Intellivision Amico

Growing up in the ’80s, Tommy Tallarico’s favourite console was Mattel’s Intellivision. It was a passion that never really went away, to the extent that many years later he pulled a Victor Kiam (ask your parents) and bought the company. The result is that now, in 2021, a new Intellivision console, Amico, is preparing for lift-off.

Having worked as one of the most prolific musicians in games, hosted fan-favourite TV shows including Electric Playground, and toured his acclaimed Video Games Live concerts around the world, Tallarico has a track record of delivering the goods, so if someone was going to resurrect one of the most fondly remembered brands from gaming’s formative years, why not him? His starting point was to create something for a “forgotten” gaming group: the family.

Thus, all Amico games are designed to be accessible and easy to understand, and in 2D – or 2.5D in some cases. Importantly, they emphasise multiplayer, attempting to bring players of all skill levels, from multiple generations, around the same console. “We’ve done a lot of focus-group testing with casual gamers and non-gamers,” Tallarico says, “and they all said they’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time, and that they typically still play the Wii.”

Nintendo’s console may have influenced the vision for the Amico project, but importantly it delivers on the Intellivision legacy. An obvious opportunity was to pull a selection of the original console’s most beloved titles back into the workshop for a 2021 makeover, with reboots of games such as Astrosmash, Night Stalker and Tron: Deadly Discs on their way. Equally, the hardware itself resonates with the past by allowing its controllers to ‘nest’ in the base console, just as they did in the original design – although nowadays this isn’t so much about keeping a tidy play area as it is providing wireless charging.

Each controller is home to a pressure-sensitive disc (as opposed to a D-pad or stick) and colour touchscreen, along with speaker, mic, gyro, accelerometer and forcefeedback functionality, plus four physical shoulder buttons. The design exceeds what you’d expect from a platform that is simply not intended to go up against the likes of PS5, but then Tallarico has never been short on ambition.

“Why not tell myself we’ll sell 100 million-plus units, like the Wii? It’s always good to dream big and try to achieve the impossible,” he says. In reality, Amico needs to shift more like 200,000 units in order to break even. With 100,000 preorders and retail purchase orders signed – more refused because demand couldn’t be met – the reborn Intellivision is off to a positive start.