Handheld electronic game

Early handheld games used simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects.

Early handheld games include Mattel Auto Race (1976) and Mattel Electronic Football (1977),[1] which have simple red-LED displays; gameplay involves pressing buttons to move a car or quarterback icon (represented by a bright dot) to avoid obstacles (represented by less bright dots).

The same year, Parker Brothers also released Merlin, a more sophisticated handheld which could play six different games using an array of 11 buttons with integrated LEDs.

The initial success of Mattel and Parker Brothers' entries spawned a wave of similar handheld devices which were released through the early 1980s.

In 1979, Gunpei Yokoi, traveling on a bullet train, saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons.

[3] Taking advantage of the technology used in the credit-card-sized calculators that had appeared on the market, Yokoi designed the series of LCD-based games to include a digital time display in the corner of the screen.

The use of custom images in LCD and VFD games allows for greater detail and eliminates the blocky, pixelated look of console screens, but not without drawbacks.

[6] In 1983, Takara Tomy's Tomytronic 3D series simulated 3D by having two LED panels that were lit by external light through a window on top of the device, making it the first dedicated home video 3D hardware.

Among technophilic gamer subcultures like Akiba-kei, unique control schemes like that of the 2008 Tuttuki Bako have been proven salable due to novelty, but dedicated handhelds such as this are uncommon.