Major League Baseball, Checkers, NBA Basketball, NFL Football: Intellivision Archive 2

In this second installment of Intellivision Archive, we explore the second tranche of test-market releases that appear to have been released around February 1980. This includes another board game conversion and three of the first titles in Mattel's much-lauded Intellivision sports lineup. All of these were among the earliest games programmed for the system, and the sports games would go on to all be major sellers for Mattel and its fledging game platform over the subsequent years.
Sources:
Intellivisionaries Podcast, Episodes 7, 8 and 18
Merchandising, June 1980
Scott Stilphen's interview with David Rolfe, Ataricompendium.com
Blueskyrangers.com
Electronic Games, July 1982 and October 1982
Video, August 1980
Video Games, October 1982
They Create Worlds: Volume 1, by Alex Smith
Weekly Television Digest, Nov. 10, 1980

[@GMax17]

It's so awesome you talked about this Baseball game. I have a tear in my eye, this brings back memories.

[@ShmebulockYT]

Kevin's back! And he brought a mantra that still holds true today, "Licensed sports games sells."

[@sandal_thong8631]

But did it really? They paid for the license and put out good games that helped sell the console (with the anti-Atari ads), but did "MLB" or "NFL" or "NBA" really sell more carts? I didn't see an option to set team colors.

[@intvprime]

This is another great effort! Shout-out The Intellivisionaries Podcast as well as one of your sources. Thank you for putting this together.

[@4stringz.]

Baseball and Hockey were my fave INTV titles

[@absolutezeronow7928]

All the Intellivision games in this episode look good. Checkers perhaps the weakest link since it is a board game, but it's a very good board game adaptation it seems. Major League Baseball looks fairly good when compared with the later SG-1000 Champion Baseball and NES Baseball.

[@AtariArchive]

It took a little bit of time to get the hang of fielding the ball to where you want it to go, but it really works well once you have the buttons figured out in your brain!

[@sandal_thong8631]

M-Network's Super Challenge Baseball was one of their two games I bought new on the Atari. Finding an opponent who could learn the controls for batting and fielding well was the "super challenge." But like the Intellivision version, it doesn't have a one-player option. Very disappointing considering that by 1981 consoles had largely changed from 2-player machines in the 1970s to machines for 1-player games.

[@marccaselle8108]

Great video on some terrific intellivision games. 🙂

[@stephencianci2026]

To notch Awesome video! thank you for you great coverage of Intellivision. Not enough people are talking about this system!

[@SteveMacSticky]

This game impressed me back in the day

[@Phediuk]

Excellent job once again. Really valuable archival work you're doing here.

[@marvdaniels5603]

Spectacular work, Mr. Bunch!

[@3vi1J]

Great video, as usual. Thanks.

[@edzelmejia3233]

My baseball cards are worth a fortune in gold now. Thanks!

[@drakesavory2019]

The worst part was that these were all two person games.

[@sandal_thong8631]

If there was a problem with not being able to program 1-player AI for Intellivision, why couldn't they do it for Atari M-Network releases? RealSports versions did it, although they were so buggy, they published "strategies" you could use to take advantage and win more often.

[@mavrick45]

Baseball rocked

[@decle]

Very interesting thanks! Could you tell me where you discovered the tidbit that the Checkers ROM variation was down to a RAM bug?

[@decle]

Ahh, ignore me, found it 👍