Winter 2021-2022 Sales Report for Sealed and Graded Intellivision Games
This report tracks the scarcity of 39 sealed-and-graded Intellivision titles across 22 markets, 36 months, and 327 market appearances—and includes full box and seal condition data for all titles.
{Disclaimer: None of the following is intended as investment advice. This is a market analysis by a journalist and video game collector, not a financial adviser. While I’ve purchased graded Intellivision games in the past and will do so again in the future, I’m not an investor in games—any collecting I do is done for my own enjoyment. I’ve never sold games, nor do I plan to.}
Introduction
Please see the full Introduction to the Intellivision sealed-and-graded game rankings at this RETRO link.
Buying Sealed and Graded Intellivision Games
By most standards of assessment, the Intellivision was a better home console than the Atari 2600, even if it sold 3 million units as compared to the Atari 2600’s 30 million.
The Intellivision’s graphics were better than the Atari 2600’s, and the Intellivision’s controllers—while imperfect—were imperfect because they were years ahead of their time. While you could easily get an Atari 2600 adapter for your Intellivision, Atari understandably had little interest in facilitating a return of the favor, so if you had an Intellivision with an Atari 2600 adapter you had the best version of any game you could afford released on both consoles (almost without exception the Intellivision version) as well as access to any Atari 2600-exclusive video games. There’s a reason IGN in 2009 ranked the original Intellivision, released by Mattel Electronics in 1979, the fourteenth best video game console ever, just behind the XBox, ColecoVision and TurboGrafx-16, and ahead of the PS3, Nintendo Gamecube, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, and Sega Saturn.
Tech Raptor calls efforts to compare the Atari 2600 and Intellivision a “bloodbath”—in the Intellivision’s favor—with the latter console having an “overwhelmingly better library of games.” Few retro gamers would rather be stuck on a desert island with fifty Atari 2600 games than the same fifty games as released on the Intellivision. While the uniqueness of the Intellivision controller can lead to some frustration, the range of options it opens up for gameplay marks the Intellivision as a better console than the Atari 2600. Even The Atari Times readily admitted that “because the Intellivision controller had a built-in keypad, as well as a sixteen-directional pad/two action buttons, it supported more complex gameplay.” Writing for Techspot, Cal Jeffrey says, “To this day, I still argue with my cousins that my Intellivision was better than their Atari….[it] hooked me on console gaming.” The National Museum of Play writes, “Without a doubt, Intellivision had an advantage over Atari [as to graphics].”
But when it comes to talking about the sealed-and-graded Intellivision game market, there hasn’t often been much to say. The market is comparatively small—almost as small in size as compared to the Atari 2600 market as the Atari 2600 market is to the Nintendo market—and while it’s easy to find rankings of the best Intellivision games, retro gamers simply don’t discuss classics like Happy Trails or Horse Racing or Sea Battle or Shark! Shark! the same way they do the best Atari 2600 games, as many of them have no personal history with the Intellivision. I admit this can be frustrating for a video game journalist; the Intellivision was so innovative that it should be seen as the first great home gaming system, and given that it arrived during the second generation of consoles, that makes it a landmark in the art form’s history. Its games should surely be valued consistent with that by gamers and game collectors alike.
The Intellivision was also—many don’t realize this—the world’s first 16-bit home video game console.
If the Atari 2600 sealed-and-graded game market has been hurt by the absurd amount of attention heaped on widely available and decidedly mediocre “licensed” games—even as, say, the amazing run of games released by Activision from 1980 to 1983 has been almost completely ignored by collectors—the Intellivision market is hurt by an even simpler obstacle, which is that there’s no existing document allowing collectors you to see the contours of the market in a meaningful way. This RETRO article aims to change that.
Part of doing this is publishing Atari Age’s “The Top 50 Intellivision Games”, which acts as a mechanism to make two key points: first, that many of the great Intellivision games were exclusive to the console, and second, many of the Intellivision games that weren’t “exclusives” were ported from the Intellivision to the Atari 2600, not vice versa.
In other words, Intellivision games were so good that Atari wanted them and made the effort of porting them and changing their names to get them. That’s quite telling.
