they were oil and water.

Robinson did have a masters degree in computer science.  His partner at Intellivision Productions who did Intellivision Space Spartans, B17 Bomber, and Aquarius Utopia did come from Aerospace.  The people that programmed IBM PC Burgertime and Night Stalker came from the Intellivision group.  There was a group in Taiwan that was setup by the guy that did Intellivision Space Hawk, as well as B17 Bomber and Space Spartans.  There was another group in France that Robinson helped setup.  The Mattel Electronics programming group was made up of people of varying education and work experience.  Robinson mostly wrote of that group which was created in 1980/81; that's why it's good to hear from someone from APh that was involved prior to Robinson.  They are all recalling memories that are over forty years old, so some discrepancies are expected.

[Walter Ives]

On 7/8/2023 at 2:44 PM, BSRSteve said:

I remember seeing Q*Bert in the arcade one lunchtime with Bill Fisher, and we both thought that would be a great game for the Intellivision. Of course, we discovered it was too late.

It would be interesting to pin down the time of that lunch more precisely. The arcade version of Q*Bert didn't hit the streets until October 1982, so say it took until February or March of 1983 to reach fast-food joints. That would have been a completely new era. O'Connell had long ago jumped to Fox Video Games and been replaced by Pirner. ColecoVision-man was hot on the tail of Intellivision-man, and the Denham-Prodromou-Pirner triumvirate had for months been instituting desperate measures to re-invent the company. The rank and file, however, was still completely shielded from and oblivious to the panic that was pervading the executive suite.

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 7/9/2023 at 6:49 AM, DZ-Jay said:

I took that comment from Mr. Ives differently.  What I understood from it was that Mattel absolutely had made a decision earlier on to not get into the arcade game licensing business, and that such decision had nothing to do with cost nor availability of licenses ...

All right, let's deconstruct this in detail.

In 1975 Richard Chang wanted to make a home video game that eschewed arcade-style games that were simple in graphics and gameplay and geared toward vacuuming up quarters. The blockbuster arcade games of the time included such games as Pong, Wheels and Tank. Home games were pretty much Pong variants. Chang's vision was to provide games that were more involved and long-playing, like what would eventually become Intellivision Football.

In 1977 Jeff Rochlis wanted to produce a component system that, together with the home television set, constituted a platform for various home software packages. Tax return preparation, recipe management, that sort of thing. For that he needed a system with a microprocessor, a video display chip, a modulator, a keyboard, memory and a cassette drive. He figured such a system was going to cost $300, a high price for a consumer item. He thought it would be an easier sell if he split the system into two $150 modules, one with the first three elements, another with the second three. To that end Rochlis co-opted Chang's game for the first module. He too wanted to disassociate the game part of the system from something designed to play arcade games at home.

In 1979 Atari was stuck with 250,000 unsold VCS units at the end of the year. Had it not been previously purchased by Warner it would have been in very deep doo-doo.

In May 1980 Atari released Space Invaders for the VCS. That was a killer app—sales of the VCS went thru the roof.

In mid-1980 Rochlis left Mattel and Denham/Kissell/O'Connell took over. The new team was fully on board about maintaining Intellivision's cachet. So much so they recruited a pipe-smoking, corduroy-jacket wearing Ivy-league type with an intellectual accent to promote it.

About August 1980 the Denham/Kissell/O'Connell triumvirate began receiving reports of the effect of Space Invaders on VCS sales. "We better get ourselves one of those too," they said. So they commissioned the first "arcade-like" game for the Intellivision, Space Armada, which was assigned to an experienced programming team. The thought of licensing some arcade title didn't even occur to them—the only thought they gave to intellectual property was possible copyright infringement. Fortunately for them, Midway had released Space Invaders without a copyright notice, so it was unprotected.

Having had their attention drawn to Space Invaders the triumvirate also happened to also notice the popularity of Asteroids. "May as well commission a clone of that, too," they said. Demonstrating the high importance and priority they placed on the idea, the project was assigned to an inexperienced new hire.

The Asteroids clone produced by the new hire was a dog (I've never played it, but even the new hire thought so). Nevertheless, it was run past legal. This didn't happen until after it had been written, mind you—not exactly the order you'd do things for a project deemed critically important. Legal found the project problematic, and management didn't fight for it.

Fortunately the new hire had fortuitously produced a derivative game that worked fairly well. Marketing liked it. Legal was OK. Christened Astrosmash, that game became the second arcade-like game in the Intellivision library. It still hadn't occurred to the triumvirate to seek a license for an existing arcade game.

