The Intellivision was developed at Mattel in Hawthorne, California along with their Mattel Electronics line of handheld electronic games. Mattel's Design and Development group began investigating a home video game system in 1977. It was to have rich graphics and long lasting gameplay to distinguish itself from its competitors. Mattel identified a new but expensive chipset from National Semiconductor and negotiated better pricing for a simpler design. Their consultant, APh Technological Consulting, suggested a General Instrument chipset, listed as the Gimini programmable set in the GI 1977 catalog. The GI chipset lacked reprogrammable graphics and Mattel worked with GI to implement changes. GI published an updated chipset in its 1978 catalog. After initially choosing National in August 1977, Mattel waited for two months before ultimately going with the proposed GI chipset in the fall of 1977. A team at Mattel, headed by David Chandler, began engineering the hardware, including the famous hand controllers. In 1978, David Rolfe of APh developed the executive control software (Exec) and, with a group of Caltech summer student hires, programmed the first games. Graphics were designed by a group of artists at Mattel led by Dave James.