So there's nothing I love in the video game industry more than a shitshow, and the ongoing saga of the Intellivision Amico is by far the best one we've had in a long time.
So here's the Timeline (as well as I can piece it together anyway):
As a huge fan of the absolutely bonkers news cycle surrounding obvious scams and vaporware in the gaming industry, this whole endeavor has been the juiciest thing to come down the pipeline in the last few years. I greet every new detail with a huge glassy-eyed grin and an "uh-huh, and then...?" Currently I'd rank it as well above "the Coleco Chameleon is a capture card with electrical tape on the back" and rapidly approaching "the Gizmondo is a front for the Swedish mafia." Please @ me with all available Amico news please. Unless it's good. Then I don't care.
So here's the Timeline (as well as I can piece it together anyway):
- May 29, 2018: Noted shithead and Color a Dinosaur composer Tommy Tallarico announces that he has purchased the rights to the Intellivision brand, including its library of classic games, and intends to revitalize it with a new console launch.
- October 22, 2018: Tommy Tallarico's Intellivision reveals a brand new console, with a projected $149-$179 price tag. The console's signature feature is a pair of wireless touchscreen-based controllers, with the option of using smartphones as additional controllers. Every game will be exclusive to the platform, rated no higher than E10+, and cost between $3 and $8 (later increased to $10). The launch date: October 10th, 2020
- August 19, 2019: A trailer from Gamescom 2019 reveals the first fleeting glimpses of gameplay, including a new Breakout title from Bit.Trip series developer Choice Provisions which has since appeared less and less frequently in promotional material.
- March 31, 2020: the Intellivision Amico becomes available for pre-order, starting at $250 with a refundable $100 deposit (though you can also pay the full amount). Special editions of the console go as high as $300. Approximately 6000 pre-orders are placed, none of which have been delivered as of this writing, and you can still pre-order the system today. The launch date at this point is still solidly October 10, 2020, a mere month before the launch of the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5, a date chosen because it was the shared birthday of both Tallarico's late sister and the sister of former president of Intellivision Productions, Inc. Stephen Roney, both of whom coincidentally shared the name Karen as well as a birthday, which seems like a really normal and smart thing to plan a tech launch around.
- April 17, 2020: The Amico launches a campaign on video game-focused crowdfunding platform Fig, raising a lifetime total of 7.1 million dollars as of this writing. I actually really encourage watching the video that goes with this because I really need y'all to see the two rooms they chose to film this in.
- August 5, 2020: The Amico is delayed, with a new launch date of April 3, 2021. The video released to coincide with the announcement features several short gameplay clips, with particular attention paid to arguably the Amico's flagship title: a new Earthworm Jim game made with the involvement of series creator and far-right asshole Doug TenNapel. The trailer consists of approximately 28 seconds of Jim running along an unpopulated beach area. The game has yet to be seen since. One trailer confirms the suspicions of many after someone recognizes one of the highlight games, a Trials-esque Evel Knievel game, as being a mobile port released on Android and iOS five years prior with no mention of the fact.
- February 18, 2021: The Amico is delayed again, this time until October 10, 2021. Nobody puts Karen in a corner.
- March 2021: during one of several pitch videos aimed at angel investors (the videos are documented but not publicly available), Tallarico boasts about having former Xbox co-founder and Idle Thumbs talking point J. Allard as part of the Amico team. Allard had indeed joined the project in May of the previous year as Global Managing Director, and left that same summer after what he called "a brief stint." Making claims like this is strictly illegal and prompted a letter from the SEC requesting that Tallarico clarify Allard's position. Tallarico also does not disclose that the console is currently in its fifth month of delays and implies a partnership with The Walt Disney Company (which has yet to manifest) in the same video, and states in a different video that Intellivision's cut of third-party game sales revenue is "around 50 percent," one of the highest in the industry.
- June 14, 2021: Intellivision releases another video to coincide with E3 2021. Similar to the Evel Knievel game mentioned above, several games highlighted are mobile ports, including a Care Bears kart racer and several freely-available Sesame Street browser-based Flash games. These games allegedly include minor adjustments meant to skirt around the Amico's exclusivity contract. Additionally, concerns that the games seem to perform badly, be of low graphical fidelity, and be of poor quality started to really pick up steam at this point and never really stopped. Ars Technica's Sam Machkovech (who, by the way, is like the #1 journalist covering the Amico even after four years so mad props to him) points out that the promotional images of families having fun playing with the Amico are in fact doctored stock images of people playing other consoles, which isn't illegal or anything, but is hilarious.
- June ??, 2021: The Intellivision Amico developer portal is temporarily, accidentally made publicly available with no login information required. Along with concrete tech specs are also a series of guidelines for on-brand Amico development, including the second most hilarious infographic you'll see this week.
