Your birth year
2006
Intellivision
19801980s
Intellivision is 26 years older than you
It's from 1980, before you were born.
- Maker
- Mattel
- Type
- Home console
- Debuted
- 1980
- Note
- Controller had a 16-direction disc and a numeric keypad
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About
As of 2026, it's 46 years old.
Mattel built the Intellivision to do one thing above all else: humiliate the Atari 2600. It hired George Plimpton for smug side-by-side TV ads showing off sharper sports games, and audiences ate up the swagger.
Its party trick was that flat thumb-disc controller offering 16 directions of glorious imprecision, plus a keypad you covered with cardboard overlays per game. It even got Intellivoice, an add-on that let cartridges actually talk to you in 1982 — slightly terrifying at the time.
The console that picked a fight with Atari and made trash-talk a marketing strategy.
