The Intellivision Amico lives on as a project in a zombie state but it is, for all real intents and purposes, a dead idea. Many will argue that it was dead upon announcement; the idea of a follow up to a long moribund brand that sought to compete in the console space by positioning itself as a more expensive Ouya with a weird controller and a lot of hoops to go through to get games onto the platform. I agree it never had the ingredients for any kind of market success, but it was funded with well over $10,000,000, which is enough to put a product out into the market (as the Ouya showed) and I thought we would at least get to see it released and people check it out and review it. That a console is a bad idea has not been a bar to its release in the past, though most of those releases like the Apple Pippin and the PCFX had deep corporate pockets behind them. I had hoped that the Amico would come to market and take its rightful place as an oddity beside the Matel Hyperscan and the Amiga CD32. Instead it turned out to be another piece of vaporware, like the Phantom.
I'm old enough to have grown up at a time when the console race was not solidified into 3 major players as it has been for the last 20 years. I remember seeing the 3DO and the CD-I in stores. I remember the release of the PlayStation and the buzz of confused anticipation at Sony entering the game market to go up against then titans Nintendo and Sega. I remember when different consoles really were different with strengths and weaknesses that don't really exist anymore (the PS5 is slightly better than the Xbox at some things and slightly worse at others but it's hard to tell much of a difference, and the Switch is just weaker at everything.) like the PS1 being better at 3D and the Saturn excelling at 3D. That's part of why I ought both PSVR headsets; because they reminded me of weirdo add ons I never had like the Sega CD and the 32X.
The Amico stimulated the part of my brain focused on those things and excited me in a way that pretty much nothing in gaming does anymore. Gaming has gotten so corporate and standardized that its lost a lot of the weirdness it used to have. Even Nintendo has mostly given up on gimmicks, with motion controls mostly being optional and implemented in logical ways. The Amico was going to be different. It was going to have screens on the controllers with no face buttons. It was going to allow you to use a cell phone as a controller for action games in a way that obviously was never going to work well. It was ambitious in all the wrong ways while being underpowered and completely superfluous in the market. It boasted of having half a dozen "pack in" games (despite having no physical media) like a virtual version of Farkle, as if it was still 1992 and there weren't ubiquitous free games on every single platform. You probably have better free games than Farkle available on your TV at this point. Every console has access to free to play juggernauts like Apex Legends and Fortnight, and various weekly sales where you can pick up amazing indie and even AAA games for pocket change. Games are astonishingly cheap these days. Right now on Xbox you can pick up Pankapu for under $2.50. That may or may not be your cup of tea but it's probably a better version of what the Amico was offering for less than the cost of a coffee and they were trying to sell a now $300 console by packing in 6 of these things while Xbox and PlayStation are offering pack ins like Forza Horizon 5 or God of War Ragnarok. It was mind blowing.
Meanwhile the level of shenanigans were also pretty incredible. From running multiple crowd funding campaigns with absolutely awful investment terms (I actually feel bad those happened because people got bilked out of real money) to selling boxed copies of digital only games with neither hardware nor software ready to go (included as an unencrypted RFID card in the box) to declaring each game license was an NFT with no apparent plan on how to implement that nor any thought about what a bad idea that was in a console pitched as family friendly. The console was often touted on the things it wouldn't have, including T and above rated game, DLC and Microtransactions, and games with 3D gameplay (something that even the Super Nintendo and Genesis had.) All of those things that the market has shown that gamers want and will buy, and more importantly that developers need as tools to maintain profitability. The system had LED lighting to go along with your games, which seems like something that would be fun for about 30 seconds and then extremely annoying from that point onwards. It was fascinating how they managed to pile bad ideas on top of each other like a Jenga tower of stupidity until it all came crashing down.
I just wish it had come out. I wish units existed in the wild so we could marvel at the crappy software lineup in the same way we look at Plumbers Don't Wear Ties all these years later. I would have loved to pick one up for like $50 just to experience playing Finnigan Fox (a reskinned version of the platformer Fox 'N Forests) with that weirdo controller. I did my best to approximate the experience by playing both Fox 'N Forests and Rigid Force Redux on the normal consoles I have, but stripped of their Amico context they are both just pretty average indie games mostly notable because they have already faded in the background on the consoles they were released on and yet someone was trying to launch a new machine with them as prominent games. At least when Sega tried to launch the 32X with a bunch of ports of old games they were best in class versions of pre-eminent enormous hits like Space Harrier and Mortal Kombat II. This is like if someone tried to launch a console based on having a version of Aero the Acrobat or Clay Fighter. All filler no killer.
Alas what did the Amico in was not its horrible ideas or even what appears to have been pretty bad execution but a combination of grift and incompetence. The company opened a bunch of expensive offices despite having no revenue stream, hired a large number of employees, and generally ran as if it were a new iteration of a megacorp like Sony or Microsoft launching their debut consoles rather than an independent company with limited funding. $17,000,000 is a lot of money but it's not ALL the money, and unlike Microsoft it couldn't afford to lose billions of dollars to break into the games market. They spent money that should have been dedicated to finalizing hardware and getting it manufactured on renting commercial real estate in sweetheart deals with company executives and buying an advertising slot on E3 to market a product that would never be available for consumers to buy. We don't even know how many games were finished, but judging by their consistent showing of titles with "placeholder" stolen assets it doesn't seem to have been that many. Maybe their version of Astro Smash will launch some day, but who actually cares when current consoles have multiple versions of Space Invaders that are far superior. Space Invaders '91 on the Invincible Collection is great, as is Infinity Gene (backwards compatible on Xbox, as are Galaga Legions and Legions DX) and why anyone needs a 6/10 at best version of a forgotten game like Astro Smash is unclear, but it's a better value proposition at $10 or whatever on PSN than it is as a pack in for a $300 console.
But I had a lot of fun watching the car crash and I would have deeply enjoyed watching people puzzle over it. It felt like a revival of something I miss from my gaming youth. Not the simplistic games or the bad controllers (Hello Jaguar, how you doing?) but the bad ideas and weirdness. Oh well it was fun while it lasted. Except for people who actually invested money. Probably not fun for them.
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