Almost 50 years ago, here’s how Intellivision took on Atari

In the mid-’70s, Mattel Electronics started putting together a plan to release a game console that would end up taking on Atari, showing the future of what games could be, and introducing what remains one of the oddest controllers in video game history. The story of Intellivision is long and takes a number of turns, which you can read all about in the book Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie from The MIT Press.

Written by University of California, Irvine professors Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman, the book weaves together over 150 interviews and extensive research material to piece together what happened behind the scenes. Below, we have an excerpt from chapter 4, diving into how Mattel used test marketing and celebrity writer George Plimpton to get the word out when introducing the console to the world.

Intellivision was test marketed in December 1979 in Fresno, California, in about 12 department stores in the metropolitan area, including Sears, Weinstock’s, and Gottschalks (a chain founded in the city). The test marketing was deemed successful, and as Mattel Electronics turned toward a wider launch in August 1980, it was clear that advertising would be crucial to Intellivision’s success. Tim Huber, vice president of marketing during Intellivision’s release, explained that Mattel’s early marketing success led to a toy industry expectation that commercials would be ready for any product. Huber emphasized that if a toy was premiered at a major convention like Toy Fair without “a full, finished commercial, nobody bought it.” Thus, it is unsurprising that advertising was Mattel’s biggest expense after inventory. Gene Kilroy, a director in preliminary design, noted it was often 15-20 percent of a product’s cost, while research and development would be a fraction of that amount.

Intellivision’s advertising was handled by Ogilvy & Mather (O&M). With a history dating to an agency founded in 1850 by Edmund Mather, O&M was one of the world’s largest advertising companies. In December 1970 it acquired Carson/Roberts, Mattel’s original advertising agency. John Seifert, who became O&M’s account director in charge of Intellivision (and was later the company’s global CEO), noted that O&M “toy category experts” often spent their whole career advertising Mattel toys, paired with Mattel’s product manager for a particular toy (with whom they might be promoted in parallel). Mattel and O&M shared sales data and the impact of media spending. Many internal marketing memoranda had a left-hand column of staff broken into two groups, with Mattel employees above and O&M employees below, as if they were one company. Executives from the two companies met regularly. Bill Gillis, vice president of marketing recalled, “Never a week passed that I didn’t have a meeting or two with the O&M folks.” Gene Del Vecchio, at the time a research project director at O&M, noted that Mattel’s business accounted for around 75 percent of O&M’s Los Angeles office billings during that period, joking that “if Mattel sneezed we’d catch pneumonia.” Seifert emphasized that by 1980 O&M was developing hundreds of commercials a year for Mattel across its toy lines.

O&M’s first Intellivision commercial featured the Master Component and Keyboard Component, emphasizing learning, games, and using the system for home financial planning and even exercise. By June 1980, marketing researchers had tested an abridged version of this spot, deeming it “ineffective in generating brand recall”. Intellivision sales remained sluggish throughout most of 1980. Senior vice president of marketing Frank O’Connell recalled that this caused “a mild panic as the product was not selling at retail. The campaign essentially positioned Intellivision as a home computer,” which failed to generate consumer interest.

Intellivision marketing had to adjust quickly — and it did. Josh Denham from Mattel Toys became the new president of Mattel Electronics in September 1980, hiring O’Connell soon after. O’Connell recalled immediately commissioning market research which found that “unaided awareness of Intellivision is low, especially in comparison with Atari.” Denham and O’Connell understood it was necessary to go on the attack or Mattel corporate would “discontinue us halfway into Christmas,” O’Connell said. Intellivision’s marketplace battle with Atari would soon turn bloody on national television.

Repositioning Intellivision would not be easy. Atari had been in stores for almost three years. Mattel Electronics Product Manager Al Nilsen noted, “We were the higher priced brand, by a lot. We didn’t have the arcade history or background they did. Atari had a ton of money.” Yet Atari’s market position also offered an opportunity. O’Connell and the marketing department “felt a head-to-head comparison to Atari would jump our awareness and piggyback off their millions in advertising and clearly demonstrate Intellivision’s point of difference.” Crucially, a comparison commercial only made sense because Atari had already familiarized the public with the idea of home video game systems. O’Connell approached Mattel’s board of directors with the contentious idea to spend millions on competitive advertising during the Christmas season. Atari would be livid seeing their system denigrated and their market awareness hijacked to sell a competitor’s product. Nevertheless, faced with huge losses if Intellivision failed, Mattel chairman Art Spear (and Mattel’s board of directors) agreed.