- June 29, 2021: Machkovech again reports via Ars Technica that the Amico is based on a System on a Chip with specs comparable to a budget model smartphone from five years prior and that its signature touchscreen controllers have enough onboard storage to maybe render some text over a static graphic. The controllers also take numerous precautions to compensate for an extremely short battery life. A very generous estimated cost of the system's components puts the console's price tag as including an approximate $150 profit margin (Sony's Playstation 4, for comparison, had a $19 profit margin at launch).
- June 29, 2021: Tallarico responds with legal threats and childish insults in a series of now-deleted tweets.
- June 30, 2021: Twitter users notice that this is absolutely normal behaviour for Tallarico, citing his presence on the AtariAge forums, and also note that Tallarico sure follows a lot of white supremacists on his public twitter account. Like a lot a lot.
- July 19, 2021: Okay so like I really wanna stress that 90% of the Amico's life as an entity is just videos of Tallarico talking about how great it is and showing off the same 10-15 second gameplay clips or occasionally showing off unfinished hardware at random events, and I can't possibly research all of them, but I do want to just highlight that one of the random lookie-loo types who appear in one of these videos, set at some kind of Crayola-themed pop-up event is confirmed to actually be a known investor, a fact which which was not disclosed at all.
- August 8, 2021: The Amico is delayed again, this time until "end of year" 2021.
- August 9, 2021: The Amico is delayed again, this time indefinitely. Yes they did these back-to-back like this.
- October 11, 2021: Despite the lack of any concrete release date, physical Intellivision Amico games become available via Intellivision's website, described as RFID cards resembling original Intellivision cartridges that license a title to your system (as far as I can tell, no actual game code is stored on the card. The card is essentially a link to the game's store page, though the license is transferrable by tapping the card to a different Amico). The games are available in bundles of either four or eight titles in collector's edition packaging for either $79.99 or $149.99. In the video accompanying the launch, Senior Technical Director John Alvarado describes the cards as being "an RFID card that is also an NFT; that means this is tracked in the blockchain, this specific individual card," so that's something. Also this is just speculation on my part, but Tallarico really likes using a lot of tech buzzwords but seems to lack the technical knowledge to understand them and sometimes confuses them with one another, so I really think that when he says RFID, he specifically means NFC, and that he's confused the terms "NFC" and "NFT," which he's done before in material related to the Amico. This would be the funniest thing in the world and holy shit I hope it's true.
- November 22, 2021: In yet another trailer/demo video posted by Intellivision (which has since been taken and reuploaded twice with revisions), a demonstration of a first-party title alternatingly referred to as Tank Battle and Battle Tanks features several art assets stolen from World of Tanks and other sources, which are quickly spotted by fans. Similar slip-ups are common, with the heavily-featured Moon Patrol remake literally having the opening text crawl from Star Fox 64 in it.
- December 6, 2021: Tallarico's continued incendiary comments on the AtariAge forums get the Intellivision Amico subforum closed and discussion of the Amico banned.
- February 7, 2022: Tommy Tallarico steps down as CEO while remaining as President of Intellivision Entertainment.
- February 7, 2022: Intellivision launches another crowdfunding campaign via the Start Engine platform, this time aiming to raise an additional 5 million dollars. Though intended to run for three months, the campaign was closed just three weeks later on March 1st after raising just $58,001. Including campaigns aimed at angel investors, this was the fourth time Intellivision had started a fundraising campaign to support the Amico. The disclosures to investors that accompanied the campaign includes the information that the company has "generated no revenues" since its inception in 2018; cannot continue to operate past July 2022; cannot account for $1.35 million paid to Chinese electronic manufacturer Ark Electronics USA; and, most bizarrely, that Intellivision must pay $100 per unit sold to a single investor named Sudesh Aggarwal until their debt is repaid. The disclosures also claim that "there may never be a fully operational Intellivision Amico" and that the company is planning another investment whip-round for another $5 million concurrently with the Start Engine one, and that the resulting $10 million would "fund the company for approximately 7 to 9 months."
- February 8, 2022: New CEO Phil Adam claims that the Amico and its associated software has a slim profit margin and will likely increase in price after release, saying “It’s not going to go up 500%, it’s not going to be $50, but it’s going to go up 50-100% in some cases"
- March 22, 2022: Intellivision releases an unboxing video for the still-unreleased system. Viewers are quick to point out the obviously-staged nature of the video, including details like the box being the European EFIGS packaging but the system's power supply cable only having a standard North American NEMA connector plug, the system using American spellings of words like "favorites," and prices in the store being in USD.
- April 7, 2022: Gamestop begins cancelling pre-orders of the Amico at Intellivision's request.
As a huge fan of the absolutely bonkers news cycle surrounding obvious scams and vaporware in the gaming industry, this whole endeavor has been the juiciest thing to come down the pipeline in the last few years. I greet every new detail with a huge glassy-eyed grin and an "uh-huh, and then...?" Currently I'd rank it as well above "the Coleco Chameleon is a capture card with electrical tape on the back" and rapidly approaching "the Gizmondo is a front for the Swedish mafia." Please @ me with all available Amico news please. Unless it's good. Then I don't care.
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