[2][4] Many potential buyers were excited by the notion (especially parents, who liked the idea of a machine that could be turned into an educational tool, or at least something more useful and practical than just a game-playing system), and many bought Intellivisions on that basis alone.
While the planned Keyboard Component was an ambitious design, it had reliability problems that proved difficult to overcome, and it was far too expensive to manufacture and sell.
personal-computer upgrade caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which launched an investigation of Mattel Electronics for fraud and false advertising.
Increasingly concerned that the Keyboard Component division might never actually produce a sellable product, in mid-1981 Mattel Electronics' management set up a competing internal engineering team headed by Richard Chang.
Originally dubbed the LUCKI (from "Low User-Cost Keyboard Interface"), it lacked many of the sophisticated features envisioned for the original Keyboard Component: instead of a full 16kB of RAM, it only offered a mere 2kB (not all of which was actually available to the user); the cassette interface was stripped down to the bare essential needed to save and load data (and was now an optional extra, rather than built-in), and there was no secondary CPU.
[1] In the fall of 1982, the LUCKI—now renamed the Entertainment Computer System, or ECS—was presented at the annual sales meeting, officially signaling the end of the ill-fated Keyboard Component project.
[2]) A new advertising campaign was hastily rushed onto the air in time for the 1982 Christmas season, promising once again that a home-computer upgrade was just around the corner, and the ECS itself was shown to the public at the January 1983 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Further hardware developments, including a planned Program Expander that would have added another 16kB of RAM and a more sophisticated, fully featured Extended-BASIC to the system, were halted, and in the end only a half-dozen titles were released for the ECS.
[6] Unfortunately, as noted above, by the time the ECS made its retail debut in 1983 a new management team had taken over at Mattel Electronics which was no longer interested in selling or promoting hardware add-ons, which they viewed as money-losers that had tied up too much of the company's capital for too little return.
The Marketing and Applications departments were also not particularly enthusiastic about the ECS unit,[6] since it really didn't add any revolutionary features to the system and it was a struggle to come up with game ideas that would justify requiring the user to have one.
World Cup Soccer was sold as a standard Intellivision cartridge but does support ECS 4-player with the Computer Adaptor and extra game controllers.
[2] In BASIC mode, the display on the ECS is 20 columns across (while the maximum program line length is 39 characters), and any text is shown in all capital letters.
The color-coding scheme, which is explained in the back of the manual or can be discerned from direct observation, is useful in determining how the ECS understood (or misunderstood) any command.