What was your first ever videogame?
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For the life of me, I cannot tell you what the very first coin-op arcade game I ever played was. That has been lost to time. It would probably be something like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, or maybe even something older like Pong or Missile Command.
I can, however, tell you the very first home video game system I ever owned. It was the Intellivision.
I remember at the time the Atari 2600 was already on its way to becoming all the rage in the early 1980s. However, Mattel Electronics introduced the Intellivision, boasting graphics and sound that were clearly superior to the 2600. They even secured licensing deals with major sports leagues—Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL.
I also vividly remember the commercials featuring George Plimpton, the famous “participatory journalist” (I even recall watching the TV movie version of his football book Paper Lion as a kid). With his erudite voice and dry demeanor, he would pitch the Intellivision’s technical superiority over the Atari 2600. Plimpton’s authoritative presence just automatically gave the platform a level of clout. The Intellivision even eventually offered a voice module called the “Intellivoice,” featuring synthesized speech in select games. This was light-years ahead of anything Atari was doing at the time.
Major League Baseball was easily my favorite game on the system—I played it endlessly. Looking back, a huge part of my lifelong passion for the game of baseball actually started right there in front of that TV. Atari had its own basic baseball game, but it was notoriously difficult to control with a simple eight-position joystick and a single red button. The Intellivision, on the other hand, gave you a directional disc and a 12-button keypad (a 10-digit keypad plus “Clear” and “Enter”).
To manage all those options, Mattel used plastic overlays that slid over the keypad for each specific title. While keeping track of those little overlays was a bit of a chore, they opened up incredible depth. After playing Major League Baseball enough times, I didn’t even need the overlay anymore—I had the plain numeric buttons completely memorized. While primitive by modern standards, its gameplay and control options were leaps and bounds beyond Atari.
Yet, despite knowing the Intellivision was the superior piece of hardware, a shift happened around 1982 or 1983. I remember wanting one of those miniature tabletop arcade versions of Pac-Man for my birthday. It was my brother—or maybe my dad—who suggested that we should just buy the home port of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 and pick up the console while we were at it.
That’s ultimately what we did. Even as a kid, I realized I was essentially downgrading. Looking back, it was my very first experience sacrificing technical quality for broad mainstream appeal. To make another classic ’80s tech comparison, Intellivision was the Sony Betamax to Atari’s VHS. The Intellivision was objectively better, but Atari was what the masses were playing—and as a kid, you just wanted to keep up with the Joneses.
Pac-Man was the turning point that cemented Atari’s dominance in our living room and marked the beginning of the end for the Intellivision. From there, Atari snagged huge pop-culture licenses like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I actually owned E.T. and played it constantly, despite its infamous reputation today as the game so notoriously unpopular that thousands of unsold cartridges ended up buried in a New Mexico landfill!
The Atari, despite its blocky, inferior graphics, became the dominant system in our house for the rest of the early 1980s… at least until the advent of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). But that’s another story for another day.
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The article “The Sony Betamax of Gaming: Why My First Console Was Better Than Yours” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob
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