The aspect of Amico that fascinates me most is the "emperor has no clothes" effect
By bigsocrates 0 Comments
I've been thinking about the intellivision Amico a lot recently. This is true much of the time, but specifically in the last week or so after the news came out that Atari had bought the original Intellivision IP from the now nameless Amico company. I'm not the only one who this has affected. One Jeff Gerstmann devoted 20 minutes of his podcast to Intellivision, which is impressive considering how irrelevant the brand actually is.
At this point Amico is like an old dilapidated property that the owner won't pay to tear down so instead it's being allowed to slowly fall apart. Selling off the Intellivision IP was like the roof caving in. There's still a structure standing there but now it doesn't even look like it could be fit for a purpose. It's just a teardown waiting to happen. This has been true for awhile but now it's as obvious as four walls with nothing on top, freely letting the elements have their way with the remaining contents.
And yet there are still people claiming that Amico will rise again and put forth a viable product. Still people insisting on holding on to pre-orders so fanciful they might as well be stock in a Pegasus rideshare program powered by fairy dust. Amico still has believers against all evidence and reason. And I'm drawn to that.
I got into the Amicosphere because I've always been drawn to observing, if not buying, oddball hardware. The 32X, CD-I, Jaguar, and 3DO all fascinated me. They were this alternate world of video games I never had access to and I always wondered what they were like. Playing games on a new or different system was always an actually different experience back in the day. Controllers and capacities were so unlike each other that at least 90% of the time you can tell an N64 game from a PS1 game just looking at a screenshot. This has been lost as the platforms have all converged to the point where the differences often break down to small differences in frame rate and resolution or how the force feedback in the controller works.
Amico promised a totally different experience. A special touchscreen controller with no face buttons, only shoulder. A focus on 2D games (originally the claim was that it would outperform PS4 in 2D, which always seemed shockingly unlikely to me and was, in fact, a complete and total lie.) A completely new way of approaching the modern game console.
It was obvious from the start that it wouldn't work, since the controllers combined a bunch of already failed ideas but implemented much worse and the idea of releasing a lower powered system against the juggernaut that is the Nintendo Switch and the growing availability of games on devices like smart TVs and streaming sticks is just stupid, but it was going to be fascinating to watch them try.
It turned out not to be that fascinating because they barely made an effort. They never developed the console beyond the prototype stage, to call their software development anemic would be to severely overrate it, and their outrageous spending seemed totally unsustainable (it was.) If you want to see what it would look like if someone actually took a real shot at a similar concept see the history of the Ouya, a console that also seemed doomed and did fail pretty quickly but at least was made by a team that was trying to execute on the things they said they were going to do (even if the CEO was woefully underinformed about the actual games market.)
But even as Amico was stillborn something else was emerging. The Amico hanger-on ecosystem. A group of weirdos driven by a variety of motivations, many of which overlapped in the same person. Some were old Intellivision fans who wanted to see their childhood brand resurrected and didn't really understand the modern games market. Some were disenfranchised fans of simple arcade games who seem to be totally unaware of the modern indie movement that has brought those games roaring back in enormous numbers (and often at very high quality.) Some were starstruck by Tommy Tallarico, mid-level videogame microcelebrity. Some just seemed contrarian and angry, happy to latch on to a product that let them fight against the "haters" and fantasize about their eventual triumph when they'd be able to shove it in all our faces.
But to remain as part of this group you had to have at least one trait in common. A willingness to pretend that Amico games didn't look like the slapdash shovelware they clearly are.
The thing about Amico is that other than a few ports of pre-existing games, none of the software ever looked better than "okay." I've covered this extensively in the past. Tommy Tallarico at one point said that every game was going to be on the level of Cuphead and then he went ahead and put out Shark! Shark! and the worst version of Missile Command not seen on the Jaguar. And in order to support Amico the people who were behind it had to pretend that this stuff looked good and they were excited to play it.
It's a perfect illustration of the "emperor has no clothes" effect. You know you're lying. The people you're talking to can see that you're clearly lying. But you need to hold on to the obvious lie because it's a required claim to support something else you actually care about. Nobody cares about these games. When they gave the most ardent supporters prototype systems and told them to test the games they didn't even bother to play them, demonstrated by the fact that they missed game breaking bugs and videoed themselves playing with all the skill and comfort you'd expect from someone who hadn't played a game in 35 years and had never seen this game in particular before.
