DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

David Warhol, who had programmed Thunder Castle at Mattel, had helped prepare the Thunder Castle cartridge for its INTV Corporation release. Terry Valeski, President of INTV, approached Dave a short time later. Would he be interested in programming an enhanced one- or two-player version of the original NFL Football cartridge?

This was quite a challenge. So far, the "new" INTV titles -- Thunder Castle, World Championship Baseball, Thin Ice -- had simply been unreleased Mattel Electronics product and had already existed as EPROM prototypes. Preparing those games for release had essentially involved getting the files into the proper format for General Instruments to manufacturer ROMs. An enhanced football cartridge, though, would require new programming.

It was now 1986, over two years since Mattel Electronics had closed. All of the development equipment had long since been sold off. Valeski could supply the NFL Football source code on 8-inch floppy disk, but nothing else -- including any startup money.

Taking a big risk, Dave put his own money into having a custom card designed and built (by his friend, hardware expert Scott Robitelle) that would interface an IBM PC and Intellivision Master Component. He put his own time into writing a cross assembler and linker to develop 1610 games on the PC.

He then hired former Mattel programmers Ray Kaestner (BurgerTime) and John Tomlinson (Mission X), plus former Mattel graphic artist Connie Goldman (Thunder Castle) to help put together the enhanced football game.

The risk paid off. INTV Corp. bought the completed game, Super Pro Football, introducing it for Christmas 1986. The cartridge was so successful that INTV used the "Super Pro" designation on all of their later sports titles, and Dave Warhol's company -- Realtime Associates -- was hired to do all of INTV's subsequent games.