Why did Mattel Bow Out?

[tz101]

I have seen all the explanations, but have yet to understand why Mattel gave up on video games for good after INTV/Aquarius, not considering the Hyper Scan.

 

I mean Coleco and Imagic were smaller companies that received irreparable harm during "the crash", but Mattel had deeper pockets. We are talking about Mattel of Hot Wheels and Barbie fame, not Connecticut Leather Company. Look at the current VG market and Microsoft. Did they not take losses on Xbox for years in order to establish a name? But they supported it with their profitable software divisions. Could Mattel not have sustained a video gaming presence financed by Hot Wheels and Barbie?

 

Given enough time, Mattel could have perhaps challenged Nintendo and Sega for market dominance. Look at Mattel today, still going strong, and we could now be playing Intellivision 6...

[edintv]

Well, was more a corporate short of sigths, they believe that the Video game industry was dead, a bubble that grew too much and blow up.

 

And that was truth until Nintendo came and learn of the mistakes made by the others.

 

Mattel was having big losses and to hope in sight to change that (if they had developed the Intv 3, maybe the history could be different)

 

After the crash Mattel had several problems with the division, Like the Fcc penaltys About the Keyboard Component, Intellivoice didn´t perform as expected, all the cost reductions they made, Etc.

 

They started real big, Full luxury in their products and all the licensing they bought (Sports, AD&D, etc.) a 16 bit processor. They invest a lot (also win a lot) and they cut their losses and let go.

 

Also consider that in the 80's Mattel was not as big as they are right now

[caver]

Maybe... I think Mattel has and always will be less adventurous then that. My feeling is that they only do what they think is a safe bet.

 

Taking that into account and how the market treated nintendo during their start in the us it makes sense what Mattel did.... Even the hyper scan, even considering how they probably had to issue buyback cash for clearing out the hyper scans and cards, I doubt they lost much if anything on it (in the grand scheme of things)...

 

That's my 2 cents, for what it's worth.

[chrisbid]

video games were seen as a fad. as soon as mattel got hit with major losses, they pulled the plug thinking the fad had burned out.

 

but intv corp did show the way to survive the downturn, the profits were likely too small for a large company like mattel. it was for the best for them to write off their losses and sell off the rights to intv corp.

[nathanallan]

They really screwed up with the much later Hyperscan, it had a lot of potential but they let it fall flat, really in a BAD way. Very little development and from what I gathered during my interest in it, there was too much legal-ese and NDS's involved to even try to develop it.

 

As far as that one console, the people that made the main processor (SunPlus something or other) had a lot to do with the failure, they made Mattel NOT develop it because they wanted to handle it all themselves, and they also let it drop.

 

If they had only made a few 2D games for it, classic collections, it would have done much better than it did. The whole card scanner idea was neat but it was a very poor implementation of it.

 

The whole thing seemed like they were looking to get someone else to do all the work and they claim any credit. Hmm.

[schuwalker]

Was Coleco really that much smaller than Mattel? Not being a smartass just curious....

[OldAtarian]

Well, was more a corporate short of sigths, they believe that the Video game industry was dead, a bubble that grew too much and blow up.

 

And that was truth until Nintendo came and learn of the mistakes made by the others.

 

Mattel was having big losses and to hope in sight to change that (if they had developed the Intv 3, maybe the history could be different)

 

After the crash Mattel had several problems with the division, Like the Fcc penaltys About the Keyboard Component, Intellivoice didn´t perform as expected, all the cost reductions they made, Etc.

 

They started real big, Full luxury in their products and all the licensing they bought (Sports, AD&D, etc.) a 16 bit processor. They invest a lot (also win a lot) and they cut their losses and let go.

 

Also consider that in the 80's Mattel was not as big as they are right now

 

I don't see why they bothered licensing anything. It's not like they needed to, Atari didn't. They wasted a lot of money getting endorsements from the professional sport and game associations. I seriously doubt that Football would have sold fewer copies without the NFL logo on the box or Skiing without the US Ski Team logo or Chess without a USCF endorsement. They were just generic sports games, anyway. They didn't even use the names of real athletes, stadiums or anything else that would have required a license.