One thing I looked for in producing this Intellivision-oriented report was whether I could detect the same signs of market confusion that currently plague the Atari 2600 sealed-and-graded game market. Is there any indication that Intellivision collectors are sitting on their sealed “raw” (not yet graded) copies of certain games rather than helping build a robust Intellivision graded-game market because they wrongly think the games won’t sell? Or don’t think potential buyers have enough data to understand the market? It’s hard to say, though it’s clear that WATA and VGA not having put out any Intellivision “population reports” doesn’t help.
Interestingly, it seems that the very top-selling Intellivision games are selling just fine. And there’s enough money in the market, in fact, for even obscure Intellivision games to do well enough that we’d expect it to be worthwhile for collectors to at a minimum test the waters for every Intellivision title that’s now available in reasonable condition.
Besides many Intellivision Donkey Kong sales in the mid- to high hundreds, a copy of Masters of the Universe: The Power of He-Man sold for $3,120 in July 2020. Sixty days earlier, an Intellivision Frogger had sold for $1,680 at Heritage Auctions. Last year also saw a Pitfall! go for the same price. More recently, in April of this year, an Intellivision Pac-Man sold at $1,440. And though it’s the most plentiful game in this market by orders of magnitude—see below if you doubt it—copies of Donkey Kong clearly just taken from factory-sealed cases continue to sell at auction for $500+.
The point here is that while the relative scarcity of Intellivision games is not yet being properly respected by the graded video game market—let alone the historic nature of the console—sales of the console’s few presently “hot” games are lucrative enough that not only is there no reason for Intellivision sellers to sit on their hands instead of getting their sealed games graded and on the market, but there’s actually little reason to think that such prospective sellers are sitting on large stocks of sealed Intellivision games. It’s more likely that the Intellivision market is simply one whose hallmarks are historical significance and organic scarcity—which in saner times would augur a “boom.”
What Makes This Ranking Different
Because the market for graded Intellivision games is so much smaller than the market for graded Atari 2600 games, RETRO was able to do something for this report that it couldn’t do for Atari 2600 games: catalogue the condition of every graded game on the market. This is the closest we’ve ever come to seeing anything like an Intellivision population report, and may offer insight into the likely condition profiles of games from other consoles.
A large-scale breakdown of the box and seal conditions of scores of Intellivision games gives RETRO readers a sense of what such breakdowns may look like for comparable games on other consoles. If the best-selling game on the Intellivision, Major League Baseball, is hard to find now, that tells us something about the potential current and future value of a copy of the game that’s still sealed and in near-mint/mint condition. By the same token, if we look and see (as we do) that the most available game for the Intellivision, Donkey Kong, is not only one that was also available on ColecoVision and the Atari 2600 and became a popular brand across many generations of home video game consoles, but is also one routinely found in near-mint or mint condition, it might indicate to us that collectors did not keep factory-sealed boxes of every game in each generation of video gaming’s history—but primarily those games that included licenses or cross-console/cross-generation appeal. Otherwise, there would be copies of Major League Baseball everywhere now. So a ranking like the one below helps by letting collectors see whether popular, unlicensed, console-exclusive games are indeed paradoxically more likely to be (a) hard to find, and (b) in relatively poor condition. Such intelligence could change some collectors long-term collecting habits appreciably.
In the past, the assumption has been that we can determine the universe of copies of a given title (its “population”) and even a general profile of these copies’ box and seal conditions, on the basis of the year a video game was released and whether the title was over-produced. But right now that’s not how things are looking. Factory-sealed boxes appear to be rarer than people think, and collectors now seem to be flocking toward mediocre licensed games that are by far the most likely to have been preserved in great condition—and therefore should be worth less than their better, unlicensed, same-console peers that only intermittently come to market via a top-condition copy.
All of this suggests that if you’re running out to buy a sealed Intellivision game tied to an existing non-gaming property like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Peanuts, Scooby Doo, Tron, E.T., Spider-Man, G.I. Joe, Looney Tunes, or even cross-gaming-generation franchises like Super Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong, what you may be doing is paying top dollar for the games most likely to be available and most likely to be in top condition, erasing any “condition premium” that you may be hoping for in future resales.
