Gaming 003: Show Me Your Bits!
Five portable electronic games from the strange and wonderful pre-LCD years.
In Gaming 002: Attack of the Arcade Era! we covered some gaming ground in the late 70’s to early-80’s time period. Arcades were in full swing, and home video systems like the Atari 2600 were on the rise, thanks to a revolution in cheap computer chips entering the market. These processors were not powerful by todays standards, but were more than capable of running a wide variety of new electronic toys and games, and were cheap enough that they could be put into products that were affordable by an average family.
The problem companies hoping to leverage this exciting new technology faced was what to do about the output. Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) had not yet entered the retail world, and were very much still a science project in the late 1970s. In a few years they would come to dominate cheap handheld toys and games, and later take over the computer monitor from the CRT.
But in the 1970s, LCDs were not an option for anyone wanting to make an electronic game, or even a watch. (LED watches however became popular in the mid 70’s, but were so power-hungry you had to push a button to turn it on, because it could not be on all the time or the battery would go dead — Looking at you, Smart Watch!)
James Bond’s LED watch from “Live and Let Die” - a digital watch was a novelty in 1973.
The main general-purpose display available to most people was their television, which is what home game systems like Pong and the Atari 2600 leveraged. But using a TV for display was not exactly portable, and also the cost of the electronics to display images (especially color images) on a TV screen was still very high back then, compared to the cost of a basic microprocessor chip. This kept TV-based game systems relatively expensive, usually over $100.
For toy companies marketing to kids, this was way too high a price point. It left them searching for cheaper display technologies that could still show computer chip output in a useful way to the consumer. Less expensive devices such as the mentioned light-emitting diode (LED), as well as Vacuum Fluorescent Displays (VFDs) were used to power many of these early home electronic toys. Some game systems as we will see even used microprocessors to power older, simpler tech, like motors and light bulbs.
So, here’s a quick sample of five portable games from that strange post-microprocessor, pre-LCD era. A few iconic. A few, obscure.
5. Entex PacMan 2
Entex Industries was a home electronics powerhouse in the early 1980s and produced a large number of licensed ‘home version’ arcade games, hoping to cash in on the arcade craze. These machines often featured Vacuum Fluorescent Displays (VFDs), which had a distinctive, glowy, blue/green and orange/red color palette. If you’ve seen the dashboard of Cadillac or other luxury car from the early to mid 1980’s, you know what I mean.
The technology allowed for more complex graphic output than LEDs, but at a cost: VFDs were very power-hungry. Many of these machines used 4 “C” batteries and still only had a play time of a few hours. VFDs were also a bit pricier than LEDs, so these toys were a bit on the expensive side - but still much cheaper than a home video system.
PacMan 2 is so named not because it is a sequel, but because it allowed two players to play, one as PacMan and the other as the ghosts. I don’t think I recall ever seeing this in stores as a kid, but I own one now. It’s quirky gameplay and cool display vibe earn it a spot on my list.
4. Parker Brothers Merlin
Nothing epitomizes the disparity between microprocessor and display capabilities in this era better than Merlin, a widely-available electronic game released by Parker Brothers in 1980. Merlin featured six different games, including tic-tac-toe, blackjack, and a music maker game. Players could interact with a set of buttons in a grid and on a small panel, but the output from this system was really just a set of LED lights, cleverly integrated into the buttons, as well as a simple tone generator and connected speaker. Merlin’s success can probably be attributed to finding the sweet spot between cost and functionality; the limited display features made it affordable, but the electronics made it interesting.
I owned one of these and it was fun for a while, but really due to the limitations it had no lasting power. I think it probably ended up in a drawer pretty quickly after purchase. The nostalgic side of me will probably require a re-purchase for my collection, though!
3. Coleco Head-to-Head Football
Coleco, well known in the 1980’s for the Cabbage Patch Doll craze, also created a series of handheld sports games that used LED technology to simulate players on a field. In 1978, Coleco released a one-player game called “Electronic Quarterback”, that cleverly repurposed the LED 7-segment display used to show numbers in clocks to form a grid of horizontal dashes, representing a player position on a football field.
These LED digit displays were quite inexpensive, and allowed for a lot of individual LEDs to be crammed into a small game system. Along with some old school 8-bit sound and decent gameplay, the combination was a winner. Affordable and fun, these toys were a staple of the late 1970s electronic game scene.
