The original big three - video game systems

 When they cleaned out their basement, my parents passed along the Intellivision and cartridges.  I looked through them to see what I had.  I might be missing a few, but I seem to have 28 original Intellivision cartridges and 4 extra ones by other companies.  Only two of the boxes (Space Armada and Triple Action) were in really rough shape.  The rest of them seemed okay.  I was only missing two of the overlays (1 for Major League Baseball, and 1 for Triple Action).  

In another box was a silver Atari 2600, and a Colecovision with one of the controllers opened up and the wires cut.  They said that they got these much later when they helped someone move.  I never had these as a youth.

Of the three systems, the Atari came out first, in 1977.  It had a joystick and you could also get paddles.  My cousins had one, but I was never impressed with the quality of the games.  It was a lot of people’s first game system so it usually ranks high but it was the lowest of the three to me.  People usually give it higher marks as it had the most games, but both the Colecovision and even the Intellivision had emulators that would allow you to play Atari games on their systems.  The Atari was finally discontinued in 1992.

The Intellivision came out in 1979.  The graphics were miles ahead of the Atari.  It also had some solid sports games for the day.  Their controllers has a keypad as well as a disc instead of a joystick.  People either loved or hated the disc; I loved it.  This is the system that I pushed hard to get, and played deep into the 80s, even after we had upgraded to the Nintendo Entertainment System.  It was discontinued in 1984 but it continued under different labels until 1990 as INTV.

The Colecovision did not come out until 1982.  Of the three, it had the best graphics, with any games looking identical to their arcade versions.  It also had, what I consider the worst controllers.  They had a keypad like the Intellivision but the controller was a bit thicker and did not fit the hand as comfortably.  It did have a stubby joystick with a flat top.  It did have a lot of expansions available, with a normal joystick and buttons, a steering wheel and pedal, a roller controller (track ball), and a super awkward super controller with a nice joystick.  One of my friends had a Colecovision so I was able to try it. It was discontinued in 1985