One other difference in this ranking, as compared to the Atari 2600 and NES reports at RETRO, relates to market size: because the Intellivision game library is a quarter of the size of the Atari 2600 library (136 games as opposed to 528) we would expect this report to be much shorter than the Atari 2600 one, and it certainly is. So readers should review the listings below with this expectation and understanding: what you’re looking at is data from a niche market. As noted above, though, we can still learn a lot about other markets from this one—and can’t yet know whether there will be a major Intellivision market “boom” somewhere well down the line.
The Top 50 Most Admired Intellivision Games
{taken from the Atari Age Intellivision Poll, with asterisks to indicate Intellivision exclusives; game titles in bold have appeared on the sealed-and-graded video game market since 2019}
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin*
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain*
Burgertime
Astrosmash
Thunder Castle*
Beauty and the Beast*
Shark! Shark!*
Bump ’n Jump
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom*/^
Major League Baseball*/^^
Lock ’n Chase
Atlantis
Tron: Deadly Discs
Utopia*
World Championship Baseball*
Diner*
World Series Major League Baseball*
Chip Shot Super Pro Golf*
The Dreadnaught Factor
Dracula*
Beamrider
B-17 Bomber*
River Raid
Demon Attack
Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack*
Night Stalker
Loco-Motion*
Spiker! Super Pro Volleyball*
NFL Football
Pitfall!
Bomb Squad*
Q*bert
Super Pro Football
Dig Dug
Worm Whomper*
Space Battle
Ice Trek*
Microsurgeon*
Skiing*
Chess
Happy Trails*
Truckin’*
Stadium Mud Buggies*
Pinball
Horse Racing*
Sharp Shot*
Mountain Madness: Super Pro Skiing*
Sea Battle*
Mind Strike*
Thin Ice*
*Intellivision exclusive (meaning it didn’t appear on the Atari 2600). In some cases the games in this category were also released for obscure or minor home consoles or PC.
^While this game wasn’t released with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons title, it is often referred to in this way (see above) by fans, as its developer confirmed that it was intended to be part of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line of Intellivision games.
^^The best-selling game on the Intellivision.
The Rankings
Below, 39 Intellivision games are ranked by their availability across 327 appearances in 22 marketplaces. The title of each game is followed by the number of copies that have appeared in the markets listed below since 2019. Parenthetical numbers indicate the number of six-unit factory cases included in each title’s total copy tally; if no such parenthetical appears, there is no evidence of cases of that title being on the market.
While none of the below information is intended as investment advice, I’ll repeat here the now universally understood conventional wisdom about how a report like this one should be read: as a general rule, unless one is extremely fond of a game and wants to “slab” it (encase it in tamper-proof plastic) purely for one’s own enjoyment, one would not want to, for investment purposes, buy any of the games considered widely available according to the rankings below.
Methodology
No CIB (“complete-in-box”) games are considered.
No “box-only” (often called “display-only”) transactions are considered.
No “repro” (reproduction games) are considered.
No “loose cart” (cartridge-only) transactions are considered.
No distinction is made between earlier and later box releases, or box “errors” or “variants.” Though these do exist for some titles and do affect market value, the focus here is on the availability of each game title, rather than title variants.
Because the focus here is on title availability, a game that reappears in a public market a second or subsequent time during the period of these rankings’ review is counted each time it appears in a market, rather than just once.
Markets Reviewed (22)
Amazon: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Brian’s Toys: transactions through December 23, 2021.
CertifiedLink: transactions through December 23, 2021.
ComicConnect: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Dave and Adam’s Card World: transactions through December 23, 2021.
EBay: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Etsy: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Evolve Comics & Collectibles: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Goldin Auctions: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Heritage Auctions: transactions through January 18, 2022.
Instagram (Game Mine): transactions through December 23, 2021.
Instagram (Playcadia): transactions through December 23, 2021.
Mercari: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Metropolis Comics: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Minus Worlds: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Prime City Comics: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Pristine Auction: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Reece’s Rare Comics: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Retro Raven Games: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Squeaks Game World: transactions through December 23, 2021.
Video Game Sage: transactions through December 23, 2021.
WalMart (QFH): transactions through December 23, 2021.
