I’ve been thinking a lot about the Amico recently a it goes through its final death throes. It’s pretty clear that it’s never going to ship in a meaningful way and while it never seemed like a good idea I’m kind of sad that it will never make its long awaited goofy flop into the marketplace. I would have loved to see the reaction to “The Wii U but far, far, worse in every way released 10 years after Nintendo’s biggest home console flop” and to a console that consisted of nothing but cheap shovelware by design.

One of the questions that I have about the Amico is when it turned from an actual, if poorly conceived, idea for a product into pretty much an outright scam. It seems clear that by the latest crowdfunding attempt everyone involved must have known the project was more or less dead, and they went ahead trying to get people’s money anyway (they are still technically taking pre-orders) but at what point did the people involved know they were never going to release anything and were just collecting money to pay themselves and keep the lights on?

I think that the original idea was genuine. The concept of crowd-funding a modestly capable console has been attempted a few other times, and some of those projects have made it to market. Everyone laughs at the Ouya but that thing released and was pretty much what they promised it would be, at a very reasonable price. Their problem was in trying to get people to make or pay for software for the thing, but it wasn’t an insane business plan and they managed to design and produce decent hardware. The main flaw was a mediocre controller, but other controllers were also compatible.

The Atari VCS also appears to have failed in the market, but it launched with some slick looking hardware and well-liked controllers. Support, again, was bad (even Atari didn’t launch exclusive new software for it even though they’ve put out a bunch of new games in the last few years, some of which have reviewed well) and its cost was comparable with modern consoles so there was no reason to buy it. On the other hand it can be booted as a moderately powerful mini-PC with a cool form factor so at least those who bought in got a neat looking piece of hardware and some okay controllers, even if the console side was mostly a bust. Slap Linux on the thing and you can access literally thousands of Steam games, many of which run fine.

So why did Atari and Ouya get to market when Intellivision didn’t despite Intellivision having a number of game industry veterans onboard and more funding than either of the other projects?

Inexperience and arrogance.

Intellivision loved to cite the fact that it had people with over 600 combined years of video game industry experience on staff. That number is, of course, kind of silly and also misleading, but it’s true that they had a lot of people who had done stuff in the game industry involved in their planned console. The problem was that these people had the wrong kind of experience. All video game industry is not created equal. It’s one thing to have someone like Mark Cerny, who has served as lead designer on multiple hit consoles, on board, and another to be led by Tommy Tallarico, who was involved in the sound tracks for a number of games and hosted a video game review show but never had any hardware experience and hasn’t done much in actual sound design since the 90s.

This would be like trying to create a new car company and having your flagship car designed by someone who had a lot of experience making car stereos in the 1990s. Yes he might have some genuine insight into how to integrate the speakers and stereo controls into the car, but unless he stands back and lets actual experts design the engine, transmission, and suspension you’re going to have a lot of problems. Tommy Tallarico did not stand back. Instead he helped design a console that was all sizzle and no steak; a weak processor and low RAM that did not translate to a low price because of everything else crammed in, from LED lights on the console itself to its albatross of a controller that had pretty much every feature you could imagine but none that you actually needed. While other consoles done on the cheap carefully pared down their feature list to keep things cheap, using mostly widely supported off the shelf chipsets and OSes built on Android or Linux, Intellivision decided it was going to build a system aimed at children based on the whims of its 50 year old CEO, who in addition to everything else is on the record as disliking most modern games and preferring the games of his childhood.

Continuing the theme of arrogance, Intellivision spent money like a company with a healthy revenue stream or at least a very well financed start-up. It opened multiple offices in different cities, decorated with cut metal logos and spent heavily on marketing with roadshows and an E3 presentation well before it had a product ready to sell. It is one thing to hire The Rock for your big console reveal when you are Xbox, a division of the incredibly wealthy Microsoft corporation. It is quite another to spend significant money on promotion when you’re a startup without an actual product to sell. Some have argued that all those promotional events were actually targeted at investors rather than consumers, but either way it is clear that Intellivision spent money disproportionate to its funding and non-existent revenue, at least partially in an attempt to project an image of prosperity. They would have done better to humbly focus on nailing down the specs and getting to manufacturing and worry about promoting the thing after they knew when it would actually ship.

