Las Vegas Roulette, PGA Golf, Tennis, Skiing: Intellivision Archive Episode 5

[@TheHylianBatman]

It's really cool to see the contrast between the Atari and the Intellivision on this channel!

[@jacobmoss1235]

Stellar work as always, just recently got the Atari Archive Vol 1 book and loving it all!!

[@winstonslone2797]

Day after my birthday but I'm celebrating today. This is one of my favorite channels

[@Phediuk]

Another great episode; this is the most informative video ever made on any of these games by a mile.

[@anactualmotherbear]

Another great episode from this subseries!

[@techsaverscomputerrepairca2127]

The name Walter Bright made my ears perk up. He was the designer of the old mainframe game Empire: Wargame of the Century in 1977. He credits 3 other people, two of which worked at Mattel as well (Mark Stroberg and David Rolfe), Sid Meier credits Empire as a major influence for Civilization. He also created the D programming language, several C++ compilers, did software work on the Boeing 757, plus several other games. The guy is amazing and is still at it. Wow.

[@vidarlystadjohansen9829]

excellent episode

[@billkendrick1]

Tempted to try and write a sophisticated skiing game on the Atari 8-bit, with Sega Genesis controller support so one button could be used for tighter turns. (Also makes me want to go play some Twisted Metal)

[@absolutezeronow7928]

Well. Mattel finishes 1980 well enough, although a few of the sports games get overshadowed by Activision. Interestingly enough, this video was posted the same day as a debate in which Presidential candidates are arguing about their golf games. Anyway, PGA Golf is still a winner.

[@christophercook5300]

I believe the original odyssey had a roulette game.

[@sandal_thong]

I watched a channel's series on Odyssey² games and they only had Blackjack and Slot Machine. Wikipedia says they had a Pachinko, but no sign of roulette. Ah, but you're right. Wikipedia says the first Odyssey is said to have had a Roulette game!

[@sandal_thong]

Sports games were supposed to be the thing for Intellivision, or at least its first ad campaign made it seem so. So it's surprising that they didn't have one-player options! I used to be really envious, but seeing some of the games for Intellivision, I know now that I had a better entertainment experience with the Atari VCS/2600. It was odd though that they thought licensing was the key to making their sports games more popular. How many more sales do they think they made by calling it "U.S. Ski Team Skiing" than just "Skiing?" I still wonder though if Mattel had realized they could sell versions of their games for the Atari in 1981 they could have beaten the game glut of 1982 and M-Network might have had some best-sellers? Also, what if Mattel had licensed the must-have game Space Invaders for their systems launch, like Coleco would do for Donkey Kong? Maybe their system would have sold and Atari would have rushed out a better system sooner? Finally, some of these winter sports don't look too exciting. But I remember trying to play Winter Olympics on some system (PC?). I think you have to do multiple events and while each event isn't that great, trying to master them all was the challenge!

[@MattMcIrvin]

The idea that video games *had* to be something you could play solo was surprisingly long in coming. Pong was a huge hit and it originally had no single-player option, so in the 1970s there was an idea that people primarily wanted video games to be a social activity--especially if they were sports-themed. And game AI could be a difficult thing to implement in the early days. While obviously single-player games had already existed, and pinball machines had worked this way all along, I think it was really the craze for Space Invaders that cemented the idea that the norm for video games was the pinball model, in which you're playing solo against the machine with a finite number of "lives" and the two-player game is players taking turns. But there was this period in the late 70s-early 80s when if a game was set in space, it'd be a fundamentally single-player shooter, but if it was about sports, it might be two-player only.

[@sandal_thong]

@@MattMcIrvin Yes, I'd agree with that, and it's probably why so many people remember Combat fondly, though no one in my neighborhood with an Atari wanted to challenge others on it in 1981-3. Indy 500 was probably their best game from 1977, which had a solo timed mode and a two-player mode that was still fun when I got it in 1981. I also had Space War, a two player game that also had a starbase-chase mode for one player, as well as Surround, that's like the light-cycle mode in Tron with both one and two player versions. Home Run (1978) and Football (1979) were terrible; Odyssey² with a one-button joystick had better versions in 1978, though pretty much every other game on that system was inferior to Atari. I said a couple years ago it would be interesting to see a channel by some brothers or best friends who played the two-player games as kids reviewing these games since it's a different dynamic. Not fun to watch people playing these games for the first time, since there's a learning curve. By 1982, the "Super Challenge" in M-Network's Super-Challenge Baseball (and Football) was trying to find an opponent willing to learn the controls to play well! Armor Ambush was a two-player port from Intellivision that looks like half of what should have been Combat II. But same thing: finding a worthy opponent in 1982-3 was a challenge.

[@Heike--]

Poker & Blackjack had to be the most boring pack-in title ever. Atari got Combat, which was fun. Intellivision kids got a boring adult game. And how is gambling fun without real money on the line?