 March/April 2003
ALL INTELLIPACKS NOW WINDOWS XP-COMPATIBLE!
Intellipack 2, that lets you play the Intellivision games Night Stalker, Space Spartans, and Deep Pockets: Super Pro Pool & Billiards on your PC, was originally posted in 1998 as Intellivision for PC Volume 2. Deep Pockets: Super Pro Pool & Billiards was a previously unpublished game from 1990 that made its debut in the 1998 release. In addition to Windows XP, the Intellipacks run under Windows 98, 2000, and Me. Versions of the Intellipacks that are Mac OS X-native are in development. The currently available Mac versions of all three Intellipacks run on OS 8 and 9, but on OS X only in Classic Mode. Download Intellipack 2 free! >
THE INTELLIVISION DIET - NIBBLE THE POUNDS AWAY! In October 2000, Intellivision fan Shawn Holwegner sent a photo of himself with his Intellivision collection (below left) to our Post My Mug page. Recently, he sent a new photo (below right) along with the following note.
Greetings! I just wanted to share with you this wondrous new Intellivision diet plan. Feel free to pass it along! Take a handful of entirely addictive childhood games, bring back via some rather excellent emulation work, release for both PC and MAC. Fold in PlayStation port, and cook for a few years. Consume at will! In no time, you'll have lost weight from sitting and playing the games you've loved for years, when you just can't drag the console about with you! This might not be 100% accurate, but this is what I'm sticking to. Hi again! You might remember me as "Shawn from Northern California" - ergh - at Post My Mug. Have no fear, a new picture is here. I haven't drug out all of my old garb, but I do have two shirts in the shot, two copies of Intellivision Lives 1.0, one copy of 1.1, and a copy of Intellivision Rocks. A subtle (read: bad) angle has the Activision Intellivision Classics beneath my iced tea, and what a wonderful coaster it doth make! Kudos to the crowd, and thanks for updating and compressing everything into this easier-to-swallow CD form. It has rather decreased my bloat as well! Shawn Holwegner
INTELLIVISION LORE FROM THE FILES OF THE BLUE SKY RANGERS: In 1986, INTV Corp. introduced the Super Pro series of Intellivision sports games. Most of these were based on the original Intellivision sports titles but with added features - most importantly: a computer opponent.
Steve remembers: "Having been a HUGE basketball fan throughout my youth (I even spent my allowance on NBA pennants, and eventually was able to decorate my room with pennants from ALL of the NBA teams of the time! Man, I wish I still had those pennants!), and having played basketball in high school, working on Slam Dunk was definitely a labor of love for me. Working with the original NBA Basketball code was a bit difficult at times, but in the end Dave and I were able to create a pretty fun game."
"Virtually all of the stats used in Slam Dunk came from the NBA Guide for the 1986 season," says Steve. "Whenever possible, the fake name was intended to reference the guy whose stats were being used, so if you were a BIG fan of the NBA, you could probably guess that someone called, say, "Thunder Dunks" was really Darrel Dawkins, who at the time was famous for breaking glass backboards with his dunks." The game was released for Christmas 1987 and sold quite well. It was rare for an Intellivision programmer to get feedback on a game from the public, so Steve was surprised when his phone rang several months later and the caller asked if he was the Steve Ettinger who had created Slam Dunk. The caller, Bart from East St. Louis, Illinois, had seen Steve's name in the game's credits and - in those pre-Web days - apparently tracked him down by looking up all the Steve Ettingers in the phone books at the library. Bart told Steve about himself and his group of friends who were Slam Dunk fanatics: The Intellivision Basketball League. They regularly staged multi-day Slam Dunk tournaments. They took it very seriously, keeping complete statistics of their gameplay. He had a special request: could he commission Steve to create a custom version of Slam Dunk that would incorporate all of the League members? Steve called Dave Warhol. There had never been a custom version of an Intellivision game done for hire. After some discussion, they agreed to do it for a fee of $1,000. "We made a special title screen for them which had an 'IBL - Intellivision Basketball League' logo, and we included all of their names and statistics, which they had provided to us in meticulous detail," recalls Steve. The game was loaded into one of the Intellivision prototyping cartridges - known as a "T-card" - and sent to the League. Bart and his friends were ecstatic. For years afterward they would inform Steve of their latest tournament. Says Steve, "I still occasionally get a phone call out-of-the-blue from Bart, and as far as I know, despite all of the advances in video game technology over all these years, these people continue to get together and play Slam Dunk!" Play Slam Dunk: Super Pro Basketball on Intellivision Lives! > (In February's INTELLIVISION LORE about the INTV-PC/XT computer, we asked how many of you ever owned one of these beauties. The number of responses we've had so far? Zero.)
