Atari is digging into gaming history and pulling off an unexpected crossover no one saw coming — it’s resurrecting the Intellivision, one of its fiercest rivals from the golden age of consoles. The new Intellivision Sprint, built in partnership with Plaion, mashes up late-’70s nostalgia with the kind of modern conveniences gamers have come to expect — think HDMI, wireless controllers, and a healthy dose of wood-grain flair.
If you ever played the original Intellivision, you’ll recognize the look instantly. The Sprint keeps the gold-and-black design and that vintage living-room charm but cuts the cable clutter that made the old system a chore to set up. It connects to your TV with a single HDMI cable and ditches wired controllers entirely. Those chunky dials and numeric keypads are still there, only now they’re rechargeable and go dock-to-charge instead of battery-swap-to-survive.
Even the controller overlays — those thin plastic cards you’d slide over the keypad to remind yourself which number fired the torpedo — are back. The Sprint ships with redesigned versions that keep the retro appeal while actually being readable in 2025 lighting.
Under the hood, it’s all plug-and-play simplicity. Forty-five games come preloaded, including Astrosmash, Boulder Dash, and a handful of sports titles that made Intellivision the go-to console for the pre-NES crowd. There’s no cartridge slot, but Atari added USB-A ports so you can expand the library or even connect original Intellivision controllers through an adapter if you’re feeling extra nostalgic.
The Intellivision Sprint drops December 5, 2025, for $149.99 — a fair price for a piece of playable gaming history that looks like it should be sitting next to a lava lamp and a stack of VHS tapes.
For Atari, it’s another chapter in its long-running mission to remix the past for a modern audience. And for anyone who grew up in the great 8-bit console wars, seeing Atari and Intellivision join forces feels like the retro-gaming equivalent of Mario and Sonic teaming up. It’s weird, it’s wonderful, and it’s proof that no rivalry ever really dies — it just respawns with HDMI output.
