Handheld electronic game

Handheld electronic game(s) are very small, portable devices for playing interactive electronic games, often miniaturized versions of video games. The controls, display and speakers are all part of a single unit. Rather than a general-purpose screen made up of a grid of small pixels, they usually have custom displays designed to play one game. This simplicity means they can be made as small as a digital watch, and sometimes are. The visual output of these games can range from a few small light bulbs or LED lights to calculaor-like alphanumerical screens; later these were mostly displaced by liquid crystal and vacuum fluorescent display screens with detailed images and in the case of VFD games, color. Handhelds were at their most popular from the late 1970s into the early 1990s. They are the precursors to the handheld game console.

Early handheld games used simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects. Notable early handheld games included Waco's Electro Tic-Tac-Toe (1972), the Mattel Auto Race (1976), and Mattel Electronic Football (1977), which featured very simple red-LED displays; gameplay involved the player pressing buttons to move his car or quarterback icon (represented by a bright dot) to avoid obstacles (represented by less bright dots). In 1978 the Milton Bradley Company entered the handheld market with Simon, a simple color-and-sound-matching game. Simon had no dedicated display, but featured four colored, lighted buttons; the original version was large enough to be used as a tabletop game or a handheld; later versions became increasingly smaller. 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. Despite their relative simplicity, each of these early games was highly successful.

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