The Game: The timeless strategy board game of conquest comes to the Intellivision, now with 100% more boopy beepy computerish sounds from the future than any game of Checkers you’ve ever played before! Play alone against the computer, or against a second player. (Mattel Electronics, 1980)
Memories: Almost a prerequisite title for any video game console back in this early days, this version of Checkers is curious in that it devotes a lot of screen real estate to showing you the men that have been taken out of play, and shrinks the board itself down to a relatively small space on the screen.
That’s really just the programmer’s choice, though – it’s not like we had (or needed, for that matter) lovingly-rendered photorealistic checkers that needed the entire screen to be appreciated. The graphics are more than sufficient to convey the essentials of the game.
But what to do about sound? That’s another matter. As the computer considers its every move, a 
bunch of retro-futuristic “computer sounds” are heard – the kind of sounds that those of us who grew up pitting Tobor against ROM the Space Knight just knew computers would make some day. It’s the sound that the future used to have.
