The Video Games Live concert has been performed all over the world. Now, by popular demand, the first of a planned four CDs has been released. Conductor Jack Wall leads the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra and Crouch End Festival Chorus through many of the most popular video game themes of all time. Video Games Live Volume One includes music from Kingdom Hearts, World of Warcraft, Myst, Medal of Honor, Civilization IV, Tetris, God of War, Advent Rising, Halo and Castlevania. Of course, we here at Intellivision have a soft spot for the TRON montage.
Here is a video clip of the TRON scherzo from the Video Games Live concert, performed in Los Angeles last year:
Order Video Games Live Volume One from Amazon.com now by clicking the link at left.
Blue Sky Ranger and Intellivision Productions President Keith Robinson has been honored to be invited three times to attend Video Games Live and sign autographs for the fans. See Keith's photos and read his blogs about the concerts here:
Intellivision Lives!, our collection of over 60 classic Intellivision games, is available for downloading now for Xbox 360! Yes, it's nostalgic; yes, it's a lesson in gaming history; but mostly it's fun! Night Stalker, Astrosmash, Snafu, Sea Battle, Shark! Shark! B-17 Bomber... these games may have blocky graphics, but they have first-rate, quick, casual game play! They're games you'll play over and over!
Originally published by Crave Entertainment for the Xbox console, Microsoft Corporation has selected Intellivision Lives! to be one of the titles available through Xbox Originals on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Xbox Originals lets you find, buy and download games from the original Xbox console for play on Xbox 360. All titles, including the Intellivision Lives! collection, are priced at $15. More information is on the Xbox web site [link].
"I'm very happy they chose to include us," says Keith Robinson, president of Intellivision Productions, Inc. and one of the original Intellivision programmers. "The Crave release went out of print at the end of 2007 because retailers won't carry titles anymore for the original Xbox console, but the Intellivision games are perennials. It's great to see it back now on Xbox 360. Intellivison Lives! lives!"
This is a complete download of the original Crave Entertainment release with all of its features:
60+ games (emulated for the exact look, sound and feel of the classic games)
on-screen instructions
production histories and credits
original box art
extreme gaming modes
saving of high scores and vibration feedback (on selected games)
Intellivision-inspired background music
classic TV commercials
unreleased games
video interviews with the programmers
developed by Realtime Associates, headed by Blue Sky Ranger David Warhol, based on emulation software by BSR Stephen Roney!
This video was produced by Crave Entertainment when they first announced Intellivision Lives! for Xbox and PlayStation 2:
Blue Sky Ranger Ron Surratt celebrates his birthday September 15. Ron's first project at Mattel Electronics in 1981 was programming the system software for the Intellivision Intellivoice module. After that, he was put in charge of the in-house production of M Network Atari 2600 cartridges: mostly ports of Intellivision titles to the Atari 2600 console.
In 1983, top priority for Mattel's marketing department was a 2600-version of the Intellivision hit BurgerTime. After careful analysis of the original, Ron declared that a 2600 version was impossible. Marketing asked what additional programming resources would be required. None, Ron replied, it can't be done. What hardware modifications needed to be made to the cartridge? You're not getting it, Ron said, it can't be done. No, Marketing came back, you're not getting it: BurgerTimewill be released for the 2600. Ron set about programming the game.
The difficulty lay in that the game was not allowed to flicker. A hardware restriction of the Atari 2600 was that when too many moving characters - sprites - were in a row on-screen, they began to flicker. In the first M Network games in 1982, sprite movement was carefully choreographed to minimize this flicker - far better than Atari had done in their own original releases. Marketing had jumped on this, pointing to the lack of flicker as proof of Mattel's superiority. Of course, this meant that all new games had to meet the standard of the early ones: no - or very little - flicker.
