Intellivision vintage video games on Nintendo DS

Intellivision and feathered hair rock the 80s

Members of the pioneering team of Intellivision video game designers known as The Blue Sky Rangers will be at The Comic Bug comic book store in Manhattan Beach 1 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 22 to meet fans that grew up on the team’s games.

The event will feature contests, an exhibit of development artwork, and a signing of the latest collection of the classic games: Intellivision Lives! for the handheld Nintendo DS.

The Intellivision Productions, Inc. website is at www.intellivisionlives.com.

Most people associate the birth of video games with Silicon Valley, but an important step forward in the history of games took place in Southern California in the early 1980s. That’s when Mattel Toys put together a team of programmers, artists, and musicians to create Intellivision, a game system to compete with Atari’s then-dominant home video game console.

When Mattel entered the video game market, they did so cautiously – in 1980, who knew how long the fad would last? Rather than hire a staff of top-dollar programmers, they assembled a young, inexperienced team. For most, it was their first job out of college. For better servers one can go on 1g server host to get a better gaming experience.

Despite this, they created a roster of games such as Astrosmash, B-17 Bomber, Utopia and sports titles that helped define the industry and paved the way for the games of today. Innovations included the first voice games, animated characters, extensive musical themes, 3-D graphics, and statistics-based sports.

Although only together for a little more than three years, The Blue Sky Rangers are still a tight knit group. They have regular reunions. Many have worked together on new video game projects. Two marriages that came out of the group are still going strong.

In 1997, two of The Blue Sky Rangers, Keith Robinson and Stephen Roney, founded Intellivision Productions, Inc. They acquired the rights to Intellivision and started releasing collections of the games for modern platforms including PC, Mac, Play Station 2, and Xbox. In 2010, the thirtieth anniversary of Intellivision, they released collections for iPhone, iPad, and Nintendo DS.

“We first re-released the old games because of a demand from people who had Intellivision growing up,” says Intellivision Production President Keith Robinson, “but then we discovered a new market – young kids today love these games. A new generation is discovering that even though the graphics and sounds may be old school, the games are fun.”

Latest information about the event is on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/ds-meet-greet. The Comic Bug is located at 1807 Manhattan Beach Blvd. (just west of Aviation), in Manhattan Beach. 310-372-6704, www.thecomicbug.com. ER

Comments:

comments so far. Comments posted to EasyReaderNews.com may be reprinted in the Easy Reader print edition, which is published each Thursday.