Intellivision (Cartridge)
Who remembers this one? I’m counting down game formats to celebrate Mario’s 40th anniversary. Let’s take a trip back to the early ‘80s with the Intellivision.
Released in 1979 by Mattel, the Intellivision was designed to compete with Atari’s dominance in the home console market. It had better tech specs than the Atari 2600, better colour depth and a wider range of sounds thanks to its custom graphics and sound chips.
It marketed itself as a more “sophisticated” alternative. However, it also had a smaller library of games, a complex numeric keypad controller, and was tougher for developers to work with.
Games were released on carts referred to as “game modules” by Mattel, and held up to 8KB of data. Despite being advanced for its time, the system had no built-in storage or save feature, meaning players lost all progress when they powered off. That’s hard to imagine today!
The Intellivision was one of the first to feature Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., courtesy of Coleco, marking some of Mario’s earliest cross-platform appearances. At this point, Mario was still known as “Jumpman” from the Donkey Kong arcade game.
Though these were some of Mario’s first home console appearances, the ports were far from arcade-perfect. Despite the Intellivision’s superior tech specs, the graphics were simplified and sound quality also suffered despite the system’s higher-end sound chip.
Some conspiracy theorists even speculated that Coleco intentionally created subpar ports for rival systems like the Intellivision, to make their own ColecoVision version look superior. While Coleco denied these claims, the difference in quality was obvious to many.
The Intellivision played a small but notable part in Mario’s early evolution and cross-platform appearances. While it wasn’t home to Mario Bros., these early ports of Donkey Kong set the stage for Mario’s multi-platform journey – well before he became a household name.
And as for the console itself, it’s often considered underrated in early video game console history. While it didn’t achieve the same level of success as the Atari 2600, it pushed boundaries in terms of its tech, but also lacked backwards compatibility and had niche appeal.
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