[Air-L] New book - Intellivision (Tom Boellstorff)

[Tom Boellstorff]

Dear all: after an incredible journey of many years with my colleague Braxton Soderman, our book Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie® will be released November 5 by MIT Press. Due to the incredible generosity of the community of former programmers, marketers, executives, and others, as well as the community of retrogaming experts, we were able to draw on over 150 interviews and many thousands of pages of never-before-accessed documents to build what we hope you’ll find to be an interesting and useful account of Intellivision, its impact on the social history of videogames, and its implications for today. 

Through the links on Intellivision’s MIT Press website (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549509/intellivision/), you can preorder the book now. If you purchase Intellivision on November 5 you can get a 30% discount by using the code PUBDAY30; anytime after that, you can get a 20% discount by using the code READMIT20 (go here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/763346/intellivision-by-tom-boellstorff-and-braxton-soderman/). A few days after the November 5 release date, there will be a link on the MIT website to the open access version of the book. 

Here’s a brief description: 

The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry.

Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari's main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision, Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivision's chips and code, games, marketing and business strategies, organizational and social history, and the cultural and economic context of the early US games industry from the mid-1970s to the great videogame industry crash of 1983.

While many remember Atari, Intellivision has largely been forgotten. As such, Intellivision fills a crucial gap in videogame scholarship, telling the story of a console that sold millions and competed aggressively against Atari. Drawing on a wealth of data from both institutional and personal archives and over 150 interviews with programmers, engineers, executives, marketers, and designers, Boellstorff and Soderman examine the relationship between videogames and toys—an under-analyzed aspect of videogame history—and discuss the impact of home computing on the rise of videogames, the gendered implications of play and videogame design at Mattel, and the blurring of work and play in the early games industry.

“As field officers, we often engage in skirmishes and battles. Boellstorff and Soderman superbly portray our elemental precursor in the nuanced context and depth of the broader games war.”
Bill Gillis, President, WF Gillis & Associates; former Marketing VP, Intellivision

“Through a rich investigation of Intellivision, this book beautifully weaves together an attention to both the technical and the social components of producing computational gaming. A must read for all scholars of media.”
T. L. Taylor, Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT

“Boellstorff and Soderman balance the heroic and the tragic stories of Intellivision's business, technology, and people. Intellivision takes readers deep inside the confidential silos within the secretive toy industry of the 70s and 80s.”
Don Daglow, Director of Intellivision Game Development, Mattel

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Tom Boellstorff
Professor, Department of Anthropology
University of California, Irvine