Some of them made Youtube channels about the Amico, dedicated a huge chunk of their free time to it (even more than I do writing a couple blogs a month) and then when asked what game they were most excited for said Finnigan Fox, which is just a graphical reskin of a game called Fox 'N Forests that already exists on every platform and which they haven't even bothered to play. It would be like someone saying that the Nintendo Switch game that most excited them was Skyrim, and then when the Switch was delayed for 5 years not even bothering to play Skyrim on any other platform. Except Skyrim is Skyrim and Finnigan Fox is a mediocre euro platformer.
It's fascinating and kind of hilarious to watch. Most of the group has quietly abandoned ship. One switched to an Amico hater and now to a Gamergate 2 guy, as if he didn't have a well documented history of pretending to be excited about a bunch of low quality flash games on an (at the time) $200 console. Some have hung on, unenthusiastically pretending they're still excited about the Pegasus ride sharing company that will open any day.
I watched a video stream of some of them reaction to the news about the Intellivision IP. They were confused and emotional about their childhood brand being swallowed by its rival. You could tell that some of them were replaying childhood arguments about whether Atari or Intellivision was the better system. They'd lost back then and here they were as middle aged men, losing again after dreaming that this time Intellivision would come out on top and the Amico would conquer the VCS. They halfheartedly pretended that the Amico might still come out even though it was clear they knew it was over. One of them said that even if the system never comes out the $200 he spent on pre-orders was worth it because of the friends he'd met and the experiences he'd had along the way. As if he'd plunked down his money to join a social club instead of buy a piece of consumer electronics.
When I pre-ordered my Dreamcast if the Gamestop clerk had said "you're not getting your system but the real Dreamcast is the friends you made along the way" I would have called my credit card company immediately. I wanted to play Sonic Adventure so bad the need felt almost physical. None of them really wanted to play these games. They were just pretending for other reasons. They were pursuing other needs, whether those were community or being noticed by Tommy Tallarico or trying to build a brand and leech a little fame. It was never about the games for them.
And so they pretend that Dart Frenzy is a compelling product. Or that it wasn't a huge red flag that we kept seeing the same games and the same footage over and over for years on end. Or that any of this could have mass appeal in a world where everyone has cellphones and we all know what games can look like. Nobody who wants to play video games lacks access to them anymore. It's not 1985.
Different people are fascinated by different parts of the Amico saga. Some find Tommy Tallarico a fascinating character; an egomaniacal brazen liar who built a house of cards around himself and had to watch his detractors revel in its collapse. Some are into the financial shenanigans and where all the money went. For me it's always been about the weird games, and as the information on them dried up about the people who pretended to actually want those games, and pretended that other people might too.
We live in a world where people lie to us constantly, and more and more they insist on their lies being taken seriously. They get indignant when you call them out on obvious falsehoods. I don't want to get explicitly political here, so all I'll say is that the stakes on some of these lies are extremely high, and some of these lies are very dangerous indeed, like when Putin insists that people pretend that Ukraine was the agressor in their conflict. To watch a microcosm of this play out where the stakes were very low and the liars lacked the social capital to actually get people to pretend to believe them was cathartic for me. It made the world feel a little more sane and under control.
On the livestream of Amico fans the guy who said he was glad to spend $200 to get nothing in return also expressed concern about Atari putting out an Intellivision 50 package because the history of Intellivision is so much richer and deeper than that of Atari. This was such a weird thing to claim that it legitimately took me aback. I think he actually believes it, probably because Intellivision remained in the hands of the people who made the original system longer and they kept putting out quasi-official games for quite a long time. He legitimately didn't seem to be able to differentiate between the historical significance of Atari at its world-changing commercial peak and Intellivision making low run games for a zombie brand after Mattel jettisoned it. For this guy the need being filled was to have other people care about the brand he really cared about, and if the price of that was pretending to be excited by Dart Frenzy or to spend $200 on pixie dust consoles that never existed then he was willing to pay. I can sort of understand this and it's more on the benign end compared to the clout chasers and angry contrarians. It makes me wonder if there are other console warriors who are like this, disguised by the fact that there are actual legitimate fans of game systems that exist and are good. Something to ponder.
Regardless I will continue to follow the Amico saga until the house fully caves in and maybe after. Video games used to be weird and I miss that. Systems used to be different (you can argue the Switch still is) and I miss that. But while for me it started being about the games it's not anymore. It's about the cargo cult constructed around them. I guess I have that in common with the supporters. None of us care about the games.
AT LEAST I PLAYED FOX 'N FORESTS THOUGH!
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