Fellow Amico enthusiasts, it’s time to get excited!

For those who used to follow the intellivision Amico project the last couple years have been fallow. Tommy Tallarico has left the company and the Internet, abandoning his previous commitment to posting through every failure and disaster, and activity has died way down. Intellivision still exists as a sort of zombie company but they’re not claiming they have any looming date when a console will actually come out. Instead they’re focusing on publishing their small handful of games within the mobile app they put out that, with the power of Amico’s cutting edge engineering, allows you to play mobile phone games so long as you have at least two mobile devices (one to run the game and one to act as a controller.) Unsurprisingly this app hasn’t exactly been a raging success, seemingly only being of interest among the tiny core of Amico followers who remain part of the cult despite Intellivision’s remarkably consistent record of dishonesty and failure.

Despite the fact that the age of Amico has long passed the Amico Reddit remains robust. A lot of the conversation there reminds me of my friend who is a massive Pittsburgh Steelers fan and loves to rewatch entire old football games during the offseason just to relive the glory. They talk about years old posts and drama and relitigate old arguments with the benefit of hindsight, reveling in showing just how full of shit Tommy and his supporters/enablers were (not that it was very hard to see it at the time.)

But some of the discussion focuses on the rare updates that Intellivision continues to issue about its barely used app and the games available on it. Why does Intellivision keep running this app and its games even though it’s not commercially viable and will never be commercially viable? Nobody knows for sure. Some speculate that they think this will stave off litigation. I don’t think it has much effect there but who knows what people believe. Some think it’s a way of draining whatever resources remain in the company or avoiding triggering debt obligations that might be due if the company folds. Maybe the owners just like the attention, maybe they’re deluded enough to think this could actually become a viable business someday or that they can sell the corpse for an appreciable amount of money if they just keep pretending it’s alive in a corporate version of Weekend at Bernie’s. The ways of Amico are mysterious and not for us to know.

What is for us to know is that the updates themselves are hilarious.

Basically the updates act as a series of confessions where the people who run Intellivision, led by John Alvarado who was one of Tommy’s right hand men during the glory days, tell on themselves. Mostly what they reveal is the absolutely terrible state that Intellivision’s games were in even as the company blustered about rocket ships on launch pads and getting ready to ship the hardware on which these games would play. The most hilarious recent example is Cornhole, whose list of fixes read like something from a real game’s early alpha. These fixes address problems that were found by random clueless users of the app who actually tried to treat it as a serious thing and discovered that a lot of what was on it was flat out broken.

Intellivision somehow managed to launch Cornhole on their “service” with the campaign mode entirely broken and unable to progress, despite being almost half a decade after the game was originally supposed to come out and after over a year of alleged bug testing by volunteers. Alvarado also claimed this was his favorite of the Amico games, proving conclusively that pretty much everyone who claims to be a huge Amico fan doesn’t actually want to play the thing. This makes sense, why would you want to play crappy versions of old flash games when there are real video games to play (or you could go outside and take a walk or read a book or watch Blight Club or whatever), but I find the fake enthusiasm for the product kind of fascinating.

It's one thing to go on the Internet and talk excitedly about something you’re into, even if you do so partially for clout and attention. It’s entirely another, much sadder, thing to fake that. If you’re doing it for money I understand but at this point there’s no money left, and a lot of these people never got paid in the first place. There were nearly a dozen regularly updated Youtube channels at one point where people talked about how excited they were for Amico and yet none of them actually wanted to play these games. Some of them got “test units” (prototypes) and could play to their hearts’ content and continued to make videos about how much they loved them and how great they were and yet they didn’t even play enough in their testing to find the most basic flaws that anyone who actually liked a game would discover in less than half an hour.

People who have been keeping up with my blogging for the last few years could possibly remember that as part of my Amico hate I finished both Fox ‘N Forests (the basis of Finnigan Fox) and Rigid Force Redux because I wanted to know what Amico games would actually be like. I got those games on other platforms and I played them until I rolled the credits, and even a little beyond just to get to understand them. I can’t say I hated either game, they’re okay for modestly priced indies even if neither is exactly Hollow Knight or Andro Dunos 2. But I can’t say I loved either of them and I played them mostly out of morbid curiosity because I wanted to know what I was talking about when I said they weren’t very good and wouldn’t be able to move consoles to anyone.

Now it turns out that I, an amateur Amico hater who never took the thing that seriously and followed it pretty casually, may have spent more time with these games than the people who created entire podcasts around the games, who bought “physical products” for them. Who went on the Internet on camera and said they were super excited about them and that their jaw was hitting the floor at the amazing graphics, yet never actually bothered to play much of them?

You’ll find me doing a lot of weird things around video games. I’ve played games I didn’t really like, I’ve stopped playing games I was really enjoying for dumb reasons. I’ve put off playing games I was excited about. And I’ve written a lot about games and gaming for no money and almost no attention. Just because I had thoughts and I wanted to share them with anyone who’d listen. What I’ve never done is start a podcast about a system, claimed to be excited about it for literal years, covering up every misstep the company made and actively fighting against “haters” who tried to be honest, all the while claiming that these games were amazing and everyone would love them, and then NOT ACTUALLY PLAYED MUCH OF THOSE GAMES WHEN GIVEN THE CHANCE.

It's bizarre, pathological, behavior. For the people who were in on the financial scam and making money off the project at least I get where they’re coming from. A lot of people have claimed to like things they didn’t actually care about for money. But the volunteers? They carried water for a scam for years, made it part of their identity, spent hours every week talking it up and then they didn’t actually bother to play the games when given the chance. If I’d done something like that, which I never would, you can be damn sure I’d have finished those games. Just so I could talk about them convincingly if for no other reason. That IS why I played those games. To completion! It took me hours and nobody actually cared, but I wanted to know what I was talking about!

I’m never going to play Cornhole on the Amico app. Why would I? It’s a beanbag toss mobile game that requires at least two devices to play and is more of a pain to set up than actual beanbag toss. But the fact that it launched with these glaring issues that were only discovered because some rando tried to treat the project seriously shows how unserious the whole thing always was. Everyone involved, from the people making the system and games to the unpaid shills pretending that an obviously outdated and ill conceived system was an exciting new frontier in video games has now demonstrated that they never actually cared about playing video games on this thing. When given the opportunity they didn’t even bother. It was not an ill-conceived but well-intentioned system, it was a Potemkin console, an obvious emperor has no clothes situation where nobody even tried to feel the fabric because they knew there wasn’t any.

Nobody ever wanted this thing, at least not once the games started getting shown, and those who claimed they did were lying, which we know because when given the opportunity to play it they…didn’t.

My jaw is hitting the floor.