 

And what does the Hyperscan have to do with Mattel pulling the plug on the Intellivision and Aquarius? Hyperscan is a 2005-2006 system. Intellivision and Aquarius were long dead by then.

Edited November 21, 2010 by OldAtarian

[edintv]

Well, was more a corporate short of sigths, they believe that the Video game industry was dead, a bubble that grew too much and blow up.

 

And that was truth until Nintendo came and learn of the mistakes made by the others.

 

Mattel was having big losses and to hope in sight to change that (if they had developed the Intv 3, maybe the history could be different)

 

After the crash Mattel had several problems with the division, Like the Fcc penaltys About the Keyboard Component, Intellivoice didn´t perform as expected, all the cost reductions they made, Etc.

 

They started real big, Full luxury in their products and all the licensing they bought (Sports, AD&D, etc.) a 16 bit processor. They invest a lot (also win a lot) and they cut their losses and let go.

 

Also consider that in the 80's Mattel was not as big as they are right now

 

I don't see why they bothered licensing anything. It's not like they needed to, Atari didn't. They wasted a lot of money getting endorsements from the professional sport and game associations. I seriously doubt that Football would have sold fewer copies without the NFL logo on the box or Skiing without the US Ski Team logo or Chess without a USCF endorsement. They were just generic sports games, anyway. They didn't even use the names of real athletes, stadiums or anything else that would have required a license.

 

And what does the Hyperscan have to do with Mattel pulling the plug on the Intellivision and Aquarius? Hyperscan is a 2005-2006 system. Intellivision and Aquarius were long dead by then.

 

Well about the licensing, I only stated that they spend a lot of money on that, usefull or not, but they open the gates fort the sports games today.

 

The licensing it was the learned lesson for Nintendo, I t was the reason that Nintendo survive an was a hit. By Nintendo Standards they weren´t as crappy titles as the Coleco for Intv

 

Nintendo allow third party Companies developing for his system, sharing information on their plataforms and of course recieving money. at the result is better titles in general, is not profitable to release a bad produced title if you need to pay to Nintedo anyway.

 

If Mattel allowed third party licensing, the number of titles released for the system would be higher, Because the work of the programmers where more easy with all the information available.

[nathanallan]

@ OldAtarian, my bad, just re-read the first post, "not considering the Hyperscan." Oops.

[OldAtarian]

@ OldAtarian, my bad, just re-read the first post, "not considering the Hyperscan." Oops.

 

I realize your post said not including the Hyperscan, but a few other people were dragging that one into the thread when it had nothing to do with Mattel getting out after they stopped the Intellivision and Aquarius.

[chrisbid]

Well, was more a corporate short of sigths, they believe that the Video game industry was dead, a bubble that grew too much and blow up.

 

And that was truth until Nintendo came and learn of the mistakes made by the others.

 

Mattel was having big losses and to hope in sight to change that (if they had developed the Intv 3, maybe the history could be different)

 

After the crash Mattel had several problems with the division, Like the Fcc penaltys About the Keyboard Component, Intellivoice didn´t perform as expected, all the cost reductions they made, Etc.

 

They started real big, Full luxury in their products and all the licensing they bought (Sports, AD&D, etc.) a 16 bit processor. They invest a lot (also win a lot) and they cut their losses and let go.

 

Also consider that in the 80's Mattel was not as big as they are right now

 

I don't see why they bothered licensing anything. It's not like they needed to, Atari didn't. They wasted a lot of money getting endorsements from the professional sport and game associations. I seriously doubt that Football would have sold fewer copies without the NFL logo on the box or Skiing without the US Ski Team logo or Chess without a USCF endorsement. They were just generic sports games, anyway. They didn't even use the names of real athletes, stadiums or anything else that would have required a license.

 

And what does the Hyperscan have to do with Mattel pulling the plug on the Intellivision and Aquarius? Hyperscan is a 2005-2006 system. Intellivision and Aquarius were long dead by then.

 

Well about the licensing, I only stated that they spend a lot of money on that, usefull or not, but they open the gates fort the sports games today.

