Intellivision Is Back, And You Won’t Believe Who’s Making It

Sorry for that clickbait-y headline. We’re normally above such things here, but it really is kinda hard to believe if you know a thing or two about gaming history. A new plug-and-play console is in the works for this holiday shopping season, and for the first time, it’s based on the Intellivision. Normally it’s the Atari 2600 and its similarly numbered cousins who get late 70s-early 80s recreations. Intellivision rarely receives a turn in the sun, so who made it happen? ….Believe it or not, Atari.

Atari and Intellivision were the video game market’s first rivalry. The 2600 arrived first, but the INTV, originally brought to market by Mattel, showed up three years later with improved graphics (though not THAT improved to the modern eye) and a ruthless marketing campaign where personallity George Plimpton directly trashed his competition in head-to-head comparisons. Intellivision never really overtook Atari in market share, but did well enough to be a threat.

Atari as we know it collapsed in the 1990s, and the brand has drifted from company to company since. Intellivision suffered a similar fate, though there was the wild twist of the brand being used to promote what may have been a scam, the Wii-like family console that would’ve been known as Intellivision Amico. The project collapsed after it was revealed to be little more than smoke and mirrors. The company that now owns the Atari brand was able to acquire the Intellivision brand in May of last year. The two former rivals are now one!

And now Atari will manufacture what they call the Intellivision Sprint, on the occasion of the console’s 45th birthday. The device will look exactly the same, with a wireless version of the baffling “phone and disc” controller from back in the day when people were still trying to figure out what a controller should be.

‘The interesting thing here is that shortly before its collapse, the Amico project sold the rights to the INTV’s two most popular games, Astrosmash and Shark! Shark!…yet Atari seems to have gained the rights to those games back as well. They are part of the 45-title built-in library the new Intellivision plug-and-play will boast, along with Star Strike, Thin Ice, Boulder Dash, Baseball, Chip Shot Super Pro Golf, Soccer, Super Pro Skiing, Tennis, Super Pro Football, B-17 Bomber, Sea Battle, Space Battle, Utopia and many others.

The Intellivision Sprint is available for preorder starting today.