Pocket Games Before the Game Boy
The Game Boy arrived in 1989 into a shelf that was already crowded. This is what portable gaming looked like in the years before it.
Mechanical first
Through the early and mid-seventies, portable play meant no electronics whatsoever: tilt mazes, spring-loaded flick games, sliding-tile puzzles and pocket pinball. Cheap to make, impossible to break, and sold as toys rather than technology.
LEDs, 1976 to 1979
Mattel's Auto Race in 1976 is generally credited as the first fully electronic handheld game, with Mattel Football following in 1977 and becoming a genuine craze. Both used red LED blips rather than characters, so the player supplied the imagination.
Milton Bradley's Microvision, released in 1979, was the first handheld with interchangeable cartridges — a preview of the model that would eventually win.
LCDs, 1980 to 1989
Nintendo's Game & Watch line from 1980 moved the format to low-power segmented LCDs, and a decade of single-game LCD handhelds followed from Nintendo, Tiger Electronics and many others. One device, one game, one loop that got faster.
1989 and after
The Game Boy combined a dot-matrix screen with swappable cartridges, and the fixed single-game handheld faded. What survived is the design instinct that came before it: something you can start in five seconds, standing up, with one hand — which is precisely the brief the club builds to.