Happy Holidays

INTELLIVISION ABUM CARTRIDGE [UNFINISHED]

Includes the games Santa's Helper, Easter Eggcitement and Trick or Treat Design/Program: Dale Lynn

Graphics: Kai Tran, Lori Sunahara

DESCRIPTION

An album of three holiday-themed games:


Santa's Helper

Find and gather all the toys and gifts. Find the elf for extra points. Get all the gifts and join Santa in his sleigh. Drop gifts down chimneys as they scroll past below the sleigh.

Easter Eggcitement

Find the Easter eggs hidden in the park. Find the Easter Bunny for extra points.

Trick or Treat

Go trick-or-treating; get candy from houses where the lights are on. Avoid the witches, ghosts and pumpkins.

DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

As Intellivision games started growing in size, a technical limitation was hit: the Intellivision memory map only allowed for 16K of cartridge space. Some new games on the drawing boards, especially ECS games, required at least 24K.

The Design & Development department worked around the problem by building cartridges using pagable ROM. 4K blocks -- pages -- of data could share the same address space and be selected by the program as needed.

While the pagable ROMs were intended to allow larger games, it was apparent that they would be ideal for multi-game "albums." Several old and/or new games could easily be linked together on one cartridge with a menu.

To demonstrate this, Dale Lynn of the D & D department came up with the original idea Happy Holidays. The cartridge would contain three original holiday-themed games.

Demo screens for the games were designed by Kai Tran and Lori Sunahara, also of D & D, and Dale programmed some simple animation. Dale presented the idea at a meeting of the senior Mattel Electronics executives.

The concept of game albums was enthusiastically embraced: everyone started brainstorming ideas for albums of both original and recycled games. (Many albums probably would have hit the market in 1984, but only two -- Go For the Gold and Party Line -- formally made it onto the release schedule.)

The idea of Happy Holidays itself, however, was quickly squelched by VP of Application Software Gabriel Baum. Gabriel jealously guarded his department as the only one within Mattel to actually develop Intellivision cartridges. At the meeting, he dismissed the idea of a holiday-themed cartridge, declaring there would be no market for it. Case closed. Happy Holidays died on the spot.

(One D & D programmed game did eventually make it to market: Melody Blaster for the ECS Music Synthesizer.)