The Intellivision is a home video game console released by Mattel Electronics in 1979. It distinguished itself from competitors with more realistic sports and strategic games. By 1981, Mattel Electronics had close to 20% of the domestic video game market, selling more than 3.75 million consoles and 20 million cartridges through 1983. At its peak Mattel Electronics had about 1800 employees in several countries, including 110 videogame developers. In 1984, Mattel sold its video game assets to a former Mattel Electronics executive and investors, eventually becoming INTV Corporation. Game development ran from 1978 to 1990, when the Intellivision was discontinued.
Gold Box is a series of role-playing video games produced by Strategic Simulations from 1988 to 1992. The company acquired a license to produce games based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game from TSR, Inc. These games shared a common game engine that came to be known as the "Gold Box Engine" after the gold-colored boxes in which most games of the series were sold.
Cryptic Studios is an American video game developer specializing in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. It is headquartered in Los Gatos, California, and was a wholly owned Perfect World subsidiary, and is now owned by Embracer Group.
The Blue Sky Rangers is a group of Intellivision game programmers who previously worked for Mattel in the early 1980s.
Dungeon was one of the earliest role-playing video games, running on PDP-10 mainframe computers manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation.
Stormfront Studios, Inc. was an American video game developer based in San Rafael, California. In 2007, the company had over 50 developers working on two teams, and owned all its proprietary engines, tools, and technology. As of the end of 2007, over fourteen million copies of Stormfront-developed games had been sold. Stormfront closed on March 31, 2008, due to the closure of their publisher at the time, Sierra Entertainment.
Chuck Kroegel is an American video game designer. He was an executive for many years with Strategic Simulations (SSI), and played a role in developing their position as an industry leader in war games and role-playing video games. His career in the video game industry now spans over 30 years.
Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball is a baseball video game (1983) designed by Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower, and published by Mattel for the Intellivision Entertainment Computer System. IWSB was one of the first sports video games to use multiple camera angles and present a three-dimensional perspective. It was also the first statistics-based baseball simulation game on a video game console; all prior console baseball games were arcade-style recreations of the sport.
Tony La Russa Baseball is a baseball computer and video game console sports game series (1991-1997), designed by Don Daglow, Michael Breen, Mark Buchignani, David Bunnett and Hudson Piehl and developed by Stormfront Studios. The game appeared on Commodore 64, PC, and Sega Genesis, and different versions were published by Electronic Arts, SSI and Stormfront Studios. The artificial intelligence for the computer manager was provided by Tony La Russa, then manager of the Oakland Athletics and later the St. Louis Cardinals. The game was one of the best-selling baseball franchises of the 1990s.
Old Time Baseball is a 1995 baseball video game designed and programmed by Don Daglow, Hudson Piehl, Clay Dreslough, and James Grove. It was developed and published for MS-DOS by Stormfront Studios. Built on the Tony La Russa Baseball engine, Old Time Baseball includes complete lineups of every major league team from 1871 to 1981, totaling 12,000 players.
Gateway to the Savage Frontier (1991) is a Gold BoxDungeons & Dragons computer game developed by Beyond Software and published by SSI for the Commodore 64, PC and Amiga personal computers.
Shark! Shark! is an Intellivision game originally designed by Don Daglow, and with additional design and programming by Ji-Wen Tsao, one of the first female game programmers in the history of video games. The player is a fish who must eat smaller fishes in order to gain points and extra lives while avoiding enemies such as larger fishes, sharks, jellyfish, lobsters and crabs. After eating a certain number of fish, the player's fish grows in size and is thus able to eat a larger selection of fish. However, while the larger fish becomes a bit faster, he is less agile than the small fish and has a harder time avoiding enemies.
Eddie Dombrower is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He co-created the baseball games Earl Weaver Baseball and Intellivision World Series Baseball. He also designed the first dance notation computer software, DOM.
Cathryn Mataga is a game programmer and founder of independent video game company Junglevision. Under the name William, she wrote Atari 8-bit computer games for Synapse Software in the early to mid 1980s, including Shamus, a flip-screen shooter.
Neverwinter Nights was an early graphical multiplayer online role-playing game, which ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.
The Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module, commonly abbreviated as Intellivoice, is an adapter for the Intellivision, Mattel's home video game console, that utilizes a voice synthesizer to generate audible speech. The Intellivoice is a large, brown cartridge that plugs into the Intellivision's side-mounted cartridge slot; games specifically designed for the device can then be inserted into a slot provided on the right-hand side of the module.
The history of massively multiplayer online games spans over thirty years and hundreds of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) titles. The origin and influence on MMO games stems from MUDs, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and earlier social games.
