Mattel Intellivision

The Intellivision, a combination of the words intelligent and television, is a home console that was test marketed in 1979 in USA and released nationwide in 1980 by Mattel, a known toymaker at the '70s. It was the first serious competition of the Atari, with better graphics and sound and a clever marketing strategy that was targeting "smart people". The Intellivision had a lot of great games released from 1980 through 1983, both from Mattel as well as the newly created third party development community that included the likes of Activision and Imagic. Some of the system's most innovative and technically impressive games came from these outside developers. In 1982, Mattel released the slimmed down more modern looking Intellivision II to replace the original model. However, Intellivision II wasn't a true sequel of Intellivision, like for example the Playstation II to Playstation I but it was more like what it was the slimmed version of PS One to Playstation I. The purpose of the release was to allow Mattel to sell the system at a cheaper price rather than a true upgrade.

In 1983 the video game market crashed taking down every major console. By 1984 the remaining stock was being cleared out from stores. However, in 1984 former Mattel Electronics vice president, Terrence Valeski, bought the rights to the system, its games and its customer list from Mattel for 20 million dollars to continue the distribution of the system in a smaller scale. He even bought the rights of the biggest third party games. Intellivison Inc. was born, later changing it's name to INTV Corp, selling new systems and even new games direct to consumers through catalogues sales. The strategy worked for a while and Intellivision was keep selling until the early 90's as a niche product. Eventually, the original programming team, known as the Blue Sky Rangers gain the rights to the system and it's games and begun releasing compilations for modern systems, along with licensing the system until the release of Intellivision Flashback for retro gamers. So Intellivison was indeed a victim of the game crash in 1983, however it has at least a successful continuation in the modern times compared to its vintage competition.