A few years later, Coleco literally upped their game by releasing a two-player, ‘head to head’ version of the game. Literally head-to-head, because both players would cram themselves over the game, one as offense and the other as defense. I recall my friend Dave and I spending a lot of time on this one. The game spawned many other ‘head to head’ type games including the Pac Man game above, and the game style remains iconic to this day. Retro reissues of the Coleco and Mattel LED-based sports games were released in the past few years, and can be found in big box stores in the toy section.
2. Simon
In the late 1970s game titan Milton Bradley launched a division called “MB Electronics”, to respond to the growing demand for electronic games and toys. Their early, runaway hit was “Simon”, an electronic memory game featuring four large colored buttons, illuminated by (conventional) lights below. A simple four-tone speaker completed the experience.
Although simplistic in design, the game play and multi-player appeal of Simon made it an instant hit. Parts needed to build this system were minimal: a very simple processor, a few buttons, a few lights, speaker, and enclosure. Resulting retail price was $24.95. This made Simon an affordable game and was produced in large volumes.
I, like almost everyone in 1979 owned one, it was almost a requirement. But to be honest it really wasn’t a favorite. It was fun to see how big a sequence you can remember, but that fun diminished quickly once you had played it a few times. It was also a decent party game, since many could take turns trying. But eventually everyone had done the “Simon” thing, and it probably made its way to the top shelf of the coat closet fairly quickly.
Reboots and reissues of this game have always been available through the years. It gets a well-earned spot on the list, due to the cultural impact it had.
1. Dark Tower
Top place on my list of pre-LCD-era electronic games goes to Milton Bradley’s Dark Tower. This 1981 offering from MB never reached the popularity levels of Simon, and was pretty much a flop - probably owing to the fact that it was a more expensive, and more complex game that was targeted towards older kids and adults.
I never owned one back in the day, and really don’t remember seeing it around. I later came to know of it when a friend asked me to help him restore a broken one he had been given. We managed to replace a faulty DC/DC converter chip on it and took it for a test drive with our game group.
What amazed me the most about this game is the lengths they went to in order to have the computer show color pictures. Inside the Dark Tower, there was a cylinder with columns of translucent color pictures of the enemies and events you would face.
You would press various buttons on the tower when it was your turn to indicate what you were doing, and then a motor inside would spin the cylinder into a specific position, and one of three light bulbs would light up, illuminating a specific picture. There was also a single 7-segment LED digit that showed a number, usually used for counting enemies faced.
Going along with it was a board that surrounded the tower, that the players would move their characters on. You would have to travel around the tower and eventually summon enough force to attack it. Overall a very complex (and long) game, but an amazing fusion of conventional board and electronic game play. The Rube Goldberg tower mechanism just adds to the charm of it all.
Honorable Mentions
So goes my semi-random roundup of pre-LCD electronic games. If you have any good ones I missed you want to mention, say something in the comments! In the meantime, here are a couple of other games from that time that don’t quite qualify as electronic - but are interesting nonetheless.
Tomy Blip!
This one should in my book probably be a ‘dishonorable mention’, because I was suckered in 1977 into buying this game, thinking it was an electronic handheld pong game, when in fact the entire thing is mechanical, save an LED light that is moved around by an armature mechanism controlled by the gears.
The mechanical design of this thing is ingenious, however. You wind it up, the led moves from side to side, and you have to choose one of three buttons based on where you think it will end up to return the ‘ball’. All game action controlled by internal mechanical gearing. Turns out though it is crazy hard. Since it contained zero electronics, price was very cheap for this game, and I successfully convinced my parents to buy me one.
I was disappointed that it was so hard to play when I bought it, so (being an engineer in the making) of course immediately took it apart, hoping to harvest at least some electronic goodies from it. This is where I learned it was all boring gears and stuff. Still very bitter about it to this day, but I did repurchase it for old times sake, and I have a much better appreciation now for what went into actually getting this thing to work.
Electric Football
The granddaddy of all these games could be Electric Football, which traces its roots back to 1929, but enjoyed peak popularity in the 1960’s and 1970s. Players are placed on a metal football field that vibrates via an electric motor. The magic, if there was any, was that you could adjust the pedestals the players were on to cause them to go straight, turn left, or right when the vibrating started.
So you would set up various plays by secretly setting your players to go certain ways, while your opponent did the same. You turned on the motor and waited to see what happened, usually mostly chaos. I never owned this game, as I was not much of a football fan. The neighbors had one, and I remember trying it out. But really, we mostly just wanted to see what random things were going to happen when we turned it on, and didn’t really try to really play a football game on it.
Included though, due to its age and lasting impact. You can still find updated versions of this classic today.
Explore Further
Next Time: Gaming 004: Pirates of the 7 CDs
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