Atari Buys Ancient Rival Intellivision, Insists The Amico Is Still Coming

Atari finally won the oldest console war of all recently–even though most of us thought it ended decades ago. The company announced that it bought the Intellivision brand, best-known for being one of its main competitors in the earliest era of home consoles in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

According to a press release, Atari bought the brand and “certain games” from the existing company known as Intellivision Entertainment. That incarnation of Intellivision has promised the release of a new console called the Amico since late 2018, with a planned release date of October 2020. However, the Amico has been delayed multiple times since then for a variety of reasons, most notably the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite these setbacks, Atari says that the Amico console will indeed come out at some point in the future–through the company that formerly owned the Intellivision name–and that it will continue to support the mobile app Amico Home. Originally developed by toy company Mattel, the Intellivision reportedly sold an estimated 5 million units. The best-known Intellivision games are mostly arcade ports (as was common at the time), such as Burger Time, Q*bert, and the Pac-Man clone Lock ‘N’ Chase. Atari released the Atari 2600+ last year, a reimagining of the classic console that plays original VCS and 7800 carts, as well as all-new games.

The Amico is closely associated with former Intellivision CEO Tommy Tallarico, a controversial figure in the games industry who bought a stake in Intellivision in 2017. In 2022, well-known YouTuber Hbomberguy released a lengthy video essay that covered a number of apparently false (and often bizarre) claims Tallarico has made over the years, including exaggerating the number of games he worked on, as well as being the first American to work on Sonic the Hedgehog.