Oh wow, guess by chance I happen to be here pretty early. Nice! 😎 Yes, surprised myself that JagJam already created some interested this early on, really looking forward to what lies ahead. And also: Atari having bought Intellivision, who would have guessed that ever happening? That's really great news.
the irony of working for an FPGA company for years is that I've seen the ugly side of how incredibly difficult it is to make non-trivial designs portable across FPGA vendors. MiSTer is a fantastic project, and I'm sure Altera will continue to build cyclone V parts as long as the profit justifies it, but for true continuity, we need multi-vendor support for the hardware designs either in the form of open source FPGA tools like yosys, or HDL that is portable across multiple proprietary vendor tools. I want implementations across Altera, Xilinx, Achronix, Lattice, Microchip -- the more the longer-lived the designs are.
It is indeed frustrating to see people do designs based on specific products and using the proprietary vendor tooling, only to later complain about the lack of available units to buy, due to those notorious "supply chain issues", or the vendor deciding to drop the product line, or whatever. I appreciate that people use what they know and are comfortable with, however. More annoying is the trait that also persists in some circles of finding the cheapest peddlers of wares in dodgy online marketplaces, getting their bargain, and then complaining about fake products, asking about how to identify fakes (before or after the purchase), and then going back to find more cheap stuff that is almost certain to be fake. Apparently, their time is worth far less than the amount they save on just buying legitimate goods, and I imagine that they think everyone else's time is similarly worthless.
Both Intellivision and Colecovision had a brief moment in the sun in the UK around 1982. Alongside the 2600, Videopac and Grandstand VEC, they were part of a nascent console gaming market growing quite quickly at the time but it all fell apart due to the global impact of the console video game crash (all five consoles were American). It could be argued that the vacuum this created, filled by home computers, is what created the European personal computer boom that soon followed, as well as the Japanese console boom that came a little later. Without it I think think the whole history of gaming in the UK in the 80s would have been very different.
Fascinating, thanks for the info! My first gaming experience was on my cousin's 2600jr in 1989 and the first computer we owned was a battered old second hand Acorn Electron shortly afterwards, so that whole era passed me by. Could be a good topic for a video. 😁
@@ReesRambles thanks - I should add that Colecovision didn't really arrive until Xmas 1983 (alongside Vectrex), but for a brief period there were six different game consoles available on the UK high street - 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, Videopac, Grandstand and Vectrex, as well as Game N Watch and a whole host of other single game handhelds. And that is before you even think about the computers that were coming out. This market saturation was also a contributing factor to the crash. I still think the early 80s is the most interesting part of gaming history.
@@HappyCodingZX Delays getting across the pond and the emerging microcomputer scene probably did it for various consoles in the UK. I only ever encountered the VCS and the Intellivision once in each respect, and I suspect that console popularity at the start of the 1980s was strongly limited to pretty well-off people, of which there weren't so many in the UK. I would be interested to see sales figures for the VCS in the UK from the era, but I don't think it was the same kind of phenomenon as it was in the US. I've found a mention of 125,000 units shipped in the UK in 1980 which is respectable. US sales were more than an order of magnitude greater than that. By the time people had money to spend and justifying that expenditure, things like the VCS seemed quite limited in comparison to home micros. And even the Atari micros were starting to look a bit dated, as well as a bit pricey, too. Even though a lot of buyers ended up just playing games on their computers, there was a lot of emphasis on computer literacy and aspirational factors involved in the purchasing decision, and the US micros tended not to hold up in the UK when scrutinised for those peripheral considerations. Anyway, as for Intellivision games, I thought the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game was pretty cool back in the day, and there was a multidirectional scrolling racing game that was quite impressive.
@@paul_boddie yes, some good points. Speaking as someone who was there at the time I can tell you that in 82/83 the shops were full of consoles. But as I said, the market was in its infancy, very reliant on older tech from America, and when the support fell away, when the price of computers fell and the government began to push home computing strongly, that market pretty much collapsed.