Ranking Key
Each entry below is structured in the following way:
(Availability Ranking) Game Title, # of Copies on Market (Number of For-Sale Boxes), rank in Atari Age’s Top 50 Most-Admired Intellivision Video Game poll*
Box Condition of Sold or For-Sale Copy #1/Seal Condition of Sold or For-Sale Copy #1 (# of Sold or For-Sale Copies in This Condition)
Box Condition of Sold or For-Sale Copy #2/Seal Condition of Sold or For-Sale Copy #2 (# of Sold or For-Sale Copies in This Condition)
Box Condition of Sold or For-Sale Copy #3/Seal Condition of Sold or For-Sale Copy #3 (# of Sold or For-Sale Copies in This Condition)
{And so on.}
*If applicable.
The Top 40 Most Available Sealed/Graded Intellivision Games
(including all known for-sale or sold copies since January 2019, with scarcity rank preceding each game and the number of factory-sealed boxes that have come to market in parentheses)
🔸 Twenty Notable Games in This Category: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin, Astrosmash, Atlantis, Beauty & the Beast, BurgerTime, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Frogger, Lock n’ Chase, Microsurgeon, Mind Strike, NBA Basketball, NHL Hockey, Night Stalker, PGA Golf, Pitfall!, Tron: Deadly Discs, Utopia, and Worm Whomper.
🔰 #1 | Donkey Kong, 106 (4)
Factory cases (twenty-four copies)
9.8/NS (8)
9.6/NS (10)
9.4/NS (24)
9.2/A++
9.2/A+
9.2/NS (10)
9.0/NS (8)
8.5/NS (5)
8.0/NS (6)
7.5/NS (7)
7.0/NS
6.5/NS
🔰 #2 | Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin, 35 (2), #1 most-admired
Factory cases (twelve copies)
9.6/A++ (4)
9.6/A+
9.4/A++ (9)
9.4/A+
9.2/A++ (2)
9.2/C
9.0/A++ (2)
9.0/A+
8.5/A++
7.5/A+
🔰 #3 | Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain, 28 (2), #2 most-admired
Factory cases (twelve copies)
9.8/A++ (2)
9.4/A++ (5)
9.2/A++ (5)
9.0/A++
8.0/A++
8.0/A+
7.5/A
🔰 #4 | Tron: Deadly Discs, 26 (3), #13 most-admired
Factory cases (eighteen copies)
90+ (VGA) (2)
9.4/A++
9.4/A+
9.2/A++
9.2/A+ (2)
9.0/A+
🔰 #5 | BurgerTime, 13, #3 most-admired
9.6/A++ (3)
9.6/A
9.4/A++ (4)
9.4/A+
9.2/A++ (2)
9.0/A+
7.0/A+
🔰 #6 | Beauty & the Beast, 9 (1), #6 most-admired
Factory case (six copies)
9.0/A+
8.5/B+
8.0/A+
🔰 #6 | Night Stalker, 9, #26 most-admired
90 (VGA) (2)
9.4/A++ (2)
9.2/A++ (3)
9.0/A++
8.5/A++
🔰 #8 | Masters of the Universe: The Power of He-Man, 8
9.8/A++
9.2/NS
8.5/A+ (2)
8.0/A+
7.0/A
6.0/A+ (2)
🔰 #8 | Space Spartans, 8
9.6/A+ (3)
9.4/A+
9.2/A+ (4)
🔰 #10 | Frogger, 7
9.6/A+ (5)
9.2/A
85+ (VGA)
🔰 #11 | Armor Battle, 6 (1)
Factory case (six copies)
🔰 #11 | Buzz Bombers, 6
9.4/A++ (2)
9.0/A++ (2)
9.0/A+ (2)
🔰 #11 | Pitfall!, 6, #30 most-admired
9.6/NS (2)
9.4/NS
9.2/NS
8.5/NS
6.0/NS
🔰 #11 | Space Hawk, 6 (1)
Factory case (six copies)
🔰 #11 | Tron: Maze-a-Tron, 6
9.2/A
9.0/A+
8.5/A+
7.5/A++ (3)
