Blue Sky Rangers

The reunion of the Blue Sky Rangers in 2011.

The Blue Sky Rangers is a group of Intellivision game programmers who worked for Mattel in the early 1980s.

When the Intellivision first came out in 1978, its games were made by APh Technological Consulting. When they knew they could get much more profit making them themselves, Mattel created their own software development group. The original five members of that Intellivision team were manager Gabriel Baum, and Don Daglow, Rick Levine, Mike Minkoff and John Sohl. Levine and Minkoff (Minkoff is a long-time Mattel Toys veteran) both came over from the hand-held Mattel games engineering team. To stop them and later programmers (the Mattel team peaked at 110 people in 1983) from being hired away by their rival Atari, their identity and work location was secret.

In 1982, TV Guide published an article about Intellivision's secret programming team. The writer of the article wanted a group name other than "The Application Software Programmers," so he thought of "The Blue Sky Rangers". This was based on the programming group's "Blue Sky Meetings," which were a series of sessions to make new game ideas.^[1]

One of the early programmers, Keith Robinson, has owned the rights to Intellivision in recent years and the Blue Sky Rangers' games are now available on multiple computer and video game platforms, as well as mobile phones. He died in June 2017. Intellivision Entertainment, which is owned by Tommy Tallarico, owns the rights to Intellivision, and is making a new console named Intellivision Amico.^[2]