 

The licensing it was the learned lesson for Nintendo, I t was the reason that Nintendo survive an was a hit. By Nintendo Standards they weren´t as crappy titles as the Coleco for Intv

 

Nintendo allow third party Companies developing for his system, sharing information on their plataforms and of course recieving money. at the result is better titles in general, is not profitable to release a bad produced title if you need to pay to Nintedo anyway.

 

If Mattel allowed third party licensing, the number of titles released for the system would be higher, Because the work of the programmers where more easy with all the information available.

 

 

 

major league baseball was one of the top selling games on the intellivision, how much the license helped out that cause can only be speculated.

 

but being the first video game company to buy licenses... how much money was being thrown at say the USCF or US Ski Team? I can't imagine were talking about millions of dollars... too bad i didnt think of this question back at CGE

[edintv]

Well, was more a corporate short of sigths, they believe that the Video game industry was dead, a bubble that grew too much and blow up.

 

And that was truth until Nintendo came and learn of the mistakes made by the others.

 

Mattel was having big losses and to hope in sight to change that (if they had developed the Intv 3, maybe the history could be different)

 

After the crash Mattel had several problems with the division, Like the Fcc penaltys About the Keyboard Component, Intellivoice didn´t perform as expected, all the cost reductions they made, Etc.

 

They started real big, Full luxury in their products and all the licensing they bought (Sports, AD&D, etc.) a 16 bit processor. They invest a lot (also win a lot) and they cut their losses and let go.

 

Also consider that in the 80's Mattel was not as big as they are right now

 

I don't see why they bothered licensing anything. It's not like they needed to, Atari didn't. They wasted a lot of money getting endorsements from the professional sport and game associations. I seriously doubt that Football would have sold fewer copies without the NFL logo on the box or Skiing without the US Ski Team logo or Chess without a USCF endorsement. They were just generic sports games, anyway. They didn't even use the names of real athletes, stadiums or anything else that would have required a license.

 

And what does the Hyperscan have to do with Mattel pulling the plug on the Intellivision and Aquarius? Hyperscan is a 2005-2006 system. Intellivision and Aquarius were long dead by then.

 

Well about the licensing, I only stated that they spend a lot of money on that, usefull or not, but they open the gates fort the sports games today.

 

The licensing it was the learned lesson for Nintendo, I t was the reason that Nintendo survive an was a hit. By Nintendo Standards they weren´t as crappy titles as the Coleco for Intv

 

Nintendo allow third party Companies developing for his system, sharing information on their plataforms and of course recieving money. at the result is better titles in general, is not profitable to release a bad produced title if you need to pay to Nintedo anyway.

 

If Mattel allowed third party licensing, the number of titles released for the system would be higher, Because the work of the programmers where more easy with all the information available.

 

 

 

major league baseball was one of the top selling games on the intellivision, how much the license helped out that cause can only be speculated.

 

but being the first video game company to buy licenses... how much money was being thrown at say the USCF or US Ski Team? I can't imagine were talking about millions of dollars... too bad i didnt think of this question back at CGE

 

I can´t tell if licensing helps, but according to the commercials at the time (the fomous Plimpton one ), it was the most advanced Baseball game out there.

 

Helpfull of not, expensive or not, Was still additional money that Mattel paid anf the other´s don´t, They try to open Big in the market thinking out of the box.

[jaybird3rd]

Mattel's approach toward licensing seems somewhat unusual in retrospect, but perhaps the licenses opened some additional advertising opportunities for them, and I'm sure it also helped to make people more comfortable with the idea of owning a video game in the first place. Remember that the Intellivision console sold for $300 in 1980, the equivalent of about $845 in today's dollars, which would have been a major investment for people who had never bought a video game system before. I'm sure that, for people who were still on the fence about them, the fact that the Intellivision lineup was so heavy with games they were already familiar with (sports games, strategy games, etc) and that many of these games carried licenses from their professional leagues (making the brand seem more "serious" than the Atari competition) would have been enough to persuade them to take the plunge. Apparently, it worked: the sports games in particular were the ones that really sold Intellivisions in the early 80s.

