Intellivision Edutainment Games

[classicgamer74]

 

In this week's episode I discuss some Edutainment Games for the Intellivision.  Which are your favorites?  Did you play any of these games when you were young?  What are your memories?  

[Zendocon]

As a kid, I wanted to get into game programming, and so Mr. BASIC Meets Bits & Bytes was my favorite title that I consider Edutainment.  Word Fun was pretty cool too.

 

I don't know if you plan on mentioning the Tutorvision, but I got into that early this year and enjoyed the games that have been released so far.  I even created my own title, just because.

[classicgamer74]

Ive never heard of tutorvision. Can you tell me about it? 

[Zendocon]

I'll start by pointing you to the Wikipedia page, since it seems to have disappeared from the Blue Sky Rangers' History section.

 

In my own words, ...

 

It was first advertised in the INTV catalogs in 1987 as a joint venture between INTV and World Book Encyclopedia.  The unit itself is a modified Intellivision console with: 4x GRAM, a modified STIC chip, additional 16-bit RAM, different GROM, and an expanded Executive ROM.  The expanded portion of the Executive ROM is known colloquially as REX.  Unfortunately, REX makes the Tutorvision incompatible with ECS.

 

Sixteen games were developed for Tutorvision by Realtime Associates and were categorized as Level 1 or Level 2, based on the intended age range.  It was demoed at the 1989 Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Chicago.  After that, World Book Encyclopedia backed out of the deal, and INTV went under shortly afterward.  Tutorvision died before it could be test-marketed.  Since then, a handful of demo units have turned up, one of which had two of the Level 1 games included: Map Mazes and Shapes In Space.  The ROMs for those two games are freely available, and the Tutorvision GROM and EXEC files are out there if you look for them.

 

In 2017, jzIntv was modified to emulate Tutorvision.  Additionally, somebody bought a copy of Geo Graphics, one of the Level 2 games, on eBay for $2,200.  Because of the outrageous price, the ROM image isn't available for free.  I bought a copy for myself, and I'm looking forward to playing the other games eventually.  Supposedly, floppies with all the games' source code turned up in the archives of the old RA building in 2011.  I'm guessing the Blue Sky Rangers have it in their hands now.

 

This is an interesting piece of Intellivision history that I hope is fully preserved, with all the games made available someday.

[First Spear]

On 10/17/2021 at 12:23 PM, classicgamer74 said:

 

In this week's episode I discuss some Edutainment Games for the Intellivision.  Which are your favorites?  Did you play any of these games when you were young?  What are your memories?  

 

That was fun to watch. Well done!