But I think that also gets back to the inexperience and arrogance themes. I think they looked at the price of components for the things they wanted to make and just assumed it would be easy to put them all together into a final product and shove out the door. What they did not realize is that sourcing a large number of components from suppliers you do not have a pre-existing relationship with, and then designing a manufacturing process to put all that together in an economical way for relatively small batch production is, in fact, really really hard, and the more non-standard what you’re making with the more parts involved the more complicated it gets. The COVID supply chain issues didn’t help, but other companies that were making simpler devices like Evercade and PlayDate still shipped their products, even though the PlayDate faced a disastrous delay when the batteries it ordered came in bad. Intellivision kept dithering around switching touchscreens and chips and making small compromises. The final controller was said to only have enough RAM for very basic graphics on the touch screen, rendering that screen even more of a gimmick.

Similarly on the software side it lagged behind on building its OS and getting everything integrated properly, to the point where now, literal years after the planned initial launch, nobody has seen a fully finished and polished version of it. Games were also made cheaply and many seem to be unfinished, with promised games never shown in depth and even those that received “deep dives” having serious flaws, like stolen assets. Many of the games were ports of outdated mobile or PC titles with a few minor changes, and it was unclear why anyone would want to spend $250 for a home machine to play stuff that could probably have run on the original Nintendo DS, a portable system released in 2004. Tallarico’s disdain for modern games and arrogance seem to have made him think that there was a hole in the market that simply did not exist. Every genre he targeted, from party games to 2D platformers to board or sports games is covered by other widely available systems. The Switch launched with Zelda: Breath of the Wild but it also launched with Snipperclips, a cheap and easy to understand title that far better than anything the Amico has shown. Even 1-2-Switch, considered a gimmicky failure on the Switch, is a better example of a family friendly party game than something like Farkle. Let’s not talk about Clubhouse Games because I’m convinced that most families would have more fun with that one title than with every game shown or announced for Amico.

So Intellivision burned through its money quickly pursuing the whims of its out of touch CEO while never quite finalizing basically anything. Maybe some of the outsourced games are ready; certainly Shark Shark appeared reasonably complete if also quite shallow, pun intended. Its inexperienced team thought things would come together faster than it did, while also having the arrogance to assume they could always raise more money if they needed to and that enough people had bought into their vision that interest would remain high. Instead they did under 10,000 in pre-orders and their recent crowd funding attempt was a complete failure. Their team is breaking up, they’ve raised the price, and the writing is clearly on the wall.

Could it have gone differently if they’d been more humble and found some people with a more realistic vision and the experience to execute? Certainly they raised enough money to produce a product and ship it to stores. It still would not have been successful, for the same reasons that the Ouya and VCS failed, but people would be able to play it and it might have developed an underground following.

So back to the question of when it moved from a badly planned dream to an out and out scam. One can argue that it has been a scam since the first crowd funding campaign with pre-orders, since they claimed they were nearly finished and ready to launch, which clearly was not the case. However I tend to think that they really did plan to make a product at that point, and they might have genuinely misunderstood how close they were to locking down their design and starting manufacturing due to the lack of console design experience on the team. I think that they may have been misleading, but they all thought they would pull it off so I would argue that it doesn’t qualify as a scam. If someone sells you something they don’t actually own on Ebay because they think they can get the item and send it to you and they follow through and you receive it you have not been scammed, even if you were lied to.

I think that it started to slide into scam territory as time went on and they continued to try to generate more revenue while promising that the system was close to completion. Do I think they still planned to ship a console when they sold games to consumers? Yes, but I think they knew they were missing the announced launch date and the fact that they were clear to include legal weasel words that you were buying a “physical product” and not a game doesn’t reflect well on them. By the time of the latest crowd funding campaign they may still have wanted to launch the Amico but they pretty clearly knew they couldn’t without a big cash infusion. They did their best to hide that and I think that’s pretty scammy.

In the end short of a tell-all book or a lawsuit that reveals internal communications I doubt we’ll ever know. People can delude themselves into thinking that unlikely things are more likely than they are. Maybe everyone, or at least some people, kept believing until the wheels fell off. I don’t know and I certainly cannot prove anything. Maybe they’ll shock us all and launch the thing, or at least put out a few units. I think it’s more likely that someone will sell one of the prototypes eventually and we’ll get to see what was actually in it and how finished the games actually were. That’ll make for some interesting Youtube content at least.

The Amico fascinates me because I’m interested in the weird and ill conceived aspect of gaming, and we so rarely get to see it these days. Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and even most of the PC game portals are professionally run companies with enough resources to make even their bad decisions (Xbox One, Vita, Wii U) into semi-successes with their defenders. We won’t see another 32X or Jaguar (horrible miscalculations by big companies) again. The Amico filled that gap for me for a little while, but it turned out to just be another Phantom or Chameleon. Oh well.