 

Remember also that Mattel was a traditional toy and game company which got into video games simply because it saw a market opportunity. Mattel's staples were injection-molded plastic toys and fuzzy dolls, which are higher-profit and lower-risk than video games, and when the bottom fell out of the video game business, the company simply fell back on its core competencies. As others have pointed out, video games were mostly seen as a fad that had burned out; Nintendo realized later that that they could come back and could become an enduring market, but none of the American companies had the same long-term commitment.

 

Mattel's approach to video games was actually very conservative up until about 1982: they tested the waters with electronic games in the late 70s, and when they finally decided to pursue the Intellivision, they did it on the cheap: with the exception of a few people in senior management, most of the Mattel Electronics group (and almost all of the Blue Sky Rangers) were young kids who could be hired relatively inexpensively. An Intellivision game which sold for $25 to $40 retail probably took about six to nine months to develop, and the development budget was probably about $18K, which left Mattel with a pretty comfortable margin.

 

When the Mattel Electronics division became very profitable for them, Mattel became more aggressive, and that's when they made their biggest blunders. They botched the follow-ups to the original Intellivision, and their attempts to enter the home computer market were misguided. The new Intellivision console that should have been released (the Intellivision III, which was compatible with the original Intellivision but had higher-resolution graphics modes, integrated IntelliVoice, and extra controller ports) died of "featureitis," and the Intellivision IV was apparently little more than vaporware. Mattel was right to recognize that home computers were becoming an important market, but they needed a much stronger system than the Aquarius, which might have fared well against the Timex Sinclair 1000 in the entry-level market a year earlier but which looked badly out of date in 1983. All this expensive development, plus the erosion of the video game market in 1983, are what really hurt Mattel Electronics, and these are the factors which prompted Mattel to pull the plug on the division in 1984.

[jaybird3rd]

Was Coleco really that much smaller than Mattel? Not being a smartass just curious....

Coleco's revenues in 1983 were $510M with profits of about $45M, while Mattel's revenues were $1.13B with profits of about $39M. So, yes, Coleco was a much smaller company than Mattel.

[OldAtarian]

Promising a computer add on from day one that they couldn't deliver didn't help them, either. In retrospect, they should have kept quiet about that until they actually had product in the pipeline. They didn't even know how much it was going to cost them to produce at the time they made the announcement or if it was even feasible to do at all. If they had not been able to come up with a working computer expansion at all, they might have been bankrupted by the FTC fines.

[psquare75]

On a (IMO) related point. Mattel bought all of these license rights. Why didn't they ever use their OWN properties?

 

Hot Wheels

Barbie

[edintv]

On a (IMO) related point. Mattel bought all of these license rights. Why didn't they ever use their OWN properties?

 

Hot Wheels

Barbie

 

That is a very good question i never think about, but after the results of Kool aid man, and E.T. is was clearly a bad idea to force a character in to a game without proper development.

 

and do you think that auto racing could had make any good to the Hot Whells brand if was named that way?

[psquare75]

What's wrong with KoolAid Man? My mom got my dad that when I was little (I think it was mail in stuff from KoolAid packages? I don't recall at all, I was 3 or 4, lol) Played the hell out of it.

[edintv]

What's wrong with KoolAid Man? My mom got my dad that when I was little (I think it was mail in stuff from KoolAid packages? I don't recall at all, I was 3 or 4, lol) Played the hell out of it.

 

I really didn´t like it, and had hear from many people that agree with me, was a game made only for publicity, and that always backfires.

 

The thing is that i didn´t play that game as a kid, and if i would, my opinion would probably be different, I played and love all the Intv games.

[OldAtarian]

Well, was more a corporate short of sigths, they believe that the Video game industry was dead, a bubble that grew too much and blow up.

 

And that was truth until Nintendo came and learn of the mistakes made by the others.

 

Mattel was having big losses and to hope in sight to change that (if they had developed the Intv 3, maybe the history could be different)

 

After the crash Mattel had several problems with the division, Like the Fcc penaltys About the Keyboard Component, Intellivoice didn´t perform as expected, all the cost reductions they made, Etc.

