In the 1980s computers were often referred to as “home computers”. Until then, the very idea of a such a thing would conjure up images of enormous and frightening rooms in “research centres”, filled with blinking lights, spinning tape reels and Joe 90 having his mind erased and then re-programmed with the thoughts of someone who was really good at yachting.
And on top of that, computers were also called “electric brains”, which had a tendency to blow up if Patrick McGoohan asked them the question “Why?”. (For some reason they never printed out a slip of paper replying “Why not?”, like in a comedy text adventure.) Ultimately, prior to about 1980, the idea of something along those lines in someone’s house was the stuff of madness.
But this was now the decade of The Microchip Revolution, and of R Tape Loading Errors and Kevin Toms’ cheerful bearded face. Now you could buy your very own computerised electrickery thinking boxes, and if you typed “Why?” into one it would sternly respond with something like “Nonsense in BASIC”. Checkmate, Number Six!
Anyway, all that shite I just wrote is an intro to an article about ads for computer games on actual British TV, which I did because you have to have an intro.
First off is K-Tel’s faintly odd attempt at muscling in on the lucrative Spectrum market, and the slightly less lucrative Vic 20 one as well. K-Tel, of course, had a number of fingers in all sorts of pies, usually to do with crap compilation LPs or “labour saving” gadgets that insulted your intelligence simply by existing. K-Tel weren’t adverse to new trends, and one particularly gravy-filled pie they decided to jab a hairy swollen digit into was one with the words “VIDEO GAMES” baked into it, using extra bits of pastry to… make out the letters… or, er, by carving that into the crust or something. (That metaphor sounded better in my head when I started writing it.)
So, instead of K-Tel advertising 20 Golden Hits Of The Enoch Powell Stranglewank Band Playing The 40 Platinum Smashes Of Lennon & McCartney & Gilbert O’Sullivan, here they’ve got cassettes with actual games on them in actual shops. And game(s) plural is the important bit to note, as each tape has TWO games on one cassette, whereas other tapes would only have one! Hoorah! Which would be good if any of them were actually halfway decent, but this is more The Power House than Ultimate Play The Game.
Indeed, even the shittest effort from the latter company would likely be more entertaining than the two being flogged here, with the second one appearing to be a not-as-good version of Chris Sievey’s minor classic “The Biz”. I’m not sure if this came first or The Biz did, but either way there’s nary a mention of Whistle Test or Probe Records to be seen. The whole two for one thing wouldn’t really catch on, even if you tried including an actual officially licensed game of The Evil Dead on the B-side.
The advert itself is a cracker, though – I wish the absurd camp nonsense of it could go on for a few more minutes at least. Extras from a provincial theatre group staging of some sort of 50s jukebox musical are pissing off a Dracula with their wild hip gyrations, which are so gyratory they’re woken both him and Lady Dracula, even though these are their waking hours. (He probably wasn’t too happy with their Sinclair BASIC attempt at drawing him, either.)
However, Lady Dracula is basically fine with the younger generation, ultimately clicking her fingers to the crazy wild cat rock’n’roll sound of The Big Bopper claiming “I got no money, honey!”, before dying in a massive plane crash. If only Don McLean could have had an Oric in 1959, it might have taken his mind off that whole “would you believe that bloody levy was dry?” business.
Meanwhile, there’s a classic example of that kind of detached, faintly ironic voiceover used in ostensibly humorous ads back then on British television. If you needed to make some sort of wry comment juxtaposing the product being sold with whatever stuff was being shown on screen, then this is the kind of thing you did.
So, this time round, the voice of someone who you’d imagine would be otherwise be taking a “side-eye glance” at Ronald Reagan saying “Well” a lot is trying to sell you some Spectrum games – or if wet, games for the Vic 20. And they’re all available at a billion shops you haven’t thought about in years, or are at least now teetering close to bankruptcy. “Twice the fun with two games on one”, as long as you’ve got the 8K RAM expansion.
Onwards into the beyond. What do we see now? An ominous bleak landscape, John Hurt narrating, it’s the 80s… no, this isn’t how we’re all going to die from shagging; it’s only the bloody Intellivision!
Hurt, modulating his voice from the more familiar “THERE IS NO KNOWN CURE” doom-tone into a “look how grand and mint and skill this amazing thing is” kind of manner, is extolling the virtues of Mattel’s ill-fated dalliance with early 80s video games.
If you know your gaming history, you’re aware how this console was wiped out in / partially caused the North American Video Games Crash – which didn’t really concern anybody outside the US or Canada to a large extent. In the UK we all shrugged our collective shoulders, if we noticed it at all, and got a Spectrum or C64 or something instead. And if you were really unlucky, you got a Dragon 32.
