Intellivision

 

I saw an advertisement for Intellivision today on Facebook as a retro-offering and was instantly transported back to late elementary school in my mind.

I had a friend with an Atari 2600 which was beginning to saturate the market for home video game systems in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  It was not cheap ($199) and so despite its popularity there were not a lot of kids who owned one in our small town.  My friend lived out in the country a good ways, but that did not stop me from riding my bike out there over hill and dale on gravel roads with the sun beating down.  I had some serious envy issues considering I had to otherwise ride around town to various places to find the large standalone video games that cost a quarter a game.  You could blow through an allowance really quick in an arcade, especially if you weren’t yet very good at the game.  Some of my favorites were Missile Command, Robotron, Defender, and Q-bert.

So imagine my surprise when my dad returned home from a business trip to Chicago with an Intellivision gaming console under his arm.  It was a convention for carpet installers and he had won it in a game or raffle of some kind.  I was excited but also confused.  What exactly was an “Intellivision”?  The controllers were more complex than the Atari 2600 and the games more sophisticated.  

My favorite was called “Utopia” where you and a friend had an island each surrounded by water.  The goal was to build up a successful civilization which included the possibility of eventually invading the opponent’s island if you had enough money and resources to do it.  Every 15 minutes or so a large rotating rectangular-shaped object that represented a hurricane would appear at the top of the screen and randomly spin itself down through the two islands and whatever it touched (houses, crops, castles, soldiers, factories, hospitals, etc) would be destroyed, ie, disappear from the screen.  It took a long time to play compared to most video games and required the ability to plan and strategize about the future of your island.  I loved it!

I came to realize from the types of games available and the better graphics that the Intellivision was a bit highbrow compared to the Atari 2600.  The downside was that there were not nearly as many games available for it and as far as I knew I was the only kid in my town that had one, which meant there was no trading or borrowing of games possible.  I ran into a similar problem many years later when my job provided a Blackberry phone and I bought a Blackberry tablet as well.  I loved that tablet.  It was a beautiful piece of technology but there were so few apps for it and eventually it died out along with their phones when the iPhone and iPad took over the market.

In the 45 years or so since that time I have built some things of my own in a sort of search for a Utopia.  I am not on an island and I have not been hit by a hurricane but I’ve had to meet and overcome some significant challenges that had the potential to be catastrophic, especially early on.  And at this very moment I am wondering why there were no churches to be built in the game?  I can’t begin to imagine what my life would have been like without the Faith to sustain it.  

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