Blue Sky Rangers Stephen Roney and Steve Ettinger celebrate birthdays this week - Mr. Roney on the 4th and Mr. Ettinger on the 5th.
Stephen Roney started at Mattel Electronics in 1981 and was involved in several landmark games: he and Bill Fisher developed Space Spartans, the first game for the Intellivoice speech module, then he and Bill joined John Sohl in developing the voice game B-17 Bomber. He ported the game Utopia to the Aquarius Computer and worked on several unreleased games, including Space Shuttle and translations of Space Spartans into Italian, German and French.
(Video and audio clips of Space Shuttle and the foreign voice games are included in the museum section of Intellivision Rocks for Windows and Mac, available exclusively in our web store.)
In 1997 with fellow Blue Sky Ranger Keith Robinson, he founded Intellivision Productions, Inc. He wrote the Macintosh emulation software for Intellivision used in their first Intellivision Lives! release. That software, written in transportable C code, has been the basis for the Windows, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube and cell phone versions of the Intellivision emulator.
Steve Ettinger joined Mattel Electronics in 1982, where he had some bad luck with his games. His first project was Magic Carousel, a children's game for the Intellivoice module. After the game was finished, Mattel decided there wasn't a big enough market for a kids' voice game and killed it. His next was Hover Force 3-D, planned to be the first game using a new 3-D glasses technology. The game received a high-profile launch at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Two weeks later, Mattel shut down Intellivision production.
Hover Force was eventually released in 1986 as a non-3-D game by INTV Corporation.Magic Carousel had to wait until 2001 to see the light of day in the Intellivision Rocks collection for Windows and Mac.
Steve had better luck creating new games for INTV Corp. from 1987 to 1989. In addition to Hover Force, INTV published his games Body Slam: Super Pro Wrestling, Chip Shot: Super Pro Golf, Slam Dunk: Super Pro Basketball and Spiker! Super Pro Volleyball. All five are included in the Intellivision Lives! collections for Windows/Mac and for PlayStation 2/3 available in our web store.
Both Steves are on view in this home video shot by the programmers at Mattel in 1983; Steve Ettinger as himself and Steve Roney as 60 Minutes commentator "Andy Roney.":
The question I'm asked most frequently is "When is the DS version coming out?" Excellent question. It has been over three years since we first showed Intellivision Lives! for DS at the 2005 E3. Dozens of publishers have evaluated the product, and all have passed. The problem isn't the quality of the collection itself; we've received nothing but enthusiastic feedback. The problem is the bean counters for these publishers. In August, one company told us in an e-mail, "We intend to publish this game..." In September, they reversed themselves because "...the projected return did not justify the capital expenditure..." My frustration is that we have to find a licensed Nintendo publisher to get the DS version released; Nintendo does not have a path that would allow us to distribute Intellivision Lives! ourselves directly to the public.
That is changing soon. Nintendo is planning on releasing the successor to the DS, the DSi, in Spring 2009. The DSi will be able to upload complete games - including Intellivision Lives! - through a service similar to Wii Ware and Xbox Live Marketplace (which now carries our Xbox version). We are still trying to find a publisher for the current DS, but I am excited that even if that doesn't happen, you will all finally be able to play the DS version with the DSi.
Nintendo hasn't yet released details of how publishing to the DSi is going to work, so none of this is official; that's why I'm talking about it here in a blog instead of in the News column. But we have opened communication with Nintendo and I hope we can make an official announcement soon. Thanks for your patience; it looks like in 2009 it will be Springtime for Intellivision!
I'd like to thank all of the Intellivision fans who stopped by the National Cartoonists Society booth at Comic-Con to say Hello! It's always great to meet those of you who grew up with Intellivision and to hear the stories of playing the games under the Christmas tree with your brother or sister of dad, even if it does make me feel about 120 years old.
Earlier today, Tuesday, June 10, we posted a birthday greeting to Blue Sky Ranger John Sohl. John sent us an e-mail this afternoon thanking us for the birthday wishes and, by the way, pointing out that his birthday is actually June 20. Whoops. We've taken down the item and deleted the RSS link. They'll be back on the 20th.
I'm very sorry for the error. Luckily mistakes like this are extremely, extremely rare. Well, except for when we got Mike Minkoff's birthday wrong in the Intellivision Update e-mail last week. His birthday is May 30, not 15.
John says he is particularly looking forward to his birthday this year, as he'll be eligible for the 55+ meals at Denny's! Congrats, John (10 days early)!
Those of you who used to receive the Intellivision Newsletter should have received an “Intellivision Update” last weekend. (If not, please check your Spam folder and add us to your address book.)
If you want to sign up for the Updates, here's the form:
But, many of you have asked, Whatever happened to the Intellivision Newsletters? Here's the scoop...