Still, at this point all that’s yet to happen, and Our Lord God John Hurt runs through the amazingness of the console best known these days for that strangled electronic voice saying something about being a “buhhhmerrrr”. (Well, you know what Texans are like.)
The word Intellivision was meant to denote “intelligent television” – TV you interacted with, rather than everyone’s favourite badly-dressed transphobic educational organisation with a jingle composed of naught but total malevolence. In 1982 it was still remarkable to plug a box into your TV’s ariel socket and make a white rectangle hit a square, so something with actual colours and graphics and text and sounds other than “BIP!” (although they still weren’t a million miles away from that) blew everyone’s minds.
Once the Temu Milky Bar Kid picks up that weird disc-and-keypad controller (note to imaginary editor: would “the Happy Shopper Milky Bar Kid” make more sense in this context? “The Fine Fare Milky Bar Kid”…?), the almighty power of the machine is revealed through, er, a magic cloud? Oh, no, it’s a future hover-city, my mistake. This advert may have been recorded on Betamax, which was technically superior to VHS and all, but it’s still a bit hard to make out at first.
And then we get to see an actual game. I’m not going to make fun of the games themselves – within the context of the time, they really were genuinely enjoyable back then, and the best of them are still fun for a quick outing today. You’re not going to get Red Dead Redemption or anything, but they do have their worth.
I must point out, though, that the description of the ad’s featured game Star Strike -“the ultimate space battle… destroy these aliens” – described 95% of all games at that point. The remaining 5% were either about gorillas kidnapping the girlfriends of Italians (shut it, Manning), or unsettling British whimsy about a man in a hat having to avoid toilets.
Apparently, you must get an Intellivision because “no one else can take you there” – I assume “there” means playing excellent games and that, and not that time when you asked your dad to take you to London to maybe perhaps possibly buy a NEC PC Engine from an import electronics store in 1989, and him flat out saying “NO”.
And it was true that no one other than Intellivision could take you “there”… well, apart from the Intellivision’s rival Colecovision, which had the best graphics of that console generation. (And was manufactured by a leather company…?) Even the increasingly creaky Atari 2600 could be relied upon for some decent thrills in 1982-ish, thanks to programmers going above and beyond to squeeze as much as they could out of that disco-era console.
As with that K-Tel business above, one of the major delights of these sorts of adverts is seeing all the old stores where you could have bought this vision of the future. Here it’s pretty much bloody everywhere, including the famed Bentalls department store.
Personal reminisce time! I visited the Kingston Upon Thames flagship store many times as a child, though I don’t recall seeing an Intellivision there myself. I think I was too distracted by the giant Playmobil figure they had standing by the toy department entrance. But now in the Hell Year 2025, the only thing like a console you can get in Bentall’s toy place are one of those Amiibo-like figurines that come shaped like Pikachu or Wonder Woman. I’ve nothing against “Wondy” or Pikachu (if I could have a baby, I would want it to be exactly like that adorable electric mouse), but y’know, it’s not the same. Come to think of it, they might have been actual Amiibos. But more unforgivingly, Bentalls has been “re-branded” as “Fenwick’s”. Gah. Personal reminisce time over!
Still, Mattel would go back into video games once Nintendo had taught Corporate America that it’s not a good idea to run a gaming company like this twat did. After that, the following decades would see a steady flow of games licensed from Mattel for Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft. They tended to focus mainly on Barbie, and also Barbie, with some Barbie thrown into the mix, and sometimes Shit Version Of Action Man… but mainly Barbie. Fair enough.
And finally, a compilation of one of the most legendary crossovers produced by human hand. Forget anything to do with DC or Marvel or anything like that – behold Morecambe And Wise And Atari!
After you’ve sat through the classically Youtubey thing of the uploader putting an intro at the start that’s a bit too long (first advert starts at 17 seconds in, accurate starting time fans), we get the head-spinning juxtaposition of The Stage newspaper and the concept of music hall with Missile Command and Pac-Man, rammed right next to each other.
Eric Morecambe cackling while manhandling a joystick (steady now) while in his classic flat cap and mac get-up is worth the price of admission alone… which is, er, free. Or at least the price is sitting through at least two adverts, one of which may be some weird and creepy bit of disinfo from that there “manosphere” they have these days, annoying everyone by screaming at the sight of blue hair dye and going insane in prison.
Other delights are Eric and Ernie having much the same arguments about playing a game as you did with your friends / cousins / siblings at any time between 1982 and 2000, and Eric doing a classic bit of business by not allowing Ernie to play Yar’s Revenge.
But rather than me waffling on about it any longer, you’re better off just watching it yourself. The above video is approximately four minutes of pure joy, and has the power to end wars. Have you played Atari today? (Bites tongue to avoid mentioning emulation – oh no what a giveaway…)