On the close of business, January 20th 1984, Mattel Electronics, a subsidiary of Mattel the famous toy company, was shut down and sold to a liquidator after loosing $300 million US that past year on the Intellivision line of game consoles. But even the liquidator had troubles selling the remaining stock of consoles and game cartridges.
After much of the inventory had been sold, former Mattel marketing executive Terry Valeski with an investment group bought all rights to the Intellivision for $6.5 Million US in March of 1984, and started a new venture. The new company, INTV Corp., continued to sell old stock via retail and mail order.
By October of 1985 the old stock of Intellivision II consoles had ran out so they introduced a new console dubbed INTV III (later renamed “Super Pro System”). This unit was actually a cosmetic rebadge of the original Intellivision console and was 100% compatible to it.
In addition to manufacturing new consoles, INTV Corp. also continued to develop new games, releasing a few new titles each year. Eventually, the system was discontinued in 1991 with the realization that competing video game technology had finally caught up to the Intellivision design.
NOTE: The INTVIII should not be confused with “Intellivision III”, an upgrade to the Intellivision II that was cancelled by Mattel in favor of the unfinished “Intellivision IV” featuring a 68000 CPU (same as Amiga and Macintosh computers) with higher graphics to compete with ColecoVision.
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Contributors: "Skel" (Derek McDonald)
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NAME
System III
MANUFACTURER
INTV Corp.
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
october 1985
END OF PRODUCTION
1991
BUILT IN SOFTWARE / GAMES
None
CONTROLLERS
Twelve-button numeric keypad (0–9, Clear, and Enter) + 4 side-located action buttons (two of which are electronicaly the same) + 16-directions controller disk
CPU
General Instrument CP1610
SPEED
895 KHz
RAM
1352 bytes
ROM
7168 bytes
GRAPHIC MODES
160 x 196
COLORS
16 color palette
SOUND
General Instrument AY-3-8914 (3 channels sound + 1 noise generator)
I/O PORTS
Cartridge slot, video ouput (RF or RGB depending versions), power in
MEDIA
Cartridge
NUMBER OF GAMES
More than 130 videogames have been produced in the console lifetime (Mattel Intellivision)
POWER SUPPLY
Power supply built-in
PERIPHERALS
Intellivoice, System changer, Music synthesizer, Keyboard component, Computer system and more
