[SIGCIS-Members] THIS FRIDAY @ 2PM ET: Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman on the Mattel Intellivision

[Laine Nooney]

Join us Friday, February 14, as *ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories *hosts
scholars Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman for a talk about their
co-authored book *Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and
Almost Bankrupted Barbie.* The event will be at 2PM ET on the *ROMchip *Twitch
channel, https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal.

Get tickets HERE
<https://www.tickettailor.com/events/romchipajournalofgamehistories/1498801>
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*About the Book*
*The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from
the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and
countless others who invented the gaming industry.*

*Astrosmash*, *Snafu*, *Star Strike*, *Utopia*—do these names sound
familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the
Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and
1984. This system was Atari's main rival during a key period when
videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In *Intellivision*,
Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of
this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze
Intellivision's chips and code, games, marketing and business strategies,
organizational and social history, and the cultural and economic context of
the early US games industry from the mid-1970s to the great videogame
industry crash of 1983.

While many remember Atari, Intellivision has largely been forgotten. As
such, *Intellivision* fills a crucial gap in videogame scholarship, telling
the story of a console that sold millions and competed aggressively against
Atari. Drawing on a wealth of data from both institutional and personal
archives and over 150 interviews with programmers, engineers, executives,
marketers, and designers, Boellstorff and Soderman examine the relationship
between videogames and toys—an under-analyzed aspect of videogame
history—and discuss the impact of home computing on the rise of videogames,
the gendered implications of play and videogame design at Mattel, and the
blurring of work and play in the early games industry.


*About the Speakers*

Tom Boellstorff is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of California, Irvine, and the author of *The Gay Archipelago*, *A
Coincidence of Desires*, and *Coming of Age in Second Life*.

Braxton Soderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media
Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of *Against
Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject* (MIT Press).

*Upcoming Events*
February 22 @ 11AM-11PM ET: ROMchip Twitch Fundraiser Stream, ft Phil
Salvador, merritt k, qdot, Paolo Pedercini, tinahacks, Jason Scott and
more! Come through for 12 hours of games, prizes, and historical hijinks.
Learn more HERE <https://donate.romchip.org/>.


*About ROMchip**ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories
<https://www.romchip.org/>* is a free, online scholarly journal for game
history. *ROMchip *develops, edits, and publishes ad-free, open access game
history research for a range of audiences. It supports any discipline of
work enlivening the history of games in local and global contexts, and
embraces diversity in how game history is studied, documented, collected,
preserved, and practiced. *ROM**c**hip* is a donation-based organization
fiscally sponsored by The Hack Foundation
<https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/> (d.b.a. Hack Club), a 501(c)(3)
nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499).

--
Laine Nooney <http://www.lainenooney.com/>

Associate Professor |  MCC <http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/> @ NYU
<http://www.nyu.edu/>  | they/them
Managing Editor  |  ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories
<https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal>  |  Join our Newsletter
<http://eepurl.com/crCul1>

-Need to make an appt? Click, don't email:
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-Probably typed by voice recognition, so please cherish typos
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