Atari has today announced the purchase of the Intellivision brand alongside "certain games" from Intellivision Entertainment LLC. This is a melancholy coda to the early days of home consoles in the West, where in the US market especially the Atari 2600 dominated the late 1970s scene. Intellivision was one of Atari's main rivals, almost entirely because the machine had the backing of Mattel (these were the days when videogames were sold in the toy section of stores), and launched its first console in 1979.
The concept of a "console war" didn't really exist, but the competition was real. Mattel had been working on the Intellivision (the name is a portmanteau of "Intelligent Television") since 1977 and launched with a big-money ad campaign directly comparing the system's capabilities to those of the Atari 2600. The hardware sold reasonably well, but Atari's 2600 remained well out in front (this was years before the 1983 crash), and Mattel would quietly spin-out the business later in the 1980s, with consoles being manufactured until 1990.