@@HappyCodingZX All I really remember from shops in 1982/3 were the computers. I guess the consoles were there, and they will have been in all the catalogues as well, but the whole Computer Literacy Project phenomenon had kicked off, and there was that IT82 (Information Technology Year 1982) initiative as well, which I didn't remember from the time, but it was obviously why schools were suddenly doing project work about computers. The rapidly changing competitive situation, along with the technological differences between the US and UK, made entry into the UK market quite challenging. Oddly, Commodore managed to navigate the era pretty well by managing to practically reset their product range and retire the PET, which had been pretty successful in the late 1970s. Then again, a lot of companies were wrongfooted by technological changes at the start of the 1980s. On the Intellivision, I'm sure you'll have seen the Mattel Internal Documents collection on the Internet Archive. There are some fascinating documents describing Mattel's attempts to broaden the appeal of their products, like home terminal capabilities for things like Prestel that were launching in the US (unsuccessfully due to the corresponding challenges of entering the US market for UK companies). Ominously, but unsurprisingly, the documents seem to dry up in 1983.
I like your sense of humour, Rees. Mattel: "not sure if they are still around today". Wonder if there was a recent cultural phenomenon involving a Mattel product, something that might have contributed to a certain company's multi-billion-dollar revenues?
Oh thanks, that's very kind of you to say. Of course I can't cover everything as in depth as you do but I have a lot of less technical viewers / listeners who aren't fully immersed in this world so I'm happy to help get the word out!
The Middle Aged Dad Jam band or whatever the hell they call themselves, are all American comedians just messing around on the side. I'm not sure how popular the 90s American Sketch show The State was over there, or the film Wet Hot American Summer (put that on one night if you haven't, its great) but yeah, very cool to see them on the pod.
Indeed, I did do some reading up on them and was surprised to discover how famous they all are - either they never made it across to the UK or I've just been living under a rock entertainment-wise (quite likely!) They've since released some more covers and I'm loving them, in fact last night I was telling my wife we should make another trip over to California so we can see them live 😅
I can't believe big video game got the UK gov't dissolved to prevent this petition from going into effect.
Welcome back!
In that Welsh metaverse, you should be disgused as a dragon, for authenticity.
Oh wow, guess by chance I happen to be here pretty early. Nice! 😎 Yes, surprised myself that JagJam already created some interested this early on, really looking forward to what lies ahead. And also: Atari having bought Intellivision, who would have guessed that ever happening? That's really great news.
I do wish Atari would sell those posters on their website. I would buy them for sure, as long as they don't sell out before I hear about them.
Agreed!
the irony of working for an FPGA company for years is that I've seen the ugly side of how incredibly difficult it is to make non-trivial designs portable across FPGA vendors. MiSTer is a fantastic project, and I'm sure Altera will continue to build cyclone V parts as long as the profit justifies it, but for true continuity, we need multi-vendor support for the hardware designs either in the form of open source FPGA tools like yosys, or HDL that is portable across multiple proprietary vendor tools.
I want implementations across Altera, Xilinx, Achronix, Lattice, Microchip -- the more the longer-lived the designs are.
It is indeed frustrating to see people do designs based on specific products and using the proprietary vendor tooling, only to later complain about the lack of available units to buy, due to those notorious "supply chain issues", or the vendor deciding to drop the product line, or whatever. I appreciate that people use what they know and are comfortable with, however.
More annoying is the trait that also persists in some circles of finding the cheapest peddlers of wares in dodgy online marketplaces, getting their bargain, and then complaining about fake products, asking about how to identify fakes (before or after the purchase), and then going back to find more cheap stuff that is almost certain to be fake. Apparently, their time is worth far less than the amount they save on just buying legitimate goods, and I imagine that they think everyone else's time is similarly worthless.
Both Intellivision and Colecovision had a brief moment in the sun in the UK around 1982. Alongside the 2600, Videopac and Grandstand VEC, they were part of a nascent console gaming market growing quite quickly at the time but it all fell apart due to the global impact of the console video game crash (all five consoles were American). It could be argued that the vacuum this created, filled by home computers, is what created the European personal computer boom that soon followed, as well as the Japanese console boom that came a little later. Without it I think think the whole history of gaming in the UK in the 80s would have been very different.