Because of the risk, O&M also needed convincing. Denham recalled being inspired to strike when he saw an Atari television commercial and realized Atari’s “product looks like kids made it”:

“I came to work and told our liaison with Ogilvy & Mather, ‘Hey, I want you to get Ogilvy to do a comparative commercial, our product side by side.’ Later she said, “Well, I just talked to Ogilvy and they don’t think it’s a good idea to do comparative commercials.’ I said, ‘Tell them if they don’t have a comparative commercial, we’re going to get a new ad agency.’”

The agency’s reticence was understandable. Seifert noted how David Ogilvy, the advertising executive who created the modern O&M company through a merger in 1964, warned against comparative advertising because it gave visibility to one’s competitor. Del Vecchio added that from O&M’s perspective, a mitigating factor was that “if you’re a new entrant and your product has a critical point-of-difference against the major competitor’s product, it can be beneficial to make the comparison.” As Denham had observed, Intellivision’s gameplay and graphical realism were critical distinctions. If O&M was going to do this, Seifert realized multiple concerns had to be addressed, including the question, “Who is the person that helps you through the storytelling? Because we didn’t think it was just as simple as to say ‘look at Intellivision, look at Atari, you decide.’”

Thus, George Plimpton was chosen as Intellivision’s spokesperson. The first editor-in-chief of The Paris Review, Plimpton cultivated an image of erudition but also published “participatory journalism,” including books about sports. In the first, Out of My League (1961), Plimpton recounted pitching for a professional baseball team. Later books recounted participation in professional football, boxing, golf, and hockey. This eclectic background made Plimpton a unique fit. His intellectual air dovetailed with Intellivision’s name and sophistication; his sports background harmonized with Intellivision’s early emphasis on sports video games. Seifert, who managed the ad campaign, recalled that Plimpton was “a bit of an intellect, guided by the facts, but also a good storyteller.”

To convince Plimpton to participate, O’Connell remembered bypassing Plimpton’s agent to call “at a hotel in Southern California, where he was playing golf.” Plimpton expressed interest, and O’Connell went to Plimpton’s hotel room with Brian Dougherty, an engineer working on Intellivision who recalled being asked to bring “both an Intellivision and an Atari. We set them up side by side for Plimpton to see.” After playing the video games, Plimpton agreed to do the commercials, “saying, ‘Well this is great. I can participate in these sports without actually getting hurt!’”

The early comparison commercials between Intellivision and Atari focused on sports video games. It is fitting that the first commercial, described at the beginning of this chapter, used Major League Baseball and NFL Football: Baseball is considered an intellectual game because of its slow pace and multiple points for decision-making, while football emphasizes strategy but also hard-hitting action. Plimpton’s image, fusing intellectualism with athleticism, recalled both forms of gameplay. Moreover, Plimpton’s participatory journalism — pitching at Yankee Stadium and running plays as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions — buttressed his authority to decide which system was closer to the real. Gary Elliot, vice president for software advertising at O&M, noted that Plimpton “was so believable and so completely different from what Atari was doing in the marketplace.”

As sociologist Tarleton Gillespie argued in the 2010 essay “The Politics of ‘Platforms’”, the marketing and public relations that surround platforms join disparate ideas to articulate a malleable set of beliefs and ideologies. Platforming Plimpton — giving him a stage to speak on national television — forged relationships between Intellivision’s realism, sports, intelligence, action, and masculine focus. It augmented the fantasy that video games offered the opportunity to play real sports virtually. It elevated Intellivision beyond a toy, legitimizing Intellivision’s strategic video games in comparison to Atari’s childish offerings. Plimpton’s persona combined minor celebrity status and the everyman, rugged sportsmanship and intellectualism, fatherly wisdom with playboy bachelorism. The fact that later research at Mattel Electronics showed that consumers had low recall of Plimpton does not indicate that Plimpton was ineffective but that his image was complex and productively diffuse — a persona that could convey multiple intersecting ideas.

Seifert, working with Nilsen and others, spent more than $8 million to produce the first series of Plimpton commercials. Accompanying these commercials were print advertisements in magazines like Newsweek. After the Plimpton commercials aired, a marketing study found consumer intent to purchase an Intellivision increased from 5 percent in October 1980 to 28 percent in January 1981, concluding that the campaign conveyed Intellivision’s “superiority to Atari and game realism themes.” During Christmas 1980 “we sold everything we had,” Denham recalled. “Our warehouse of retail was totally cleaned out. That started the whole thing rolling.” A few years later, engineer David Chandler summed up the Plimpton commercials’ impact in a document looking back at the console’s history: “Intellivision finally was a reality in the marketplace.”