We Boomers had great imaginations. How great? Well, in the mid-to-late 70's, we would get extremely excited over little red LED's flashing on a tiny screen. These LED's, as they lit and darkened to the motions of our thumbs on buttons, would cause cheering, cursing, and occasionally even the tossing of the game that provided all of this "action" (hopefully against a shock-absorbing surface).
Electronic games began with Mattel's Auto Race in 1974. It was the first handheld game to contain no gears, relays, or any other moving parts. Everything ran with diodes, transistors, integrated circuits, and of course a tiny screen with "cars" represented by tiny red LED's. And believe you me, any kid whose parents shelled out the big bucks for it was popular, at least while he had fresh batteries.
Football seemed to be a natural fit for handhelds, and accounted for many of their incarnations. The pictured game (thanks, Handheld Museum) was Mattel Electronics Football, circa 1977.
But memory tests soon got red hot a little later in the decade. In 1978, Merlin and Simon appeared, both challenging you to repeat patterns of lights by punching the appropriate buttons. And as some of us enter the twilight years, take it from me: you NEED to have your memory challenged on a daily basis! Use it or lose it.
The games quickly got more sophisticated. By 1980, you could get bowling, hockey, baseball, chess (THAT was cool!), and Missile Attack. I was alway vaguely disturbed by playing Missile Attack, as the cities full of innocent people that you were striving so hard to protect were ultimately doomed, it was just a matter of when.
In the early 80's, LCD screens began to appear, and realism took a quantum leap. After all, those tiny LED's required a lot of help from your imagination to become basketball players, bowling balls, or nuclear ICBM's.
In 2000, Mattel re-released their original 1977 football game. It was a hit, in large part from younger Boomers trying to recapture the excitement of seeing those little LED's light up and being transformed them into hulking football players.
Comments (4)
I still have that very game somewhere in a drawer or box.........
That is cool.......
Posted by Doug Fletcher | February 28, 2007 5:59 PM
Posted on February 28, 2007 17:59
Now some Boomer just needs to invent something to make us live longer. According to www.boomerdeathcounter.com one of us dies every 55 seconds.
Posted by James Love | March 1, 2007 12:07 AM
Posted on March 1, 2007 00:07
I remember these mostly in the eighties. I even have a football game in a drawer someplace. I don't really much remember having any interest in them. Heck Electric football I thought was cool! I remember back in the day having those old games where you pull the knob that would shoot a ball up and fall down into holkes with numbers written on them. Real old tech their!
Posted by Rivers End | June 5, 2009 10:30 PM
Posted on June 5, 2009 22:30
I loved Mattel’s Football game. I was at some friend’s house while they were practicing as a band. They had this game there and I started playing it and I could not stop. I was nuts about it. Had to get one myself. I could go on forever if I wanted. Yeah, those were the early and fun days of electric games. We got one of those Atari video sets, the 2600 I think, around 78 or 79 I think. I was out of school by then. That was fun, too. But by mid 80s, video games had gotten too serious and challenging. I did not want to spend that much time playing them.
But as boomers, we knew the world before them, we knew it when games came along, and we know how it all went down. When you think about it, what we had through childhood, was what most had before us, for many years to some degree. But what started to come along in the 70s was a serious departure from the previous. We saw it all! But it was those early simple things that were so easily enjoyable. It sure got out of hand, though.
Posted by Scott Irv | June 6, 2009 1:32 AM
Posted on June 6, 2009 01:32