Mattel Electronics was the vidio game division of the Mattel toy company. In 1983 the company released their first home computer, the Matell Aquarius. It was based on a design from the British company Radofin. Internally the machine had a codename of Checkers and the never relased Aquarius II was codenamed Chess.

The Aquarius was sold below manufacturing price. The idea was that profit could be made on its peripherals and ROM cartridges, which included memory expansions, ports, joypads, and games. The machine came with 4KByte of RAM, which was not big enough for anything other than some small BASIC programs. The machine was capable of graphics, but this was not easy to achieve with the limited BASIC.

Matell passed all the computer business to the Radofin company, only a few months after the release of the Aquarius. Radofin did release an Aquarius II, but it was the same machine, but with a full-stroke keyboard and BASIC in ROM.