The Electric Company Word Fun
Platform: Intellivision
Region: USA
Media: Cartridge
Controller: INTV
Genre: Educational
Gametype: Licensed
Release Year: 1980
Developer: APh Technological Consulting
Publisher: Mattel Electronics
Players: 1 or 2 VS
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Word Fun was developed in conjuction with the Children's Television Workshop, and features three different word based educational games. The games are:

Crosswords: This game is similar to Scrabble. Each player is given seven letters from which they need to form words on the game board. On each turn the player can create words either horizontally or vertically, and must use one (or more) of the existing letters on the board. Points are earned depending on the word created, and at the end of 20 turns the player with the most points wins!

Letter Hunt: In this game each player controls a monkey in a letter forest. Each monkey must collect letters from the forest to spell three words within the given time limit. When both monkeys are complete, points are awarded for the words spelled and the highest score wins!

Word Rockets: In this game the players control a rocket capable of collecting and shooting vowels upwards. On the top of the screen, various words which are missing vowels will float by and each player needs to try to fire an appropriate vowel into the empty space. The first player who can complete 50 words wins!


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.


BUG:

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: 

Te 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."

 
http://www.mobygames.com/game/intellivision/electric-company-word-fun
http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/learning.html#word