Comments
Written by Jason Baron on 2008-07-09 13:14:20A forum would be cool, like what they have over at Atari Age. I finally beat that devil/dungeon level on Thunder Castle after all these years, and have nowhere to brag about it! ;-)
Written by George Gray on 2008-07-04 10:05:07I like the newsletters. I don't visit the site that often as I had relied on the newsletter...if something was interesting in the newsletter, I went to the site. For quite awhile, I did not get anything from them and the site had not been updated...I thought they had finally bit the dust. Glad they are still around.
Written by Keith Robinson, Intellivision on 2008-06-24 09:56:37Don't blame Josh for the plug-and-plays. The decision was based on the current technology vs. cost and selling price. While the games aren't identical, the overwhelming feedback from the nearly 4 million people who own them has been positive. Kids love them and are being introduced to Intellivision. And the income is letting us move forward with projects that we hope will make even the biggest Intellivision fans happy.
Written by Lucy V. on 2008-06-23 21:53:28Josh should be replaced if he is the one who decided that the plug and play game shouldn't resemble accurately (or be a similar reboot) the original controllers, and that the games shouldn't be the original roms.
Written by Russell Penner on 2008-06-13 19:30:48Please go back to the older style newsletters with the trivia questions, thanks!
Written by Keith Robinson on 2008-06-06 07:32:18In response to Chris below, when Microsoft pulled the plug they DID let us export the address list, so everyone who used to get the newsletter should be getting the updates. However, the stats show us that only around 35% of the people who are receiving the update e-mails are opening them. We assume the rest are mostly getting lost in spam filters. So if you have any friends who are Intellivision fans, please tell them we are regularly updating the news on the web site!
Written by Joshua on 2008-06-06 07:07:37Hey, if the geriatric nostalgia crowd still wants the long-form newsletters, then Keith has every right to keep putting them out.
But, I will have you know that it takes Keith something like 5 months just to put one out, and if you haven't noticed, my advice of short bytes of news has spurred Keith to do constant active updates to the site on almost a daily basis.
So you tell me what's better: 1.) News every 5 months or 2.) Daily updates? (Because it's common knowledge Keith can't do both.)
Also, if you actually read Keith's post, none of the bells and whistles are going away, they are just being repackaged into something a little less dusty.
Written by Chris on 2008-06-06 05:40:03I can't believe Bill Gates would pull the plug and not let you export the list of email addresses? Oh wait, they are Microsoft, they can do anything they want! Anyway, keep up the good work! And I also like the old newsletters better.
Written by Shawn on 2008-06-06 02:14:30I must say that I must not have changed with the times; I still believe in typing full sentences, discourage top quoting, and can handle a paragraph at a time; I don't need to be spoonfed pablum to keep my short attention span on target.
Josh needs to cut down on the boozing: You're not trying to appeal to the twitter crowd. They lost their concentration before realizing the cartridge has to be placed into the slot.
Written by Jason Spero on 2008-06-05 22:57:51I like the old newsletters too. Josh is an yuppie idiot who sounds like an jump on a bandwagon kind of guy, just because all of the other idiots are doing it dose not mean that you have too, please send josh to man the astrosmash gun.
Written by Mark Buchholz on 2008-05-17 18:58:07Yes, I'm a dinosaur and PROUD of it! :)
Age 39 and had Intellivision back in my early teens. Glad I picked it over the lame 2600. LOL
~~MARK~~
Those of you who used to receive the Intellivision Newsletter should have received an “Intellivision Update” last weekend. (If not, please check your Spam folder and add us to your address book.)
If you want to sign up for the Updates, here's the form:
But, many of you have asked, Whatever happened to the Intellivision Newsletters? Here's the scoop...
Comments
Written by Rick Luce on 2008-05-17 18:40:13Yeah, I miss the old-style "long and wordy" newsletters. Then again, I'm a dinosaur who doesn't have a MySpace account, so I'm one of the 8,500 subscribers who didn't make that switch. Bring back the old newsletters, please! (And tell Josh he's been demoted from "marketing guru" to "marketing newbie"--he'll hate that...)
Stephen Roney started at Mattel Electronics in 1981 and was involved in several landmark games: he and Bill Fisher developed Space Spartans, the first game for the Intellivoice speech module, then he and Bill joined John Sohl in developing the voice game B-17 Bomber. He ported the game Utopia to the Aquarius Computer and worked on several unreleased games, including Space Shuttle and translations of Space Spartans into Italian, German and French.
Steve Ettinger joined Mattel Electronics in 1982, where he had some bad luck with his games. His first project was Magic Carousel, a children's game for the Intellivoice module. After the game was finished, Mattel decided there wasn't a big enough market for a kids' voice game and killed it. His next was Hover Force 3-D, planned to be the first game using a new 3-D glasses technology. The game received a high-profile launch at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Two weeks later, Mattel shut down Intellivision production.