ASK THE BLUE SKY RANGERS! Adam E. Dean writes: Hey Blue Sky Rangers, how are things in Intellivision Land? It sure was swell growing up in the Golden Age of video gaming. I'd pick one of your games over Doom or another gory shooter anytime. I took a good look at your website - IT ROCKS HARDER THAN ASTROSMASH!!! You seem to have all the bases covered. Just one thing though - what WERE the sixteen colors on the Intellivision?
The Intellivision can generate 16 colors - 8 "primaries" (black, blue, red, tan, dark green, green, yellow, and white) and 8 "pastels" (gray, cyan, orange, brown, magenta, light blue, yellow-green, and purple). There are limitations on when the pastels can be used. For example, lower case letters can't be displayed in pastel colors without some programming trickery. Despite their classification, most of the "pastels" aren't really pastel. In November 1980, Astrosmash programmer John Sohl, nicknamed "Dr. Sohl" because his methodical notes on his early work with Intellivision became valuable documentation for later programmers, described the sixteen colors in a rather eccentric, almost poetic, manner:
In developing the emulation software for our Intellipacks and CD-ROM collections, the programmers were given leeway to recreate the colors as they see them on their own TVs with a real Intellivision. The result is that the emulators for DOS, Mac, Windows and PlayStation all have slightly different palettes. Which is correct? The only "correct" colors are the ones that make you feel as if you are playing your Intellivision on your living room TV set at home in 1982. We hope we've achieved that. [By the way, if you're wondering what Afrika Korps yellow is, John Sohl says, "It helps if you watched 'The Rat Patrol (in color)' when you were 13."] Got a question for the Blue Sky Rangers? Write us here >
THE INTELLIVISION TRIVIA CONTEST! 109 of you entered February's trivia contest. The question:
From the 59 correct answers, the random number generator at http://www.random.org/ selected Kala Yoder of Bellevue, Nebraska as the winner of an Intellivision coffee mug. Congratulations, Kala! And thanks to all of you for playing!
In 1982, an internal Mattel Electronics memo to all programmers instructed them to delete a particular Intellivision game from their computer systems because too much time was being wasted playing it. What was the game AND what was the date of the memo? (If you have trouble following the above link, or if submitting your answer fails, type the URL http://www.intellivisionlives.com/contest.shtml into your browser and try again.) We'll pick a random winner from all complete, correct entries received before NOON PDT, MONDAY, MAY 5. The winner will receive an official Intellivision Coffee Mug - just like we use here in the office for serving up steamin' hot java! GOOD LUCK!
THE BLUE SKY RANGERS
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The Windows XP-compatible version of Intellipack 2 has been posted to our free downloads page. This makes all three of our free Intellipacks XP-compatible.
THE INTELLIVISION BASKETBALL LEAGUE
The conversion of NBA Basketball into Slam Dunk - Super Pro Basketball was done by Steve Ettinger with David Warhol producing. 
More than just adding a computer opponent, Steve created a new front end that lets you assemble your team from a pool of 74 candidates based on their statistics. During the game, you decide which three of your five players will be on the court at any time. The stats of the players influence the game play.
Stephen Roney, co-programmer of Space Spartans and B-17 Bomber, and head of software development for Intellivision Productions, replies:
Because the Intellivision output is analog, subject to noise and component variations, and because televisions - particularly early 1980s televisions - vary in their color and tint adjustments, players see slightly different colors from console to console and TV set to TV set. For instance, brown appears greenish on many sets.
Lawyers for Atari got what Intellivision game yanked out of a trade show because the prototype version on display used Atari logos for targets?
59 of you had the correct answer: B-17 Bomber. (This information could be found on our website on the Voice Games page, and on the Intellivision Lives! CD-ROM in the B-17 Bomber production notes.)
Now try this question: