Blue Sky Rangers

The first Intellivision games, produced by an outside software firm, were so successful that Mattel started a new company -- Mattel Electronics -- to develop games in-house. A staff of young programmers was hired. For fear that Atari would try to lure them away, Mattel insisted that their identities be kept anonymous; they were referred to in publicity as The Blue Sky Rangers. In 1982 the video game industry boomed. The Blue Sky Rangers grew from twenty programmers to well over a hundred at Mattel's Hawthorne, California headquarters. Dozens more were hired at Mattel's offices in France and Taiwan. Scores of companies jumped on the bandwagon, developing games for Atari's, Mattel's, and newcomer Coleco's game systems. It seemed that every major company, from 20th Century Fox to Quaker Oats, had to have its own video game division. The Blue Sky Rangers themselves, in addition to designing Intellivision games, developed titles for the Atari 2600, Colecovision, Apple II, IBM PC and PC Jr., and Mattel's Aquarius computer. Hundreds of new cartridges and disks hit the market. Midway through 1983, it all collapsed. Supply far outpaced demand, stores returned millions of unsold cartridges, and the industry lost about, oh, one or two billion dollars. At the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it was obvious that video games were dead. Just about everyone ignored the new game system introduced by one company; it was called Nintendo. Two weeks after C.E.S., Mattel Electronics was shut down. Except for a buildingful of accountants and lawyers left behind to clean up the mess, everybody was laid off. The rights to Intellivision were purchased by a new company, INTV Corporation, started by the former Marketing VP of Mattel Electronics. Using Blue Sky Rangers to complete unfinished Mattel games and to create new ones, INTV continued to release Intellivision games throughout the eighties. When INTV finally shuttered in 1990, it ended a ten-year-plus run of commercial production for Intellivision -- the longest support of any cartridge-based game system. The Blue Sky Rangers themselves lived on, meeting annually to commemorate the closing of Mattel Electronics. Many rode the video game comeback of the late 80s to new success: several run their own game companies; others are top programmers, artists, designers and executives, responsible for some of the industry's biggest hits. When the Blue Sky Rangers established their website in June 1995, thousands of fans visited, most wondering when they could play the classic games again. So Intellivision Productions, Inc. was founded by some of the Blue Sky Rangers to purchase the rights and develop versions playable on PC and Mac. In June 13th, 2017, founder Keith Robinson passed away. In 2018, Tommy Tallarico started Intellivision Entertainment, LLC after joining with Intellivision Productions. In 2019 Intellivision Productions became Blue Sky Rangers, Inc.