Fascinating, thanks for the info! My first gaming experience was on my cousin's 2600jr in 1989 and the first computer we owned was a battered old second hand Acorn Electron shortly afterwards, so that whole era passed me by. Could be a good topic for a video. 😁
@@ReesRambles thanks - I should add that Colecovision didn't really arrive until Xmas 1983 (alongside Vectrex), but for a brief period there were six different game consoles available on the UK high street - 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, Videopac, Grandstand and Vectrex, as well as Game N Watch and a whole host of other single game handhelds. And that is before you even think about the computers that were coming out. This market saturation was also a contributing factor to the crash. I still think the early 80s is the most interesting part of gaming history.
@@HappyCodingZX Delays getting across the pond and the emerging microcomputer scene probably did it for various consoles in the UK. I only ever encountered the VCS and the Intellivision once in each respect, and I suspect that console popularity at the start of the 1980s was strongly limited to pretty well-off people, of which there weren't so many in the UK.
I would be interested to see sales figures for the VCS in the UK from the era, but I don't think it was the same kind of phenomenon as it was in the US. I've found a mention of 125,000 units shipped in the UK in 1980 which is respectable. US sales were more than an order of magnitude greater than that.
By the time people had money to spend and justifying that expenditure, things like the VCS seemed quite limited in comparison to home micros. And even the Atari micros were starting to look a bit dated, as well as a bit pricey, too. Even though a lot of buyers ended up just playing games on their computers, there was a lot of emphasis on computer literacy and aspirational factors involved in the purchasing decision, and the US micros tended not to hold up in the UK when scrutinised for those peripheral considerations.
Anyway, as for Intellivision games, I thought the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game was pretty cool back in the day, and there was a multidirectional scrolling racing game that was quite impressive.
@@paul_boddie yes, some good points. Speaking as someone who was there at the time I can tell you that in 82/83 the shops were full of consoles. But as I said, the market was in its infancy, very reliant on older tech from America, and when the support fell away, when the price of computers fell and the government began to push home computing strongly, that market pretty much collapsed.
@@HappyCodingZX All I really remember from shops in 1982/3 were the computers. I guess the consoles were there, and they will have been in all the catalogues as well, but the whole Computer Literacy Project phenomenon had kicked off, and there was that IT82 (Information Technology Year 1982) initiative as well, which I didn't remember from the time, but it was obviously why schools were suddenly doing project work about computers.
The rapidly changing competitive situation, along with the technological differences between the US and UK, made entry into the UK market quite challenging. Oddly, Commodore managed to navigate the era pretty well by managing to practically reset their product range and retire the PET, which had been pretty successful in the late 1970s. Then again, a lot of companies were wrongfooted by technological changes at the start of the 1980s.
On the Intellivision, I'm sure you'll have seen the Mattel Internal Documents collection on the Internet Archive. There are some fascinating documents describing Mattel's attempts to broaden the appeal of their products, like home terminal capabilities for things like Prestel that were launching in the US (unsuccessfully due to the corresponding challenges of entering the US market for UK companies). Ominously, but unsurprisingly, the documents seem to dry up in 1983.
Intellivision has some very cool games, Thunder Castle really comes to mind atm.
I like your sense of humour, Rees. Mattel: "not sure if they are still around today". Wonder if there was a recent cultural phenomenon involving a Mattel product, something that might have contributed to a certain company's multi-billion-dollar revenues?
Great channel and video. I love your breakdowns. Thanks for covering potential upcoming FPGA gaming projects.
Oh thanks, that's very kind of you to say. Of course I can't cover everything as in depth as you do but I have a lot of less technical viewers / listeners who aren't fully immersed in this world so I'm happy to help get the word out!
The Middle Aged Dad Jam band or whatever the hell they call themselves, are all American comedians just messing around on the side. I'm not sure how popular the 90s American Sketch show The State was over there, or the film Wet Hot American Summer (put that on one night if you haven't, its great) but yeah, very cool to see them on the pod.
Indeed, I did do some reading up on them and was surprised to discover how famous they all are - either they never made it across to the UK or I've just been living under a rock entertainment-wise (quite likely!)
They've since released some more covers and I'm loving them, in fact last night I was telling my wife we should make another trip over to California so we can see them live 😅
Have the MARS system contacted MARS inc to get their permission to use their brand name?