Your Vision is Atari's Vision

 

"The big fish eats the little fish."
You don't know how right you
are, Shark! Shark! creator
Ji-Wen Tsao.
(image from Glitchwave)

 

I'm super, super late on this, but as you no doubt have heard, Atari purchased whatever's left of the Intellivision brand from whatever's left of Tommy Tallarico. They didn't take the Amico part, because you don't board a ship when you see it springing leaks... just hundreds of the company's valuable intellectual properties. 

What is Atari getting for their money? Well, there's Burgertime- no wait, G Mode has that one, being the successor to Data East. How about Tron: Deadly Discs? Nope, Disney has those rights locked away in a vault, along with Jim Henson's corpse and that straight to VHS smash, Beauty and the Beast Argue at the Dinner Table. There's all the sports games licensed by professional leagues, which... oh, I think Electronic Arts owns those now.

So remind me again why Atari wants the Intellivision? It's not as useless as the ColecoVision brand, because Coleco subsisted primarily on arcade hits owned by other companies and toy licenses that wore out their welcome in the 1980s. The Coleco brand itself may have some fleeting value, but nothing Coleco made for the ColecoVision lasted past its own 1985 expiration date. 

The Intellivision has a bit more value beyond its brand name, but not much more. There are original games, and some very good ones, but not the mammoth amount of hits already owned by Atari, or Japanese companies like Namco, Konami, and Capcom. (No, Atari is not a Japanese company. It's an, um, French company now? I think? I can't even keep track anymore.)

Still, at this point, it's Hungry Hungry Hippos in the world of classic gaming rights, and big companies like Atari, along with smaller but equally voracious ones like Piko Interactive, have to grab everything they can while there's still marbles left on the board. Don't be the last in line... you'll have to settle for Radical Rex, or Bubsy, or Rocky Rodent. There's Awesome Possum too, but it's been bouncing around on the table for years without so much as a bite. Funny how everyone seems to keep their teeth clean of him during this corporate feeding frenzy.

Speaking of old as crap video game references, it's rumored that the Xbox will license its technology to other hardware manufacturers, because that worked oh-so-well for the 3DO and Nuon. People keep thinking they're going to make a standard for video game consoles that will be the next VCR or DVD player, but then again, people kept thinking they could unseat Nintendo as the king of handheld video games in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ask the Gizmondo and Tapwave Zodiac and N-Gage and Wonderswan and Neo-Geo Pocket and game dot com how well that worked out for them.

(Cybiko? Isn't that what they play at Mardi Gras every year?)

Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons

 

 

In case you were wondering where I've been for the last month and a half, I've been working on a video game... my first since the Game Boy Advance conversion of GORF way back in 2009. It's called Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons, it's for the ColecoVision and the SG-1000, and it's available free of charge from my Itch.IO page. If you've ever played whack a mole, it's basically that, but with graphics and sound that stretch the limits of these two systems. 

The story is as follows: Byron visits an arcade, only to get the shock of his life when he touches a token against the metal edges of the coin drop. That shock is doubled when he realizes that shorting out the machine has won him 256 extra lives... except they're digital copies of himself! It's your job to clean up the mess he made, bopping the holo-Byrons with swings of your electrostatic PEEK-0 mallet. Swat a Byron on the head and he vanishes, but hit him on his butt and you'll lose points. Beware! The pesky bears arm themselves with bombs in the later stages... hit one and it's an instant game over.

I'm talking to some folks about physical distribution, but for the moment, the game can be had digitally for the price of free ninety free. And it's good! It's one of the better games in the ColecoVision library, if I do say so myself. I mean, you would expect me to say that, since I made it, but give it a try and judge for yourself. It sure beats the crap out of Rolloverture, or Gust Buster, or whatever the hell Illusions was supposed to be. Also, try the SG-1000 version! It's got an exclusive Sega-licious intro screen which I think you'll like. I sure liked making it.