Update: Thu 7th Jul 2022 09:15 BST: The trademark for the Intellivision Amico is once again live on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website. It looks like rather than request a further extension on the existing trademark, Intellivision has instead opted to file for a brand new one as of June 30th, 2022.
As reported by IGN, Intellivision's CEO also states that the company "is still working on the console" and that the United States Patent and Trademark Office website "is usually pretty slow in updating".
So the saga continues! Whether we'll see the console actually come to fruition is up in the air, but hopefully some good news will come to the customers who have supported the project thus far.
Original Article: Mon 4th Jul 2022 13:00 BST:
In the latest sign that the Intellivision Amico is unlikely to ever release, its trademark has now been marked as "abandoned" by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
As reported by VGC, the trademark was originally filed by Intellivision Entertainment on October 19th, 2018 and subsequently accepted on September 24th, 2019. As per trademark guidelines, an application will be marked as abandoned if the applicant has either not filed a 'Statement of Use' or requested an extension on the trademark within six months of the approval.
Intellivision first requested an extension on the trademark on May 11th, 2020. This was then followed by an additional three extension requests, the latest of which was approved on November 18th, 2021. An abandonment notice was then filed on June 21st, 2022 after Intellivision's failure to submit a fifth extension request.
Intellivision now has two months from the date of abandonment to file a 'petition to revive' if it hopes to retain the trademark, though its inability to request any further extensions could perhaps be the clearest sign so far that the troubled console will likely never be released commercially.
Just last month, Intellivision raised a few eyebrows when it confirmed that staff would be significantly cut in order to help the console across the finish line. It also confirmed that such drastic steps has meant that some customers' refund requests would be delayed due to the reduced staff and financing requirements needed to continue operations.
It's certainly not looking good for the Intellivision Amico. What do you make of this latest update? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was originally published by nintendolife.com on Mon 4th July, 2022.
[source tmsearch.uspto.gov, via videogameschronicle.com, ign.com]
Comments 98
:gif of a person eating popcorn:
Surprised? No, Sad? Yes
Whoa what a shocker.🙄
Someone's probably gonna get sued.
This always looked like a hard sell. I wonder how much money they’ve lost trying to make this.
Amico, Amibo, Amico, Amibo, Amiico, Amiibo.
I’m curious whether this was ever intended to actually be released or whether it was a scam?
Who was even interested in this nonsense? It was doomed to fail from the get go. Unlike Switch Pro which is going to be a guaranteed success.
Man, was this funded with a kickstarter or any similar platform? I'd feel bad for people who lost money
It's almost more funny that you actually printing stories about it still.
Was this a crowdfunder? Someone catch me up? Are loads of people out of pocket?
Oh no.... Anyway, let's focus on important stuff now.
Seems like they have ran out of money already. It was announced over 4 years ago and very little has been shown on the progress of the system except what is an empty shell prototype and concept videos. It has been sold on marketing hype with very little actually happening in those 4 years to actually get a working product to market.
I wonder if someone made off with the money
The nostalgia console nobody wanted or asked for didn't find its audience. Hmmmm
Vapourware for sure , this was never gonna be released
Lol it was never looking good. Which is why it's a bit humorous that Nintendolife here was the only place I ever saw this thing get any positive spin on some of the stuff they wanted to do with the system, like the awful idea of making the games NFTs.
What a sad death of a console that should had been. If only Tommy Tallarico spent more time focusing on the launch of the console instead of harassing YouTubers online this would had gone somewhere. At one point this thing feels more legit than the Atari VCS, PlayDate, and Polymega, now it falls behind on all of them and is vaporware at best.
Personally, they should've gone with a plug-n-play Mini Console, with the bulk of their gaming library. You know, so it would make a bit more money. Instead of doing this cash-grab.
"It's not looking good, folks"
A statement that has applied to every single stage of this device
well the con has been exposed no point keep pretending now
not surprised but it is a shame for the few that were interested in it
"It never looked good, folks"
There, I fixed it.
I just want this to go away already, and for Tommy to get back to the Video Games Live series.
Now how about refunding folks' money, just to show this wasn't a pyramid scheme?
Now let’s see Tommy Tallarico investigated for this entire debacle. He sold people dust.
This was up on Reddit 14 days ago... https://www.reddit.com/r/Intellivision_Amico/comments/vgzkqg/intellivision_amico_trademark_has_been_abandoned/
Earthworm Jim 3 on consoles then. Good.
@Serpenterror ay the playdate is actually awesome haha
This was never a scam. Just a failure. When it was announced, it had potential for nostalgic Intellivision fans and casual gamers, but I thought the predicted release window was already too far out. I expected a tepid launch probably. Guessing the supply chain was not kind to this thing on top of all the other difficulties.
Remember folks, even the “big guns” screw up hardware launches quite often. It is not easy and recent events have humbled the biggest companies. For small, basically first-timers, it takes incredible determination and is so much more work than it looks like.
Not remotely a scam, though. There’s real software and games and heart and hope put into it. Just makes it more sad.
Well, start porting EWJ4.
