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Intellivision IV

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Intellivision IV

Unread postby icycalm » 31 Jan 2009 03:26

We were working on secret next-gen hardware -- what was going to end up being called Intellivision IV -- that was an Amiga-like machine that I had a team secretly working on in '83, but the press and the retailers swarmed.

The mainstream press started writing articles saying, "Oh, the fad's over. It's like the hula-hoop. Video games came and went. What's the next big fad for kids?" And the retailers reached the same conclusion in the toy business -- fads really do come and go. So they reached the same conclusion and they just stopped ordering product.

BS: I have a lot of questions based on that.

DD: No worries. Whatever is interesting.

BS: Intellivision IV -- tell me more about it.

DD: Yeah, and the fact is now we can. The NDAs were long ago. It was an Amiga-like machine. I don't actually remember all the numbers on it and stuff, but it had multiple bit planes, so we could do a lot of things -- whereas an Intellivision was basically tile-based -- and our resolution was something like 96 scanlines high and 128 pixels wide. It was something like that. I'm not getting it exactly, but it's in the ballpark. It was, by today's standards, hopelessly blocky. Much higher resolution... dammit, I don't remember what it was. Did we have 64 colors? Twenty-eight colors? I don't remember how many colors we had.

FC: What kind of range for the resolution? Are we talking like...

DD: Basically, it was Amiga-like. I remember I had, like, Amiga serial number eight on my desk at EA. It literally had a wooden frame for the keyboard. Everything was just breadboarded inside, because it was such an early one, because Trip had made such a strong commitment to support the Amiga -- this was before the Commodore acquisition -- that we just got everything early and absolutely first, because Trip had gone so all-out.

There were these full-page magazine ads of Trip saying, "EA believes in the Amiga, and we're going to support this box very early on." So we got the first of everything. I remember playing with the machine and going, "My god, this is Intellivision IV." With some advances, but so much of it was heading where we were with Intellivision IV.

FC: So this was after the completion? After you left Intellivision, right?

DD: Yeah. The Amiga... when did we get our Amigas? I'd have to go back and look. That would have to be around '85, probably. Right at the very beginning, when EA first committed to it.

BS: Did Intellivision IV get to the prototype phase?

DD: Yeah, we had prototypes. I did a write-up where I think I proposed six initial games to be the launch titles. I was kind of surprised, because they took the exact list of six that I pitched. There's a certain logic to that, because you're trying to get a variety of games. Sports games were center for us, so there was a baseball game there. In fact, the baseball game that was there was a lot like what ended up being Earl Weaver Baseball.

We absolutely had to have coin-op arcade-style games, so we had to have something like that in there. We had six games, and we'd probably gotten to where we were working on four of them by that point. By then, though, we'd already started to have layoffs, because of the slowdown. We went from having always like two or three open racks -- we never, ever filled every rack.

There was a guy we've always joked about who was fresh out of school named Eric Delcesta. Eric got hired in, I think, March of '83, and two weeks later, we lost all of our racks. There were no open racks -- "Just stand still where you are." About another week after that, we were told, "No, you have to go out and cut eight or twelve people." So everybody looked at Eric and said, "Eric, you are the luckiest man in the world, because you're the guy who got in." In fact, I don't think Eric actually had his college degree then. I think he was just a really bright programmer. So it really swung from, "Grow grow grow, build build build," to, "Hold still. No, cut cut cut!" very, very quickly.

BS: What did the hardware look like? Did it still have a disc on the controller?

DD: On Intellivision IV? In fact, did they ever actually get to where there was a physical prototype? We were using mockups of the capability, but I don't remember exactly how we were doing...

BS: If you designed the games, there must have been some interface idea at least, right?

DD: God, I haven't thought about this in so long. I have to dredge it out of my brain, because it got cut off. It was when we did the second wave of layoffs. The program was canceled, and that was the end of that.

Part of it was that I had been defending the disc for years, and iPod has now defended that for itself. But Mattel had... god knows the disc was not perfect, but it was a different sort of interface than what everyone else was doing. There was a feel you could get with the disc that you could not get with a joystick.

Mattel had a lot of internal politics in hardware, so there were rival groups pushing different things, and that's part of what happened to Intellivision IV when it was shut down -- a much lower-cost keyboard device was substituted, and to be blunt now, it was shoddy and cheap.

Everything about it was cost-reduced. It was their desperate attempt to get something that... the personal computer was becoming a big deal, and we were a video game, and we wanted to make ourselves look like a personal computer, so this is what it was. But instead of being the elegant system they had been trying to build since 1980, it was just thrown together.

And then after the layoff, all the people who were working on it who were on the separate rival team got signed over into my team, so I was thinking, "Oh god, I've got these demoralized people who have come off this other thing. It's a terrible piece of hardware. It isn't these peoples' fault. It was the political fighting that produced this cheap piece of hardware. It's not their fault. What do we do so that this team can feel good?"

So we had codenames for everything, because industrial espionage happens a lot in the toy business. So I gave it the codename "LUCKI" for, "Low User Cost Keyboard Interface." I was just trying to find something to be upbeat about in the middle, because every day you came to work, you got bad news, because the industry was just dying out there.

Of course, LUCKI was unlucky, because it wasn't a very good system, and even if it were a great system, it probably wouldn't have turned the tide anyway. It was too late. It was just a really depressing time for everybody.


http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=22021

I am finding a lot of interesting stuff in this interview. Nice work, Brandon!
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icycalm
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