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Lost Intellivision game OFF THE WALL (unreleased)


Rev

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Seen this posted on the Intellivision Lives instagram page.

An old Polaroid of Off The Wall.

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From the IntellivisionLives website:

 

 

OFF THE WALL

 

INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [uNFINISHED]

 

Design: Don Daglow

Program: Michelle Mock, Judy Mason

 

GAME DESCRIPTION
Delay the evil, green monsters from scaling the walls of your building as long as possible, allowing the maximum number of people inside to escape through the roof hatch to the waiting rescue helicopter.

 

DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Don Daglow (Utopia) came up with the idea for this humorous arcade-type game in November 1981. By that time he had been promoted to Director; he had no time to do it himself and all of his programmers were on other projects, so the idea was put on hold.

 

Midway through 1982, Michelle Mock was hired and assigned to Off the Wall. She was less than enthusiastic; a Dungeons & Dragons addict, she wanted to design a fantasy role-playing game. She spent most of her time working on a proposal with fellow D&D fanatics Dan Bass (Loco-Motion) and Bill Goodrich (Quest) for a Keyboard Component-based series of cassettes that would let you use characters you created in a variety of adventures, each to be sold separately at a store near you. (New ideas for the Keyboard Component were not a high priority at this point so the proposal went nowhere.)

 

When forced back to work on Off the Wall, she developed an introduction screen that put explanatory text on the pages of an open book -- suspiciously more appropriate for a D&D-type game than for what she had been assigned.

 

When the Keyboard Component was killed late in 1982 in favor of the Entertainment Computer System (ECS), Don suggested that Off the Wall might make a good ECS game. Michelle balked at the idea; the Keyboard Component had gone nowhere, and she suspected that the ECS would suffer a similar fate. She wanted no part of developing a game for what she felt was a dead-end system.

 

At that point, Don suggested that Michelle might be happier in a different department; she transferred soon thereafter to Design & Development. Apparently, she wasn't happier; she left Mattel a short time later.

 

When Judy Mason was hired in November 1982, she briefly picked up Off the Wall, although there really wasn't much to pick up. She was quickly reassigned to King of the Mountain, a design idea Marketing was more enthusiastic about. No further work was done on Off the Wall.

Edited by Rev
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OK, let's talk game play. We all have (serious) ideas on what makes a good game on the Intellivision. How do you think it would or should play? Controls? Actions? Levels? Let's have a discussion on how this game should play or be made. The awesomeness of Christmas Carol has the Pac Man genre origins. , Sydney Hunter has roots in the Smurfs and Montezuma's Revenge, etc. I am hoping that with enough good ideas maybe there could be something new based on this game's. Inception.

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On first glance, looks like two guys holding a safety net and they'd move back and forth catching people falling from the building. Nintendo did something similar in one of those game & watch things.

That sounds similar to the Bouncing Babies for the PC (from the 1980s).

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On first glance, looks like two guys holding a safety net and they'd move back and forth catching people falling from the building. Nintendo did something similar in one of those game & watch things.

GAME DESCRIPTION

Delay the evil, green monsters from scaling the walls of your building as long as possible, allowing the maximum number of people inside to escape through the roof hatch to the waiting rescue helicopter.

 

 

The people inside escape through the roof hatch.

 

The aliens scale the outside walls.

 

Somehow you delay them. That is the action on your part. But as to how you delay the wall scaling aliens is the question.

 

And I can't tell which character on screen you would be controlling.

 

But i do not see two guys holding a safety net. The 2 aliens are standing on bottom right side, in front of their space ship.

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From the brief game description it doesn't seem like a very compelling game to me. If it was a single level in some kind of multi-level "invasion" style game then it might work. As the core of a standalone game, I can see why the assigned programmers were not very enthusiastic about it.

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...Tapper or Pooyan (1982) even. Maybe the ship moves up/down and you're blasting something toward the building to fend off the aliens that are supposedly scaling it? The description doesn't really match what you see in the screen shot though. Why would human beings be looking out the window as aliens are climbing up to get them? Should be building barricades with their office desks, book cases, dividers and other furniture near windows and doors. Or tossing typewriters, answering machines, chairs, flower pots, hot coffee, whatever down on them ala Crackpots. :lol:

Still like my idea though... those two fat but friendly looking aliens hanging out by their ship, shootin' the shit, could just as easily roll that thing over to use as a safety net for the humans about to jump out of the windows. A wild band of Reptilians are being dropped off from above, entering through the roof hatch, breaking their way into the building and terrorizing the people inside. That's why they're by the windows, willing to jump... desperately looking for a way to escape!

 

Just have to use your imagination a bit. :rolling:

 

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I kind of feel bad for Michelle. Still an interesting story, though.

Yea, what about Michelle her feelings and life story.......I wonder about that too!

 

:|

Wonder no more, for her life story is right here: http://www.imagiverse.org/team/michelle_mock.htm. Anyone want to ask if she's interested in picking up where she left off 35 years ago? :P

 

onmode-ky

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So she doesn't get swamps by Intellistalkers, who volunteers to reach out to her?

 

s

Consider it done. It would be an interesting interview for the podcast.

 

 

 

 

Sent from my Keyboard Component using Jack's Conversational Intelli-talk cassette

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