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Mattel Intellivision fans, do you care what happens to the Amico?


Rev

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3 hours ago, Zendocon said:

...

 

Console multiplayer gaming means having three friends over for some beer and Goldeneye with an order of pizza on the way.  PC multiplayer gaming means sweaty adolescents with handles like AssMastar666 sitting in dark, dank basements, bitching about ping times.

 

...

 

Ok, I enjoyed and lol'ed at the "AssMastar666" part.

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14 hours ago, Rev said:

 

 

There was a chip shortage:

 

 

The Intellivision was introduced at the 1979 Las Vegas CES in January as a modular home computer with the Master Component priced at US$165 and a soon-to-follow Keyboard Component also at $165 (equivalent to $590 in 2020).[21] At Chicago CES in June, prices were revised to $250 for each component. A shortage of key chips from manufacturer General Instrument resulted in a limited number of Intellivision Master Components produced that year. In Fall 1979, Sylvania marketed its own branded Intellivision at $280 in its GTE stores at Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.[2] On December 3, Mattel delivered consoles to the Gottschalks department store chain headquartered in Fresno, California with a suggested list price of $275.[15][22] The Intellivision was also listed in the nationally distributed JCPenney Christmas 1979 catalog along with seven cartridges.[23] It was in stores nationwide by mid-1980 with the pack-in game Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack, and a library of ten cartridges. Mattel Electronics became a subsidiary in 1981.[5]

 

 

 

 

 

You need to send that to the No Swear Gamer.  He mentions that no console has ever had a price hike like the Amico has.  Well, based on this he is wrong!

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4 hours ago, mr_me said:

A lot of people are turned off of photorealism in videogames today, so their "weaker" graphics could have a positive effect for the audience they're going for.

The problem with this train of thought is that gamers who don't care about photorealism are rather well catered for already. Switch is unashamedly underpowerd in the gfx department vs the competition, and the games which top the charts across all the most popular platforms very often have "weaker" (but far from being flash-looking) gfx style. We're talking the likes of Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Dead Cells, Noita, Hades, and the latest superhits: the Fall Guys & Valheim. The latter two are Steam top sellers, co-op oriented and totally atypical, so that might tell you something about how out of touch your vision of "sweaty adolescents" playing CoD is.

 

But if y'all think it's a good idea to make an ad campaign based on insulting one of the largest gaming sectors, go ahead - the results could be...amusing :)

 

I must admit, I am sort of fascinated by Amico's cult-like following, because I haven't seen so much bad reasoning and extreme rationalizing in a very long time. Hence my occasional posts on this subject. It's becoming a bit of a shooting-fish-in-the-barrel exercise though, so it's probably better to put all these threads on Ignore for now and maybe revisit it  in a few months time, assuming there are any real new developments.

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1 hour ago, atarifan88 said:

You need to send that to the No Swear Gamer.  He mentions that no console has ever had a price hike like the Amico has.  Well, based on this he is wrong!


No, i believe he said he didnt recall a console raising its price.   Doesnt mean he was “wrong”. 
 

I dare say the majority of us hardcore Intv fans didnt know this factoid. 
 

Anyway, having to back 40 years+ to get a console that raised its price by 100.00 speaks volumes. 

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1 minute ago, Rev said:


No, i believe he said he didnt recall a console raising its price.   Doesnt mean he was “wrong”. 
 

I dare say the majority of us hardcore Intv fans didnt know this factoid. 
 

Anyway, having to back 40 years+ to get a console that raised its price by 100.00 speaks volumes. 

I sure didn't, but they did technically raise the price based on the info you posted.  Of course these days when information is put out on a new console, people are going to hold you to that, so it wasn't surprising some interest dropped off after we were informed of an increase in price of the Amico.

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4 hours ago, Rev said:

...

 

Anyway, having to back 40 years+ to get a console that raised its price by 100.00 speaks volumes. 

Not really, because the Intellivision is the only console that I know its history well.  And Mattel made that announcement months before the console's release.  Still, I'd be really surprised if any videogame executive shared an executive target price estimate two years before its target release date.

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The $179 was never an announced price of the console.  It was part of a target price range very early in the console's development.  In the video presentation it was described as a "price point" which can mean the point that demand would be highest.  Videogame consoles don't reach highest demand until years after release, when game libraries are more developed.  Since then the hardware has also been upgraded, e.g. resistive touchscreens replaced with capacitive, more free games as well.  In 2019 their website said final pricing wouldn't be announced until 2020 Q2.  Even when they started taking orders for founders editions in 2020, they still hadn't announced prices for the standard editions.  I don't think you'd find another videogame company that's shared as much information during development as this one.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Wait..the Amico has had a price bump?

 

I am on the Founders Edition waiting list with a 100 bux holding my spot. I dont recall ANY email's explaining a price bump. 

 

 

As for the questions the OP asked. Yes i Care, Yes i hope it succeeds and i hope it takes families by storm bringing them back together. 