@Moroboshi876 EWJ 4, amazingly.
@aaronsullivan The potential was that they could have released their IP on the switch first to satisfy the retro gamers, and make a little money before (potentially) going into hardware (which most would say does not need to exist).
If they're basically first-timers, why did their investment material tout their 600 combined years of experience? They raised a lot of money and have nothing to show.
I hope Earthworm Jim 4 isn't dead with it.
@KillerTan98 Any evidence it exists?
@TryToBeHopeful A trailer (a short gameplay teaser really) in 2020. Nothing since. And after a little more digging, it's looking really dead.
@Earthbound28 Yeah but at one point people were actually more interested in the Amico than the PlayDate. It wasn't until all the delays and the blaming of the pandemic and harassment of critics that people started backing off the Amico ship.
@KillerTan98 Yep, I think it was announced but never developed.
@Serpenterror Were they, though? This is one of the few places I have seen much positive coverage in news or comments. The playdate was always a fun product made for hipsters (and I can't wait for mine to arrive), and the coverage of it has been fairly consistent (and thankfully it was well received on release).
I don't think the interest in Amico was ever that high.
And when you compare $100 preorder numbers of Amico (about 6,000?) to the full-price preorders of the playdate (40,000 I think?), it doesn't really seem that close.
@TryToBeHopeful Cause early on the Intellivision Amico didn't seem to be the scummy product it had become, it was going to be a retro throwback console with family and casual in mind and was planning to launch at under $200 with 2 controllers, 6 pack-in games, and had digital games ranging from $2-$9 and all are exclusives. As the Amico saga continues though things change. The price went from $199 to $249 and then eventually to $299 and now it may even reach $329. The pack-in games went from 6 games to 5 games (not sure what game they took out), the price for digital games went from $2-$9 to $4-$12.
The console will not come with 2 controllers anymore, will probably lose some lighting features and will probably had games that likely won't be exclusives anymore too as they plan to release those via multiplat as well according to their new CEO and previous Coleco Chameleon Super NES inside an Atari Jaguar shell team member, Phil Adam. Early sign of the Amico being scummy is when Intellivision hired J Allard of Microsoft to join the company, the guy was only there for one week, saw that the position wasn't for him and left. If J Allard got out just as fast as he got in, then there's something way worst happening at Intellivision right now.
Maybe one of the people they laid off was responsible for renewing the trademark? 🤨
@Zverik Ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa MJ
@WiteWulf @WiteWulf Ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, yeah, maybe
@PessitheMystic They’ve lost millions of dollars. Their financials were released a few months ago and you can look at them online. It’s like staring at a train wreck.
@Moroboshi876 Earthworm Jim 4, not 3
@Burning_Spear I got my refund, thankfully.
@aaronsullivan it didn't start as a scam but the last couple of years it certainly has been. When you're asking for more money when you know full well many of the games aren't and won't be finished and keep lying about release dates when you don't even have a working cloud service to deliver games on a console that has no manufacturing contracts, then its a scam.
@KillerTan98 I don't even think they have the rights to Earthworm Jim anymore and they never did any work on it
I was really excited for this console. It was trying to do something very similar to the original Wii and was going to buy it as a party machine for when friends and family were over. This is probably the saddest commercial casualty of the pandemic.
@WhiteTrashGuy it's failure had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was meant to launch 2 years ago yet very few games have been finished, there is no manufacturing of the console in place and it has no cloud infrastructure to deliver its digital only games. None of this is the fault of the pandemic
@eaglesfly76 @TryToBeHopeful You get the point, guys...
Kinda hard to feel "sorry" for anyone in regards to this whole ordeal.
Having Tommy run his mouth about stuff he knew nothing about for as long as he did was never a great PR choice, as entertaining and braindead as it was. The weird cult of "believers" that bought into his nonsense was equally as perplexing and wild, too.
I guess I just hope some people got their money back long before this point.
I knew this console was never coming out just like the Coleco Chameleon. I'm shocked the Atari VCS is a real console, though.
If only they’d just released an Intellivision games compilation for switch… sigh. They would have made good profit on that and it would have helped this project along.
Looked promising but DOA I reckon now.
I wouldn't call this a scam; you have to promise people something good for it to be a scam. This was a sad, misguided mistake from day one. Nobody wanted this silly product, nobody was ever going to want it, and the years that Tommy & Co. spent clinging to such an obviously dead concept makes me believe that this was honest foolishness as opposed to malicious deception.
SCAM as again....no wonder they couldn't get a product out. Why do this to gamers.....
Here I was thinking of buying it because of Earthworm Jim 4. My mistake. Hopefully Earthworm Jim 4 has moved development to other consoles.
I feel like there was a point in time you could argue this wasn't a scam and it was before they went and preemptively sold allegedly-physical copies of games that don't exist yet with legal terms that said they didn't actually owe you a game for buying them.
Was this console connected to Nintendo in any way? Just curious as this site seems to cover it a lot for a non-Nintendo console.
@calbeau No lol.
@eaglesfly76 Hahah, I figured.
