"Space age electronics"
Sigh, old advertisements were the best!
The First Generation of Handhelds
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 On 08/09/2013 at 03:59 PM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
The first handhelds were these LED light arrays overlayed with different painted designs like the different sports fields. I played all three of the ones shown below which came out in the late seventies alongside Atari 2600 and then Intellivision in '79. Me and my neighborhood friends played the heck out of these things to the point where we wore the buttons right off and the casings were so beaten up, the circuit boards showed through. I picked up these again off of ebay a few years ago for nostalgic reasons. 
Then I came across some more handheld ads from 1980 with this Parker Brothers Wildfire Pinball handheld which I never knew about.
And this Bandai America Electronic Marvels handhelds ad, also new to me.
Then I used to play around with my scientific calculator, a TI-55, as if it were a game machine. You could do simple programs on it. It seemed like an improvement on those simple LED games, but there was very little entertainment to be gotten out of it. After all, it wasn't supposed to be a game machine, but you had to think of something in between classes.
Interestingly enough, Gunpei Yokoi was apparently inspired to create Game & Watch by seeing a business man pushing buttons on a similar calculator. I found this ad for Game & Watch, begun in 1980, below in a old comic book. I never owned one or even knew these existed until recently. I guess I never knew anyone who had one or maybe they were only in the toy store which, me being a teenager, I didn't frequent. Anyway this had an LCD screen which is a much better choice than LED arrays. You can do so much more. No wonder it became the standard for handhelds.
So those were what you had until the release of Game Boy in 1989.
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