🔰 #16 | Utopia, 5, #14 most-admired
9.8/A++
9.6/A++
9.2/A++
8.5/A+ (2)
🔰 #17 | Carnival, 4
9.8/NS (2)
9.6/NS
9.0/NS
🔰 #17 | Donkey Kong Junior, 4
9.8/A++
9.2/NS (PAL)
9.0/NS (PAL)
9.0/A++
🔰 #17 | Space Armada, 4
8.5/A+ (4)
🔰 #20 | Astrosmash, 3, #4 most-admired
85+ (VGA) (2)
7.5/B+
🔰 #20 | NBA Basketball, 3
9.0/B
7.5/A
6.5/A+
🔰 #20 | Scooby Doo’s Maze Chase, 3
9.4/A++
8.5/A++
8.0/A
🔰 #23 | Atlantis, 2, #12 most-admired
9.4/A++ (2)
🔰 #23 | Lock ’n Chase, 2, #11 most-admired
9.4/A++
8.5/A++
🔰 #23 | Pac-Man, 2
9.4/A++
9.0/A++
🔰 #23 | Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, 2
9.6/A+ (2)
🔰 #23 | Vectron, 2
9.4/A+ (2)
🔰 #23 | Worm Whomper, 2, #35 most-admired
8.0/A++
8.0/A+
🔰 #29 | The Dreadnaught Factor, 1, #19 most-admired
9.8/A+
🔰 #29 | Microsurgeon, 1, #38 most-admired
6.0/A+
🔰 #29 | Mind Strike, 1, #49 most-admired
85+ (VGA)
🔰 #29 | Mr. Basic Meets Bits n’ Bytes, 1
8.5/A+
🔰 #29 | NHL Hockey, 1
9.0/B+
🔰 #29 | PGA Golf, 1
9.0/A++
🔰 #29 | Space Battle, 1, #36 most-admired
8.5/A+
🔰 #29 | Star Strike, 1
9.6/A++
🔰 #29 | Triple Action, 1
8.0/A+
🔰 #29 | Yogi’s Frustration, 1*
9.0/NS
🔰 #29 | Zaxxon, 1
9.4/A++
*Prototype (released as a reproduction cart and box).
Intellivision Games Not Seen From 2019 Onward in a Public Market
ABPA Backgammon
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom
Air Strike
Auto Racing
B-17 Bomber
Beamrider
Blockade Runner
Body Slam! Super Pro Wrestling
Bomb Squad
Bowling
Boxing
Bump ’n Jump
Centipede
Championship Tennis
Checkers
Chess
Chip Shot: Super Pro Golf
Commando
Congo Bongo
Defender
Demon Attack
Dig Dug
Diner
Dracula
Dragonfire
Duncan’s Thin Ice
The Electric Company: Math Fun
The Electric Company: Word Fun
Fathom
Frog Bog
Go for the Gold
Grid Shock
Happy Holidays: Easter Eggcitement
Happy Holidays: Santa’s Helper
Happy Trails
Horse Racing
Hover Force
Ice Trek
The Jetsons: Ways With Words
King of the Mountain
Kool-Aid Man
Lady Bug
Land Battle
Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack
Las Vegas Roulette
Learning Fun I
Learning Fun II
Loco-Motion
Major League Baseball
Melody Blaster
Mission X
Moto-Cross
Mountain Madness: Super Pro Skiing
Mouse Trap
NASL Soccer
NFL Football
Nova Blast
Party Line: Hard Hat
Pinball
Pole Position
Popeye
Q*bert
Reversi
River Raid
Royal Dealer
SafeCracker
Sea Battle
Sewer Sam
Shark! Shark!
Sharp Shot
Slam Dunk: Super Pro Basketball
Slap Shot: Super Pro Hockey
Snafu
Spiker! Super Pro Volleyball
Stadium Mud Buggies
Stampede
Street
Sub Hunt
Super Cobra
Super Masters!
Super Pro Decathlon
Super Pro Football
Super Soccer
Swords and Serpents
Tennis
Thunder Castle
Triple Challenge
Tron: Solar Sailer
Tropical Trouble
Truckin’
Turbo
Tutankham
U.S. Ski Team Skiing
Venture
White Water!
World Championship Baseball
World Cup Football
World Series Major League Baseball