intellivision history 1984 to 1991
Intellivision Inc.
Former Mattel Electronics Senior Vice President of Marketing, Terrence Valeski, understood that although losses were huge, the demand for video games increased in 1983. Valeski found investors and purchased the rights to Intellivision, the games, and inventory from Mattel. A new company, Intellivision Inc, was formed and by the end of 1984 Valeski bought out the other investors and changed the name to INTV Corporation. They continued to supply the large toy stores and sold games through direct mail order. At first, they sold the existing inventory of games and Intellivision II systems. When the inventory of games sold out they produced more, but without the Mattel name or unnecessary licenses on the printed materials. To lower costs, the boxes, instructions, and overlays were produced at lower quality compared to Mattel.
In France, the Mattel Electronics office found investors and became Nice Ideas in April 1984. They continued to work on Intellivision, Colecovision, and other computer games. They produced Intellivision World Cup Soccer and Championship Tennis, both released in 1985 by European publisher Dextel.
INTV Corporation
In 1985, INTV Corporation introduced the INTV System III, also branded as the Intellivision Super Pro System, using the same design as the original Intellivision model but in black and silver. That same year INTV Corp introduced two new games that were completed at Mattel but not released: Thunder Castle and World Championship Baseball. With their early success INTV Corp decided to produce new games and in 1986 introduced Super Pro Football, an update of Mattel NFL Football. INTV Corp continued a relationship that Mattel had with Data East and produced all new cartridges such as Commando in 1987 and Body Slam Wrestling in 1988. Also in 1987, INTV Corp released Dig Dug, purchased from Atari where the game was completed but not released in 1984. They also got into producing next-generation games with the production of Monster Truck Rally for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1991, also released as Stadium Mud Buggies for Intellivision in 1989.
Licensing agreements with Nintendo and Sega required INTV Corporation to discontinue the Intellivision in 1990. INTV Corporation did publish 21 new Intellivision cartridges bringing the Intellivision library to a total of 125 individual game releases. To this day some of these games remain highly sought after and expensive by collectors on the secondhand market.
Tutorvision
In 1989, INTV Corp and World Book Encyclopedia entered into an agreement to manufacture an educational video game system called Tutorvision. It is a modified Intellivision, the case molded in light beige with gold and blue trim. The Exec ROM expanded, system RAM increased to 1.75K, and graphics RAM increased to 2KB.That is enough graphics RAM to define unique graphic tiles for the entire screen.
Games were designed by World Book, J. Hakansson Associates, and programmed by Realtime Associates. Sixteen games were in production, plus one Canadian variation. However, the cartridges and the Tutorvision were never released; instead, World Book and INTV Corporation sued each other. In 1990, INTV Corporation filed for bankruptcy protection and closed in 1991.
An unknown number of later Intellivision Super Pro systems have Tutorvision hardware inside. A subset of these units contains the full Tutorvision EXEC and can play Tutorvision games.