File:Mattel Electronics Intellivision space games commercial feat. George Plimpton

Description
One of at least 11 commercials featuring Mattel Electronics spokesperson George Plimpton aka "Mr. Intellivision".

This commercial was in response to one Atari ran where they show popular coin-op games running on an Atari VCS/2600 on a TV, next to a TV labeled "other companies" that showed static. The commercial shows Atari's VCS/2600 Asteroids game versus Intellivision's Space Battle, Space Armada, and Astrosmash. Let's see, a port of Atari's most-popular arcade coin-op game compared to a light gun-esque target shooting game, a weak Space Invaders knock-off, and an Asteroids wanna-be (ain't never ever gonna be). Doesn't seem fair :) Boy, Mattel sure gave Atari lots of free advertising for their Asteroids port (this being one of 3 commercials to feature it).

The original release of Space Battle for the Action Network (red box) series was considered "too easy" for most gamers and discontinued. Space Battle was one of the first titles available for Intellivision and was programmed for Mattel by APH Technologies because Mattel had no in-house programmers at the time. The "blue box" version of Space Battle with increased difficulty is much more common than the red box.

The "blue box" version of Space Armada is much more common than the red box. Space Armada was possible because the lawyers at Mattel discovered that Space Invaders had not been properly copyrighted by Taito. So as long as the name was changed to something other than Space Invaders, the concept was, in a sense, public domain.

Astrosmash was one of Mattel's most popular games. The game itself is rather common since Mattel offered the game free upon purchase of specially marked Master Console boxes (in 1983, Astrosmash replaced Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack as the pack-in game for the Intellivision console). The original design of Astrosmash was much more true to Asteroids with the ship in the middle of the screen and everything! Programmer John Sohl was forced to differentiate it from Atari's Asteroids for obvious legal reasons.