Perhaps in another reality this console is wildly successful and being covered constantly in IntellivisionLife.
It never looked good, like at all
There’s more chance of the Sinclair C5 making a return
@Big_Fudge Nah. There simply is close to no need for this.
Could someone explain what exactly happened here?
@YoshiAngemon a mini console with slides for the controller would have been brilliant. Even if they had sold packs of extra game download codes with 5 controller slides.
@Westlondonmist Well, years ago, AtGames made an Intellivision Flashback with games in it. I don't know if they'd be willing to bring that back for the modern era.
I thought this and the new Atari VCS were interesting, but I honestly don't see where the market for them would be. The major consoles have so much indie and retro games, these don't really do anything you can't get on the Switch or Playstation. And these retro consoles aren't cheap enough to be a compelling option. I think the Atari VCS benefited from just how unambitious it was; that is to say it was just a cheap PC with standard controllers so it didn't require any unique games. The Amico would have needed games designed or modified specifically for its weird controllers. I don't know if the people behind the Amico were acting in good faith (sometimes projects just fail, it doesn't necessarily mean they intended it to be a scam), but I wish it would have made it to market.
@aaronsullivan Failures often end up as scams. A sincere idea runs into financial difficulties... money is solicited under false pretenses to fund that "sincere idea"... the cycle repeats... a couple shady folks in the organized begin profiteering from the scam...
@Big_Fudge Any game manufacturer can do that on the Switch, though. Why would people that aren't releasing these games already, wait for the amico to do it?
@pikmin_4 you's be looking at paying like £260 for earthworm jim 4.
@Serpenterror You're singing to the choir! I know all about the amico.
But the idea that one device could satisfy kids, 50 year old retro gamers (who don't want to play atari) and casual gamers who don't have phones / or want to spend less money on appletv 4k was always wild.
I seriously don’t understand how anyone thought this was a good idea
@TryToBeHopeful To be fair I was planning on waiting for it to drop to rock bottom prices
Oh well. Hopefully some of the possible stand outs will be released anyway.
Funny how I was just on eBay browsing for Jaguar games and saw a copy of Missle command for the Amico brand new factory Sealed. Real pics displayed too! Strange indeed.
No worries everyone it's all good because they filed a new trademark using a new address it's a UPS store
@joey302 Oh they do exist, they just don't do anything except point at a website.
This thing won't stay dead.
Awwwwwwww, I thought this painful saga was over.
At least we got two days of joy and celebration.
@calbeau Good question, had the same with the information on the sega mini 2... apparantly all retro inspired life is now nintendo life......
This was dead from the start i'm afraid.. the intellivision itself was too small for a dedicated revamp, and the new games were clones of flash or phone casual games.....
(and now hoping my playdate will arrive soon)
The world's first zombie console?
Well, at least they have the trademark back. I was lowkey worried we might hear about Soulja Amico soon.
@romanista It's no doubt of interest to some people who are interested in Nintendo consoles. And Nintendolife must see that there's an interest in these articles otherwise they wouldn't bother....
Roll on IntellivisionLife....
@Big_Fudge
You’re giving me some big flashbacks to the BS Olympics people played nearly a decade ago to justify the Ouya.
I like to think that all the gaming pages reporting about this reached the people at Intellivision and they were like "Oh cr@p! We forgot that thing"
@Big_Fudge
So prayvtell why it did? Because nobody was interested in playing mobile games at home on a big TV?
I have to wonder about ANYONE that thinks this pile of junk offers anything new or revolutionary.
Now the Intellivision Amico is coming to take back its thrown and beat the Polium One as the ultimate NFT vaporware console once and for all.
Does anyone even want this though?
This is becoming the Walking DEAD....let it die is behind and no actual product has even made it out.
@cammers1995 yes: Big_Fudge. He’s about the only one, though.
@Moroboshi876 Crossing my fingers that that's true. What systems do you hope/think it'll come on? I say it'd be a good fit for Steam, Switch, and PS5.
@Tempestryke I'd say everywhere except Xbox, as usual. But it seems like the trademark has been renewed after all.
Anyway I hope it's a timed exclusive...
The Amico vs the Polio... err... Polium. Their battle will be epic.
@Tempestryke @Moroboshi876 Earthworm Jim 4 doesn't exist, it never did and all mention of the game has long since been removed from their YouTube channel.
@Muddy_4_Ever Just because that can happen doesn't mean that is what happened here, of course. Haven't seen evidence of intent to fraud, myself, just people failing and potential customers and haters being angry about it. shrug
@Big_Fudge They might be, there might be tonnes of these games on Switch. But until Nintendo adds better searching, content matching algorithms, more showcasing outside of its own products, mandatory demos and curates the endless shovelwear, chances of people find it aren't good.
Having one company tell you what to play isn't a good thing, and until consoles start opening themselves up to multiple shop eshops like PC, the only way round that is more products.
The Atari VCS does all that with multiple shops, cloud services, more games other than their own, and functions like a PC and look what happen to it. Nobody bought the thing or any games on it.
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