 

They started real big, Full luxury in their products and all the licensing they bought (Sports, AD&D, etc.) a 16 bit processor. They invest a lot (also win a lot) and they cut their losses and let go.

 

Also consider that in the 80's Mattel was not as big as they are right now

 

I don't see why they bothered licensing anything. It's not like they needed to, Atari didn't. They wasted a lot of money getting endorsements from the professional sport and game associations. I seriously doubt that Football would have sold fewer copies without the NFL logo on the box or Skiing without the US Ski Team logo or Chess without a USCF endorsement. They were just generic sports games, anyway. They didn't even use the names of real athletes, stadiums or anything else that would have required a license.

 

And what does the Hyperscan have to do with Mattel pulling the plug on the Intellivision and Aquarius? Hyperscan is a 2005-2006 system. Intellivision and Aquarius were long dead by then.

 

Well about the licensing, I only stated that they spend a lot of money on that, usefull or not, but they open the gates fort the sports games today.

 

The licensing it was the learned lesson for Nintendo, I t was the reason that Nintendo survive an was a hit. By Nintendo Standards they weren´t as crappy titles as the Coleco for Intv

 

Nintendo allow third party Companies developing for his system, sharing information on their plataforms and of course recieving money. at the result is better titles in general, is not profitable to release a bad produced title if you need to pay to Nintedo anyway.

 

If Mattel allowed third party licensing, the number of titles released for the system would be higher, Because the work of the programmers where more easy with all the information available.

 

 

 

major league baseball was one of the top selling games on the intellivision, how much the license helped out that cause can only be speculated.

 

but being the first video game company to buy licenses... how much money was being thrown at say the USCF or US Ski Team? I can't imagine were talking about millions of dollars... too bad i didnt think of this question back at CGE

 

The sports games would have sold with or without the license because they were the best sports games at the time. The M-Network versions for the Atari didn't have the logos on the boxes and they still sold.

Edited November 23, 2010 by OldAtarian

[NumbThumb]

On a (IMO) related point. Mattel bought all of these license rights. Why didn't they ever use their OWN properties?

 

Hot Wheels

Barbie

 

Well, actually they did. Just not with Intellivision.

 

These titles are by Epyx for (my beloved) Commodore 64.

 

Gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb-Fs8e0iQE

 

Gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktPcoP2925Y

 

Also, Barbie and Ken DID play Intellivision...

http://www.old-computers.com/fun/default.asp?s=15

 

I suppose all of this is old news but I did not find anything (other than the comment in this thread) about it when I searched the page, and thought it was kinda fun.

 

Does anyone know if these titles were ever considered for Intellivision?

 

Perhaps some homebrewer is up for the task of producing a Barbie Intellivision game.

Just in honor of the toy without which there would have been no Intellivision at all...

Edited December 17, 2014 by NumbThumb

[Fushek]

First that I've seen it!

 

Ken and Barbie are playing Star Strike ... classic!

[+BBWW]

One word: ET

I don't see why they bothered licensing anything. It's not like they needed to, Atari didn't. \

[freewheel]

Supposedly Auto Racing was intended to be Hot Wheels, but the internal licensing didn't happen in time or something. Corporations are weird.

 

As to the original question, the answer is simple: NO ONE survived the Crash, except Atari. Because Atari was a video game company first and foremost. Everyone else was a toy company, a leather company, a Television company... Atari was really the only dedicated video gaming company so they HAD to survive. Everyone else just closed up their gaming divisions and that was that. A few microcomputer companies also survived, depending on how you view gaming.

 

It all ties into how video games were viewed as a "fad" at the time - and this view was not exactly incorrect. They went from nothing to everything almost overnight, and it was years until the average person played video games again. Hell it took the big N a solid 3 years to really bring gaming back to North America. That's a lifetime in this industry, then and now. Back in 83-84, a lot of smart people believed this stuff had no future - so why ride out the losses? Microsoft did it with the Xbox because the market was entirely different 20 years later.

[+intvsteve]

I think Activision may have pulled through, too.