Pac-Man hit the US market in December 1980. The triumvirate now consisted of Denham, O'Connell and Gillis, and it was learning. It made creating a Pac-Man clone a priority. APh had proposed a gobbler game using LEDs sometime between 1976-1978, and several gobbler games for the Intellivision were proposed and even prototyped between 1978-1980. All had been shelved for being too arcade-like. As these were being dusted off, someone saw the Data East Lock'N'Chase game, a light went on, and a deal was done to license and port that game. This was still an exception; the guiding philosophy of not doing arcade games had not changed. Mattel's legal department, being old hands at negotiating license agreements and always on the lookout for ancillary clauses that might benefit Mattel, threw in a "first-look" provision for Data East's future games as a matter of course.

This is how in September 1982 (or July 9, if you believe Wikipedia), almost seven years after Chang started the project and just 16 months before Mattel Electronics' demise, that Lock'N'Chase became the very first licensed arcade-style game in the Intellivision library.

So what was happening elsewhere in 1981? Well, we know that Coleco started designing a system with the avowed purpose of allowing teenagers to play arcade video games at home and was making the rounds of Nintendo and Sega to secure licenses to their arcade games. What was Mattel doing in the meantime? It was busy throwing money at Disney to license TRON. But that was a movie license, not an arcade game license. Did Mattel show any interest in coordinating its license with the arcade TRON games that Bally/Midway was producing? Nope. None whatsoever. Zippo. The TRON cartridges that came out in late 1982 bore no relation whatsoever to their arcade counterparts.

Next Data East came out with a game called Loco-Motion. Now, Mattel had an existing toy product that used that name, so it arguably had some rights to the name. So what the heck, said people at a lower-level than the triumvirate, why not assign some programmer to port that game to the Intellivision. Sure. And so it was said, and so it was done. The programming of this game, which was to be the second arcade license, was penciled in to start about July 1982. Not sure the exact date, but summer of 1982. Yup, you read the year right, 1982. Kind of late in the story, eh?

In the meantime the world is changing. In June Frank O'Connell, VP Marketing, leaves to run Fox Video Games, and ColecoVision bursts onto the scene with Donkey Kong as a pack in. The new triumvirate now consisted of Denham/Prodromou/Pirner. How the h*** are they going to respond to this existential threat? Companies aren't faceless, they execute the vision of the very human individuals who form the top management. When the management changes and circumstances change, the approach changes. What did the great and powerful do here? They went to…MacDonald's. I don't know why MacDonald's, maybe because it would have been a cliché to go to Disneyland, maybe to give themselves a preview of where they could expect to be regularly eating if they didn't come up with something quick. At any rate, the change of scenery worked; for they stretched their imaginations to the utmost and came up with the idea for—Big Mac. No, not a new MacDonald's burger, the Big Mac burger was already a staple. They co-opted the name Big Mac to be the code name for the Intellivision II project. A touch of genius, no? What could they use as a competitive pack-in game? BurgerTime! So they shelved the banal Loco-Motion conversion in favor of a crash project to port the exciting BurgerTime. As a result it would be BurgerTime rather than Loco-Motion that would become the Intellivision's second licensed arcade title. It wouldn't reach store shelves until June 1983, just as Mattel was going off the cliff. (Well, the whole industry actually zoomed off the cliff together around November of 1982 but, as with Looney Tune characters, the participants just kept spinning their appendages and wouldn't realize until much later that they no longer had any visible means of support.)

One of the important attractions of ColecoVision was that it was being marketed as being exactly what the Intellivision was not—a way to play arcade games at home. On seeing that the Mattel general staff recognized how wide open they'd left their flank so, starting the last half of 1982, the company did indeed begin exploring licensing existing arcade games.

And what of Loco-Motion? It doesn't hit store shelves until Thanksgiving 1983, when Mattel Electronics was on the last leg of its dive, just two months before it closes its doors. A port of Data East's Bump'N'Jump is released about the same time as Loco-Motion. Given those release dates, even if Mattel had succeeded in securing a slew of arcade game licenses in the last half of 1982 they would not have made it to market in time to have had any impact whatsoever on Mattel's viability.

WJI

[Walter Ives]

 

On 12/5/2022 at 12:27 PM, DZ-Jay said:

Well, there goes an entire thread accepted as part of the historical canon.

You might have noticed that this account bursts yet another bubble. Locomotion didn't start dribbling its way onto store shelves until Thanksgiving 1983, well after Morris had written off the Intellivision as a viable product line and so would have been starved of advertising dollars even if Happy Trails had never existed, despite Robinson's narrative to the contrary.

WJI

PS: Don't let the fact that I contradict Robinson here make you think I don't admire what he managed to accomplish. He wove the best narrative he could given what he knew, but his role while at Mattel was quite limited and he often got facts wrong or made erroneous inferences. To his credit, he diligently solicited new information and when corrected he immediately adjusted his narrative, and would have surely done so here upon discovering when Loco-motion actually appeared on shelves. Perfect is the enemy of progress: had he not been willing to regale us with what he had managed to piece together the memories of the Intellivision would have faded much more quickly.