Around the time that I turned 55 a few years ago, my parents had cleaned out their basement and passed along our Intellivision games.
I had 28 games by Intellivision directly and 4 extra ones by other companies. 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).
Since Intellivision had produced 55 games and I already had over half of them, I thought it might be fun to see about picking up the remainder to complete the original set. I have the Intellivision Flashback which is a retro console that emulates a lot of the original Mattel Electronics and INTV games for the Intellivision. It doesn’t have a lot of the licensed games though, so that was another push to get the remaining ones.
Starting out, I had Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack which came with the original console. We also picked up Armor Battle, Major League Baseball, and NFL Football from the 1979 set of 8. We also got Auto Racing, Sea Battle, Space Battle, Tennis, and the US Ski Team Skiing from the 11 games that came out in 1980.
These original 19 games originally came out with numbers on the top of the box, and many of them also came with full color manuals, both of which are subsets of collecting the games in addition to just having the later editions that came with the two-color manuals (black plus another) and did not have the top box numbers.
We had 6 of the 7 games from 1981 – Astrsmash, PBA Bowling, SNAFU, Space Armada, Star Strike, and Triple Action. One of the things that Mattel did with their boxes was that they had different colors for their ‘networks’ of games. Blue was for Sports, Green was for Gaming, Purple was for Strategy, and Red was for Action. They added Indigo for their Space games but had released Space Battle and Space Armada as Red originally, and then later as Indigo.
1982 was the largest year by Mattel Electronics. The Intellivision II came out, which shipped with Lock ‘n Chase in Canada, and later with Burger Time in the United States. They released 17 games and we got 12 of them – Lock ‘n Chase, Night Stalker, Reversi, Sharp Shot, Space Hawk, Tron: Deadly Discs, Tron: Maze-a-Tron, USCF Chess, Utopia, Bomb Squad, Space Spartans. They also released the Intellivoice module, and three of the games release were in the Cream boxes for the Intellivoice Network.
In 1982, other companies started making games for the Intellivision as well. Coleco released 3 games, and Imagic released 7. We got Carnival, and Donkey Kong.
Of the 12 games that came out in 1983, we only got two of them. Which is unfortunate as five of the games from this year do not appear on the Flashback.
We did get Vectron, and Burger Time, which are probably the worst and best games for the year. This year they also became quite scattered in their Network colors. Other companies released another 31 games of which I only got Lady Bug, and Pitfall!. Mattel Electronics also put out 6 cartridge games for the ECS expansion, which allowed you to add a keyboard, and even a musical keyboard to your system.
At the end of 1983 there was the “crash”, with a glut of unsold games pulling down the majority of the video game consoles. The Nintendo NES was released in 1985 and broadly in 1986. The Apple II line of computers was already out since 1977, and the Apple IIc was released in 1984. The Vic-20 had come out in 1980, and the Commodore 64 was released in 1982. The IBM PC Jr came out in 1984.
Then INTV got the assets for the Intellivision from Mattel Electronics and started releasing more games, mostly by mail order. They originally game in bags with just the cartridge and manual, but later were released with boxes, although only the Baseball game came with overlays. From 1985 through 1989 they released another 21 games, as well as rereleasing some of the games from other companies under their own line of boxes.
Then the line went quiet, until 2001 when a homebrew version of Tetris came out on a cartridge as 4-Tris. Since then, there have been more games release since 2000 than were released before 2000. This can make collecting the entire set a bit tricky. As well, Sears/CBS released a bunch of the Mattel Electronics games under their line with variant covers.
Because of this history, collecting the entire set is a matter of deciding what you consider a complete set. Mattel Electronics released 55 games for the system, plus another 6 for the ECS (Entertainment Computer System) keyboard expansion. There were another 41 games released by 1983 by other companies like Activision (7), Atarisoft (3), Coleco (8), Imagic (14), Interphase Technology (2), Parker Brothers (6), and Sega (1).
Dextell Ltd released 2 games in 1986. And INTV released another 21 games between 1985 and 1989. They also released some older games by other companies in INTV packaging.
This gives you a bit of a choice to what you want for a ‘complete’ collection. You can collect the original 19 games – as noted by the number on top of the boxes. You can collect the entire 55 Mattel Electronics games. You can collect some, or all, of the games by other companies. You can skip the ECS games or even the INTV games, which allows a smaller collection. Or you can go for the entire 125, or even beyond with the newer releases.
For me, I set the original Mattel 55 as a goal. With perhaps the original 19 as a secondary goal. Then I will need to re-evaluate how deep into this rabbit hole I am willing to go.
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