 

I got 3 grandkids now and i CANT wait to play some astrosmash with whole lot of them! (Yes, yes....Poppy (me) will let the grandkids beat him)

 

Does the wait vex me? Sure, but this is simply the status of the entire world. We are all on hold due to supply chain shortages due to covid.  The price bump DOES concern me though. 

 

Sure, there is a lull in us nerds about the Amico because we have been following it since day one but MOST of the world has no idea of its existence. So i dont think overall Tommy T has an issue.

Knowing the PR Machine that Tommy T is.....i have no doubt he will be able to breath new excitement into this system when its launch time. 


I will personally volunteer to put on an old grey wig as a reimagined George Plimpton for Tommy's TV ads! All he's gotta do is ask!  (as a kid growing up i often got Sagan and Plimpton confused)

 

But whats this noise about a price hike???????

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I made the $100 deposit, thinking at the time that I may or may not eventually get an Amico out of this.

I expected delays, although not going on two years.

If the console ever ships, it looks like it will have some interesting games and I'll enjoy it, though perhaps not as much as my original Intellivision.

And if the Amico doesn't ship, I'm only out $100.  (shrug)

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12 hours ago, mr_me said:

Just noise.  For anyone that's pre-ordered one, the price hasn't changed.  They have doubled the onboard storage memory since then.

 

Thanks for this info. Good to know!

 

I am a Founder till the very end. The end being a beautiful retro woodgrain Amico! 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I still care..  I still hope it could turn into something that could revive the intellivision brand, would have good upgraded intellivision games and new games of a similar vein, or even something that channels the feel from intellivision that can hook up to a TV without a life support system and doesn't have 30,40 years of wear and tear on it.. 

 

I still care, but no longer believe :(

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This is why I usually never 'follow' something I am interested in.

 

I pre-ordered this as soon as I heard about it because I want it.

 

Fortunately, Ignored most of the hype and drama surrounding it.

 

So yeah, I care about getting and playing it.  And I couldn't care less about how we get to release day and what goes on until then.

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On 8/28/2021 at 5:33 PM, cjherr said:

I preordered the founders edition, but my optimism is waning. I wanted to play upgraded versions of the games I loved back in the day, and still play now. But what I see is games like Night Stalker and Cloudy Mountain upgraded for multiplayer (I get it, that's the point) and loaded up with all these flashy explosions and visual overload and I think "they look like phone games", and THAT'S NOT WHAT I WANT. Take the thing that made these games great, the playability, and bring new things into the mix. Bring the graphics up to date, but not everything has to be at light speed with everything spraying all over the screen. It's like looking into a strobe light. I still have my hopes up, but it's getting harder to do so. I'll wait and see what the system finally delivers.

 

I kind of agree, I just want reimaged classics....they don't have to add new bells and whistles, just small tweaks.

 

Also, I HAVE to ask you. What is that game in your avatar picture?  When I was a kid back in the 1980's (a LONG time ago), I saw a game being played on the monitor in one of the Electronic Boutiques (I think that was the name back then) for one of the consoles.  I  always wanted to play it and I think that is the game. It was like a more action packed take on Berzerk from my memory.  It was most likely on the Colecovision or or the Atari 5200 or 7800.....I was a poor kid so we only only had one console growing up. Me and my brothers pooled odd job money and got the Intellivision

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12 minutes ago, Mik's Arcade said:

 

Also, I HAVE to ask you. What is that game in your avatar picture?  When I was a kid back in the 1980's (a LONG time ago), I saw a game being played on the monitor in one of the Electronic Boutiques (I think that was the name back then) for one of the consoles.  I  always wanted to play it and I think that is the game. It was like a more action packed take on Berzerk from my memory.  It was most likely on the Colecovision or or the Atari 5200 or 7800.....I was a poor kid so we only only had one console growing up. Me and my brothers pooled odd job money and got the Intellivision

The game is Shamus. One of my favorites. It was definitely on the Atari 8-bit and 5200. It was ported to other systems, but I don't believe it made it to the Colecovision.

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4 minutes ago, cjherr said:

The game is Shamus. One of my favorites. It was definitely on the Atari 8-bit and 5200. It was ported to other consoles, but I don't believe it made it to the Colecovision.

OMG.....I just looked this up on Wiki and then watched a gameplay video and this is totally it.  I'm off to go find a way to play it.  I'll set up my Raspberry pi to play 5200 games or grab the Game Boy version.

 

Thanks for solving this mystery for me. What an interesting way to track this down.  I mean, I wasn't losing my mind trying to figure this out but it was always one of those mysteries in the back of my brain and when I saw that picture it made me think of it.

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  • 1 month later...

Well... so much for free-speech.   But I guess that's what a forum full of disagreements will get you.

 

I'll miss it, but not for the Trolls and all the insanity on both sides of the fence.  I like this community and I'm happy to be a part of it for as long as I have.   From something that started out so well, to having ended with so many posts that just kept people at each others throats.  Based on that, I agree... it was the right thing to do.

 

And now for something completely different!

 

 

 

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