Unfortunately, the highest scoring move in BurgerTime, dropping all of the bad guys at one time, requires that they all be in a row. So how could he keep a row of sprites from flickering? Ron used something of a cheat: a regular sprite's look is defined by the programmer, but there is also a special sprite - a missile - defined by the hardware. A missile is simply a rectangle intended, as its name implies, to be used as the graphic for a projectile. The programmer cannot change its shape, only its color and width. Despite its graphical limitations, missiles do have one advantage: they don't flicker when in a row with other sprites. So Ron made a square missile orange and called it a slice of cheese, made another square white and called it an egg, and made a thin missile brown and called it a bread stick. Voila: no flickering.
Some fans of BurgerTime were disappointed to find that the chef was being chased around the maze by colored squares and sticks, but most were happy that the gameplay was quite faithful to the Intellivision version.
Blue Sky Ranger Keith Robinson celebrates his birthday September 9. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Keith worked on special effects for movies and television shows, including Masada, Little House on the Prairie, History of the World Part One and the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. A meeting at Information International, Inc., where they were creating effects for the movie TRON, led Keith to Mattel Electronics, which was looking for someone to program TRON Solar Sailer, an Intellivoice game based on the movie. Keith took the job and was soon managing the development of other Intellivision games, including Shark! Shark!, Thin Ice and Hover Force.
In 1997, two years after creating a web site on the history of Intellivision, Keith founded Intellivision Productions, Inc. with fellow Blue Sky Ranger Stephen Roney. Intellivision Productions purchased the rights to the Intellivision system and started releasing collections of the original games for modern platforms.
Since 1985, Keith has written and drawn the newspaper comic strip Making It: A Survival Guide for Today, which is posted weekly on the Making It web site.
In this interview from 1999, Keith talks about the formation of Intellivision Productions and bringing the games to a new generation of players:
Hollywood spends millions of dollars to bring hit video games - Doom, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil - to movie screens. But what about the Intellivision favorite BurgerTime? Well, a while ago at Anime Central 2005, a few friends spent pennies on painted cardboard, grabbed a camcorder and, to the surprise of the other Expo attendees, shot BurgerTime - The Movie. OK, we're not sure if it's a movie, performance art, or just plain stupid, but it made us smile. Here it is:
Space Battle was intended to be the official Battlestar Gallactica game. When Mattel failed to get the license to the TV show, the game was simply released with a different name. The enemy ships still look like Cylon fighters from the original show.
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.
Here's a slideshow of photos from the booth... Write Comment
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...
The Video Games Live concert has been performed all over the world. Now, by popular demand, the first of a planned four CDs has been released. Conductor Jack Wall leads the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra and Crouch End Festival Chorus through many of the most popular video game themes of all time. Video Games Live Volume One includes music from Kingdom Hearts, World of Warcraft, Myst, Medal of Honor, Civilization IV, Tetris, God of War, Advent Rising, Halo and Castlevania. Of course, we here at Intellivision have a soft spot for the TRON montage.
Intellivision Lives!, our collection of over 60 classic Intellivision games, is available for downloading now for Xbox 360! Yes, it's nostalgic; yes, it's a lesson in gaming history; but mostly it's fun! Night Stalker, Astrosmash, Snafu, Sea Battle, Shark! Shark! B-17 Bomber... these games may have blocky graphics, but they have first-rate, quick, casual game play! They're games you'll play over and over!
Blue Sky Ranger Ron Surratt celebrates his birthday September 15. Ron's first project at Mattel Electronics in 1981 was programming the system software for the Intellivision Intellivoice module. After that, he was put in charge of the in-house production of M Network Atari 2600 cartridges: mostly ports of Intellivision titles to the Atari 2600 console.
Blue Sky Ranger Keith Robinson celebrates his birthday September 9. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Keith worked on special effects for movies and television shows, including Masada, Little House on the Prairie, History of the World Part One and the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. A meeting at Information International, Inc., where they were creating effects for the movie TRON, led Keith to Mattel Electronics, which was looking for someone to program TRON Solar Sailer, an Intellivoice game based on the movie. Keith took the job and was soon managing the development of other Intellivision games, including Shark! Shark!, Thin Ice and Hover Force.