Atari Acquires Intellivision Brand

[leech]

14 minutes ago, ubersaurus said:

It depends. Arcade ports and third party games don't really use the keypad much, but I feel like a lot of the sports, strategy, simulation etc. type games absolutely lean on the keypad hard. You can tell what games were designed with the Intellivision controller in mind and which were just shoehorned into it.

I know Frogger on the 5200 exclusively uses the keypad to hop.  It was rather awkward when I first played it.

[BassGuitari]

On 5/29/2024 at 3:00 PM, leech said:

I know Frogger on the 5200 exclusively uses the keypad to hop.  It was rather awkward when I first played it.

You can change it to joystick. 🙂 Joystick mode "aims" you, and the fire button/s jump.

[freewheel]

Daaaaaaaaaaaaang that's a weird topic to stumble upon today. I guess everything will in fact one day be owned by Brawndo. And I guess this commercial makes less sense now:

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 5 by freewheel

[Intymike]

On 6/5/2024 at 8:46 PM, freewheel said:

Daaaaaaaaaaaaang that's a weird topic to stumble upon today. I guess everything will in fact one day be owned by Brawndo. And I guess this commercial makes less sense now:

 

 

 

 

 

Gives me the urge to do a bus trip to Las Vegas.  

[Walter Ives]

On 5/24/2024 at 2:12 AM, DZ-Jay said:

Great.  There goes the neighborhood.

Best comment ever.

[Cee Cee]

On 5/24/2024 at 6:38 PM, mr_me said:

They would still own the copyright on the software code for licensed games programmed at Mattel Electronics e.g. Burgertime, so they can be part of the deal.

 

Mattel and INTV Corp released over 90 titles for Intellivision, including ECS and KC.  There might be another thirty or forty unreleased/unfinished titles. There are handful of games for other platforms e.g. IBM PC, Apple II, Colecovision. The Atari 2600 M-network games were part of a previous transaction. There are fifteen Tutorvision titles but not sure if they own them. So that could be about 120 to 140 titles. If Amico games are included, it might get closer to 200.

 

 

Mattel didn't own BurgerTime. It was an arcade game licensed from Data East, (along with Lock 'n Chase and Bump 'n Jump) who went out of business decades ago. Data East's former IP is now owned by G-Mode.

Edited June 15 by Cee Cee

[mr_me]

16 minutes ago, Cee Cee said:

Mattel didn't own BurgerTime. It was an arcade game licensed from Data East, (along with Lock 'n Chase and Bump 'n Jump) who went out of business decades ago. Data East's former IP is now owned by G-Mode.

Each software program code written is a separate copyright IP as a literary work. Mattel Electronics would have owned those copyrights for the program code they wrote. The audio-visuals are a separate copyright, and Mattel Electronics used those along with the name trademark under license from Dataeast. So G-mode wouldn't be able to release Intellivision Burgertime or Atari 2600 Burgertime or IBM PC Burgertime without the permission of Atari SA, and Atari SA wouldn't be able to release those games without the permission of Gmode.  However, those copyrights are still IP that can be bought and sold.

[BSRSteve]

On 5/24/2024 at 3:38 PM, mr_me said:

They would still own the copyright on the software code for licensed games programmed at Mattel Electronics e.g. Burgertime, so they can be part of the deal.

 

Mattel and INTV Corp released over 90 titles for Intellivision, including ECS and KC.  There might be another thirty or forty unreleased/unfinished titles. There are handful of games for other platforms e.g. IBM PC, Apple II, Colecovision. The Atari 2600 M-network games were part of a previous transaction. There are fifteen Tutorvision titles but not sure if they own them. So that could be about 120 to 140 titles. If Amico games are included, it might get closer to 200.

 

 

The contract separately lists games with and without licenses attached, even when those licenses are only on the packaging and other materials. So NHL Hockey and Hockey are separately listed, as are UCSF Chess and Chess, etc. 

[First Spear]

It would be great if Atari could lend its investment muscle to a kind of "Intellivision Publishing Platform" that would lower the cost of producing Intellivision games.

 

Most of us here are familiar with the supply chain oddities that make Intellivision games costly to produce, especially at the high end tier (pro looking CIB etc). Imagine if Atari took on that production responsibility by supplying physical components in bulk (maybe assembly/packaging?) and in exchange for royalty $ it allowed the end-user price to be $40 for a CIB game and $20 for a bare cart plus PDF docs/overlays and $15 for ROM+PDFs?

 

Atari has distribution and marketing channels that are probably the biggest in the retro space, so maybe a dev would reach n-% more sales because (1) game costs less and (2) more units sold because more people know. 

 

No Intellivision developer is getting rich from making a game. The profit rate is probably less than US Minimum Wage. So maybe Atari could unblock that part? 

 

Now that I am in that rabbit hole, I'm also thinking about a software dev ecosystem too, where Atari uses a community standardized IntyBASIC dev environment with code/assets that can be submitted and troubleshoot for different errors and built against all of the variations of hardware and emulation (memory mapping), lowering the barrier to entry for game developers. Cloud-based emulation "try a cart" for testers to explore without having the ROM (kind of like what is on archive.org for some systems). Looking to get Óscar some consulting work.