Atari today announced that it will purchase the Intellivision brand along with "specific games" from Intellivision Entertainment LLC. It's a depressing coda to the early days of Western home consoles, especially in the US market where the Atari 2600 dominated the scene of the late 1970s. Intellivision was one of Atari's main rivals, almost entirely because the machine had the support of Mattel (a time when video games were sold in the store's toy department) and launched its first console in 1979, which was 1 of Atari's main rivals.

The concept of "console warfare" didn't really exist, but the competition was real. Mattel has been working on Intellivision since 1977 (a bag word for "Intelligent Television") and launched a big-money advertising campaign that directly compared the capabilities of the Atari 2600 with the capabilities of the system. While the hardware sold reasonably well, Atari's 2600 remained before (which was a few years before the 1983 crash), Mattel quietly spun out of business in the late 1980s and the console was manufactured until 1990.

The years that followed were not friendly to either company, but with 2 great successes, Atari was truly chosen under different owners. But the current iteration of Atari is regaining its luster little by little to the brand under CEO Wade Rosen. While Atari hotels and Nft have had some mind-boggling aspects, they have been welcomed by the company's legacy and older games and have received more widespread attention (perhaps a notable move in Rosen's tenure so far was the acquisition of Nightdive Studios, the maker of the excellent System Shock remake).

Intellivision IP is certainly in line with its focus, and Atari will not only "try to expand the digital and physical distribution of traditional Intellivision games," but in the future "potentially new, but it will sell you a t-shirt soon." The agreement includes more than 200 title rights and all associated trademarks in the Intellivision portfolio.

It's not yet shown which game Atari is interested in bringing back, but we hope to see a more bizarre monopoly of Intellivision like Dracula and Microsurgeon. It's worth noting that the press release includes the digital Eclipse, owned by Atari: a retro expert with a great track record of producing the Atari 50th anniversary collection and, more recently, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Some sort of Intellivision collection with added historical context makes sense.

Confusingly, following this sale, Intellivision Entertainment LLC rebrand itself to the remaining business profits that are the Amico Home app and the Amico console (which will be allowed to distribute Intellivision games). Well, perhaps it now has a bit of spare cash to fund hardware production at the end of last year. 

"This was a very rare opportunity to unite former competitors and bring together fans of Atari, Intellivision and the Golden age of the game," said Wade Rosen, Atari's chairman and CEO.

"Integrating Atari and Intellivision in 45 years will end the longest running console war in history," said Mike Mika, studio head of Digital Eclipse. It might rather exaggerate things. If this was a great gladiator contest, the crowd left decades ago when both competitors were already out on their feet. But victory is a victory, and for all the Grizzled Atari fans out there, perhaps this is worth celebrating.