| The Electric CompanyŽ Word Fun |
|
INTELLIVISION CARTRIDGE [#1122]
Trademark used under license from Children's Television Workshop, Inc.
AKA Word Fun
Produced by: APh Technology Consultants for Mattel Electronics
Program: Kevin Miller |
CATALOG DESCRIPTION
How those little monkeys love to learn! Watch them swing through the jungle, capturing letters with their tails and making words.
Three great learning games.
Find A Word has little learners weaving words in and out of each other.
Word Hunt sends them into the jungle looking for missing letters.
And
Word Rocket has them blasting vowels into the sky to make words out of clouds of consonants. It's the fun and easy way to improve vocabulary skills.
- Three fascinating word games
- One or two players
- Developed in conjunction with The Children's Television Workshop
PRODUCTION NOTES
Find A Word was renamed Crosswords between the printing of the catalogs and the release of the cartridge.
The three games in the Word Fun cartridge were recycled in the Learning Fun II cartridge from INTV Corporation .
Bugs: The game won't work when plugged into an
Intellivision II . A feature to keep early Coleco-produced Intellivision cartridges from working in the Intellivision II inadvertently keeps
Word Fun from working also. Marketing didn't feel
Word Fun was important enough to hold up release of Intellivision II to fix the problem.
Fun Fact: The fact that
Word Fun didn't work with
Intellivision II allowed one group of kids to get copies of every Intellivision game for $1.95 each. Ringleader
Mark Thompson wrote to explain the scam:
"When the
Intellivision II came out, we found out that
Word Fun didn't work on the new version and so we called
Mattel to see what was going on. When we found out that
Mattel was offering to replace the
Word Fun cartridges with any other game we wanted, we went down to their place in Hawthorne.
"One day I went to
Kay-Bee Toys for new games and saw that
Word Fun was only $1.95. To make a long story short, every
Kay-Bee store in the LA area was able to sell completely out of
Word Fun ! We would get a carload of our friends (I was 14 at the time) and make a field trip of going down to turn in our
Word Fun cartridges for new games. We'd have about 6 people in the car and each of us would turn in two
Word Fun games at a time about once a week (a self-imposed limit because I didn't want to ruin this). The fact that we were able to do this for about six months surprised me. Plus I made a lot of money selling the newest cartridges for about $25 apiece."
