The Gamer's Quarter - Issue #6 - TextFiles.com

us, “Sony won’t allow you to release a
game unless you show off the graphics.”
This means that you end up paying the
most money for the interface. After some
finagling, Sony agreed to an Intellivision
release with a 3-D interactive arcade
as the games menu. Without that, they
could have released the game dirt cheap
and made quite the profit.
But is there even a point to releasing
games on a console if you can just
download them for free and play them on
your computer? Intellivision controls this
by releasing the original ROMs from their
own website. Searching on the internet
reveals that most bootleg ROM sites will
link to the Intellivision homepage, where
you can get them free. Intellivision knows
that when you come out with products
with packaging, people want them. They
give you something to unwrap under the
Christmas tree. And Keith had found the
truth about copy protection, that you
still won’t sell those bootlegs that
people download.
Perhaps we were getting off topic. The
drinks were direly low by this point, and
the conversation was drifting off to iPods
and downloading movies. I needed to
steer the conversation back on course,
towards a topic that would score us more
drinks: “So how healthy is Intellivision
right now?”
If they can sell the Nintendo DS version
of Intellivision Lives, they’ll be extremely
healthy; nearly four hundred thousand
dollars was invested in that development
project. It is currently just about impossible
to self-publish the game. And while
they are confident that, if they got a
publisher, everyone would make money,
the publishers want to see big numbers.
Even though Intellivision knows they can
sell 150 thousand titles, the publishers
want a five-hundred-thousand seller.
So Intellivision is shifting their
demographic. In the ’80s, Mattel spent
a lot of money telling kids that the
Intellivision home console was “the
closest thing to the real thing.” Riding
the wave that Mattel Electronics started
twenty-six years ago, Intellivision is now
aiming at those kids’ kids. The direct-to-
TV game is what they hope to hit them
with. These consoles-in-controllers
include not only the old versions of the
games, but graphical overhauls of some.
They’re hoping to get these products into
the hands of 5–12 year olds.
Still, you can only repackage and
resell the same game a certain number
of times. With all the troubles that
Intellivision has gone through with
console releases in the past, they hope
now to migrate mainly to the computer
for future releases of their classics. If
games come out for next-generation
systems, they will most likely be full
remakes with new graphics and updated
gameplay. So don’t expect to see the
pixelated running man anytime soon on a
future console.
And games aren’t the only things
Intellivision is working on right now.
“The generation creating the art, media,
and music of today don’t remember a
time when videogames didn’t exist,”
says Keith. He’s decided to support that
generation with Intellivision Music, which
has signed the artist 8-Bit Weapon.
On top of that, Intellivision Gear has
been created to jump on the boat of
retro-gaming apparel.
Gradually, we noticed the music
getting quieter and people trying to
bid Keith farewell. The conversation
had been long and so had the day. My
shoulders hurt from carrying around my
laptop, and my eyes were beginning to
close from alcohol. We still had two blue
tickets left to redeem for free drinks.
Packing up our things, we thanked
Keith Robinson for his time only to find
out that it was too late: the bar had
already closed.
1 “Vibration in Astro Smash is evil!” Courtesy of the Intellivision 100, the hardest of hardcore
Intellivision fanclubs.
64 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #6
Drinks Are on Keith
65