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Intellivision Next Was Almost A Reality
While speaking at GDC, industry legend Don Daglow, who was one of the original five programmers for Mattel's Intellivision, revealed that he was working on a follow up to the classic machine. Daglow called the console the "Intellivision Next" and mentions it would release in 1983. During his speech Console Wars Revisited, he talked about the famous video game industry crash that happened around that time. Had the Next come out, it would have beat the original Nintendo to the U.S. market, but because of the crash, the project was scrapped and Daglow moved on. The NES ended up dominating the U.S home console market until the Sega Genesis came along in 1989. Daglow also admitted that even though 90% of the consumers that were polled thought the Intellivision was better than the Atari 2600, they never once had a period that they were able to outsell the rival machine due to the spendy price tag of $299 (which interestingly inflated to today would cost $892).
How do you think the 80's would have played out if the Next had been a rival to the NES?
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