Sure, you know the story of Nolan Bushnel and the early days of the video arcade game Pong. And as a kid (or parent) maybe you ate pizza while watching his animatronic rodent Chucky Cheese. But do you know the story of rival Intellivision? It's been almost 50 years since the introduction of Mattel's home video game system. Authors Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman reveal all in their new book "Intellivison: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie."
It's fantastically researched and interestingly written as only an anthropologist (Boellstorff) and a professor of media studies (Soderman) could do. Learn the how the corporate culture of marketing pioneer West coast toy maker Mattel led it to soar in the boom of electronic games, and then nearly go bust in crash of the first generation of video game business, taking a byte out of Barbie.
And for tech nerds, there's a super deep dive into the details of early video game development, e.g., comparison of early microprocessors and makers, coding details and video scan rates, designer's early prototype sketches, and more. (I know it's accurate because I was there as a designer at Mattel and worked on this stuff, drawing computer graphics, pixel by pixel on graph paper, and coding it manually into hexadecimal—awp!)
