Time Warped 1980 - PGA Golf

On 02/20/2018 at 05:13 PM by KnightDriver

The Warp Hive is still being refueled with power pupae from the alien bee queen, so I'll just reminisce about Intellivision's PGA Golf.

So back in 1980, I did not have an Intellivision when it came out that year in North America. My neighbor, however, did. Back then we had a kind of gang with all the kids our age in the neighborhood. Nothing dangerous, although that might be questioned, but a friendly group of kids clearly up to no good. Well, I, and the other kids in our group, would go this person's house and play Intellivision. They had a good selection of games from the launch, my favorite being Sea Battle. Too bad it is strickly a two-player game, otherwise I would have revisited it. No, instead, I played PGA Golf, or just Golf, as it is now on Intellivision Lives! for original Xbox.

I found this game a million miles better than Atari Golf, which ,nevertheless, has a charm in its simplicity. Intellivision's Golf has much more detailed graphics and depth of control. Intellivision was definitely the system for sports fans and my neighbor and his brothers were all strongly into sports.

You play by selecting clubs on the keypad portion of the controller. Then you control your angle to the ball with the circle pad and shoot with a side button. I played this on an original Xbox so I used the standard Xbox controller. The difference being, I think, that you have limited angles at which to turn your line that represents the edge of the club. I swear the original controller allowed for more than 8 positions because this was tricky to play with such a limitation on a Xbox controller. That being said though, I was charmed enough by the game to keep playing longer than I expected to. The ball seems to move realistically as it enlarges while flying higher in the air towards the screen. The courses are also detailed enough to be interesting.

It's too bad I recently traded my Flashback Intellivision console because I would've loved to try it with the original controller.

Here's a commercial that came out comparing Intellivsion Golf to Atari Golf.

This was the main strategy of Mattel in selling its Intellivision, and for my sports loving neighbors, it worked.

Super Step Contributing Writer

02/20/2018 at 05:21 PM

KnightDriver

02/20/2018 at 05:24 PM

I am seriously going to have to watch some Simpsons when I get to the 90s in my retro thing.

SanAndreas

02/20/2018 at 07:12 PM

I never played Intellivision growing up. I might have seen a few Intellivision games here and there. Apparently it was a lot more sophisticated than the 2600. Its controllers were a bit weird, but that was normal for then.

The one old school video game machine I always really wanted was the Bally Professional Arcade (later repackaged as the Astrocade after Bally sold its game division off). That system had a lot of really good home versions of Midway arcade games like Space Zap and Wizard of Wor. I actually saw one on sale at Fallout Games in Phoenix for $180. I didn't buy it though. :(

02/20/2018 at 09:27 PM

I could go for some Wizard of Wor but $180 is way too high. I spent $50 once on an Atari 2600 in a case with several games. That's about what I think those things are worth even today.

02/20/2018 at 11:07 PM

I expected it to go for $500, and I never expected to see one there at all. Astrocades are super-rare, and they were arguably the best consoles out at the time from a technical standpoint. They were sold only by mail-order when they were originally released.

02/21/2018 at 11:18 PM

i read up on it. Those game screens look really sharp. For some reason I had thought it was another system full of pong clones. How wrong I was.

02/23/2018 at 12:44 AM

They're pretty interesting. They had BASIC built into them, and you could get a keyboard for them, although you could type BASIC commands using the numeric keypad the same way you could type text messages on an old cell phone. The cartridges were meant to look and fit into the machine like cassette tapes, and the machine had a storage bin for cartridges. The controller was kind of weird, being shaped like a pistol grip with paddles on the ends for Pong-style games. But back then, I'd probably have rather had an Astrocade than a 2600.

02/23/2018 at 12:43 PM

I never knew about it back then. No one I knew had one and I never heard about it either. Only when I started collecting did I read about it.

Cary Woodham

02/21/2018 at 12:37 AM

My cousins had an Intellivision. Me and my cousin Jana would play Frog Bog for hours. I'm not sure how it entertained us that long, but we were little kids. My uncle, father of those cousins, had that golf game and a Dungeons and Dragons game, but I couldn't tell which was which. Again, I was a little kid.

02/21/2018 at 11:04 PM

Mark and I stumbled upon Frogs and Flies for Atari years ago and had a blast with it. Later I found it was Atari's version of Frog Bog on Intellivision. I played that on Game Room on XBLA. I kind of like the simplicity of the Atari version over the Intellivision one, but I had a surprisingly fun time with both. Never played it back in the day though.

Matt Snee Staff Writer

02/22/2018 at 11:11 AM

I had an intellivision when me and Gregg were collecting systems in the late nineties. It's not bad. Good games. Wish I still had that stuff but we got rid of most of it when we moved out of California back east.

02/22/2018 at 10:58 PM

You were collecting about the same time I was. Most of it got traded, but I still have a lot of stuff.

02/23/2018 at 05:14 AM

yeah that was before and just at the beginning of Ebay, where u could still find good stuff at thrift stores and whatnot.

02/23/2018 at 12:35 PM

Yea, I vividly remember the change that happened at the flea markets when ebay happened. Stuff got stupidly expensive. I remember a little kid, maybe 8 or 10, coming up to the booth full of NES games and asking the sales guy how much something was. When he told him the kid said, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!". I had to laugh. That was the right response.

goaztecs

02/22/2018 at 12:02 PM

There's something about the look and sounds of these games that bring me back to going to friend's homes in the summer.

Me too.

PixlBit

Time Warped 1980 - PGA Golf

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