Before (and early on, concurrent with) the wide proliferation of the Atari 2600, and way before Game Boys and PSPs, there were dedicated handheld electronic games. They’re charmingly primitive today, but they were as hot as it got most of 30 years ago.
Mostly, the early games presented all of the game components as LEDs. Your guy was a bright red dash; the dim red dashes were everyone else. They were athletes in most games, of course. However, in others you might be invited to imagine your bright red dash as a Colonial Viper attack craft (Mattel Electronics Battlestar Galactica), or a car (Mattel Electronics Auto Race). And we’d gleefully run alkaline batteries dead in a single afternoon playing the fool things.
In the crowd I ran with, for a time handheld electronic games were the primary stores of wealth about which to brag amongst your friends. That’s somewhat surprising to me looking back, because they weren’t cheap. The Mattel Electronics games were $25 or so each. That’s about $80 today. And I went to school with guys who had a dozen different ones.
Chris and I had a few. That I can remember, we had Mattel Electronics Football 2 and Basketball 2; Parker Brothers Split Second and Merlin; and Entex Defender and Galaxian 2. I don’t know where that Football 2 game is now, but as late as 1992 it was pulling toilet tank duty in the upstairs bathroom at my dad’s house. Still worked great. (I almost said “as recently as 1992,” but then I somewhat painfully realized that that’s 15 years ago now, making the word “recently” a little silly.)
Football 2’s big advances over the original Football were 1) you could pass; and 2) you could run backwards. Really. I think about the simplicity of that game vs. the football games on the modern home console gaming systems. They cover every single nuance of the game and are, in fact, almost complex enough that they don’t appeal to me because the learning curve is so steep.
I’ve thought about picking up a Split Second or Merlin on eBay; they’re both out there
frequently for just a few dollars. I suspect what would happen if I did, though, is that I’d get a great kick out of playing for an hour or so, and then I’d have another non-trivially-sized item to store. I’ve also considered getting Kenner Red Line and Bambino UFO Master Blaster, because those were two that I wanted and never got. My rational self always prevails, though. Hell, at least Lester Burnham could drive his Firebird.
If your tenth birthday occurred between 1978 and 1984, visit the Handheld Games Museum. You’ll have a blast. I can remember a lot of obscure handhelds, and that page always knows about them.
Thanks to the Handheld Games Museum for the photos.
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