Intellivision®: Programmer Home Movies 1983/1984

A glimpse inside the Mattel Electronics video game department by the Intellivision programmers.

Visit intellivisionlives.com for Intellivision games and history!

Copyright Intellivision Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. Intellivision, the Intellivision logo and the Running Man icon are U.S. registered trademarks of Intellivision Productions, Inc.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Intellivision
• videogames

[turducken321]

That was great! These guys were funny, a great bunch. Definitely innovative. Atari was so over-rated

[BalladiChaos]

That was kind of my point. I wasn't even defending Microsoft, just trying to show that all corporations are just trying for profit, and that MS hating isn't specific to just them. Sorry to even respond - this just cluttered up my actual inbox.

Besides the point. Great to see that Intellivision had a sense of humor. Sorry to clutter up your vid with a bunch of off-topic bulls**t, IntellivisionProd.

[MichaelBr57]

Just thought I'd clarify a few things. The folks in the video were real Mattel Electronics employees. Intellivision had a 10-bit processor. And since there are a lot of ways to internally keep and calculate scores other than in an eight or sixteen bit integer, I don't think very many (any?) Intellivision game had a max score of 65535.

[horriehomepage]

@FiveFingerCrawl Oops, you're quite correct! It was the graphics ram that was 8 bits wide.

The worst type of challenge I had was dealing with DOS assembly programming real mode vs. protected mode, and trying to make programs that worked on both. Widening and shortening stuff to fit in registers was a pain in the butt. Good thing college is over! :-D I'm still a fan of assembly though.

I forgot if any Intellivision games had scores higher than 65535. I'll have to play more to find out :-D

[FiveFingerCrawl]

@horriehomepage Intellivision had a 16bit processor.

[horriehomepage]

These guys were gods of computer science. Without them we wouldn't have anything near the level of animation we take for granted today (including youtube). I would actually be surprised if they had time to do ANYTHING other than writing code and tracking down bugs. There were no hard drives, no DirectX APIs, no windowed operating systems, no "mouse," no "internet" to look up information, and probably no quality assurance or testing department. And all of this shit in Assembly Language!

[horriehomepage]

@narox Actually it was really hard because they programmed everything in Assembly Language, and they only had an 8-bit processor to work with, meaning the highest number you can even represent is 255. Before you make stupid comments, why don't you think about how they showed a score of "10,000 points" on the screen when the machine can only understand numbers as high as 255. The DirectX API and C++ didn't exist back in 1978. One line of C++ code is about 4 to 6 in Assembly Language.

[tonstad39]

And are those actual employies

[tonstad39]

Wtf it's freaking Mattel

[crusty21]

Happy fun loving guys. They probably all work for TSA now.

[SMGrawks]

This is pretty brilliant!

[marbleskc]

I love the intellivision