The Atari-era game console Intellivision is seriously coming back

Before PlayStation vs. Xbox, before even Nintendo vs. Sega, there was Atari vs. Intellivision.

There were other competitors that came and went during the 1980s, too. Atari bested them all, but Intellivision, with three million units sold during the first half of the decade, came the closest to putting up a fight.

Now it's coming back. As the new team driving Atari continues to tease 2018 gamers with vague details of the soon-to-be-revived hardware, Intellivision is plotting a similar course. Spearheading the effort is Tommy Tallarico, co-founder of the popular Video Games Live concert tour.

"I see a huge gaping hole in the market now with families in the home,” Tallarico said in an interview with VentureBeat. "We will be focused. We will not try to compete with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. That would be insane, and we would need $1 billion."

Noting the popularity of products like Nintendo's Classic console releases, Tallarico moved to purchase a stake in Intellivision Productions from the estate of company founder Keith Robinson, who died in 2017. He then reassembled some of the old team and rebranded the company under its new name: Intellivision Entertainment.

You can expect the first details on this revamped Intellivision to surface on May 31, when the company takes to Facebook for a live Q&A. You'll have to wait for a full reveal, though; that won't be happening until Oct. 1.

It's difficult to know what we should expect from this Intellivision revival. It's smart to not take on the "big three" of Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, but the modern tech space is also littered with the corpses of intentionally underpowered, indie-friendly gaming systems, like Ouya.

The desires that drive the modern video game industry are all rooted in the idea of technology pushing ever forward. Virtual reality headsets, 4K-capable machines, even just hardware that can deliver better graphics... those are the bullet points modern fans look for.

Of course, there are also products like Nintendo's NES Classic and SNES Classic, both of which capitalize on nostalgia. You can play a collection of very old games on very new TVs, HDMI ports and all. Intellivision is very much in this category of nostalgia-driven products.

But does it -- or even Atari, since we're on the subject -- have the same kind of brand recognition? Fans flocked to Nintendo's Classic releases because they featured early games from some of the company's top franchises, including Super Mario, Zelda, and Metroid.

Intellivision was ahead of its time at the tech level. The version of the machine released in 1982 was the industry's first 16-bit game console, released almost a decade before the SNES and Genesis set that standard. Intellivision was also the first platform to offer any kind of an online service, and it offered some of the most advanced game controllers of the time.

All of which means very little in 2018. The fact is, Intellivision doesn't come loaded with a Super Mario-level brand to get people excited. It was an ahead-of-its-time console in the early '80s that no doubt still has a niche hardcore following. But one wonders how Tallarico and Intellivision Entertainment hope to make a splash here.