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Coleco "Electronic Quarterback" (1978)

Handheld electronic games are very small, portable devices for playing interactive 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 calculator-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 both the precursors to and inexpensive alternatives to the handheld game console.

Early handheld games utilized very simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects. Notable early handheld games included the Mattel Auto Race (1974) 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.

The initial success of Mattel and Parker Brothers' entries spawned a wave of similar handheld devices which were released through the early 1980s. Notable among these were a series of popular 2-player "head-to-head" games from Coleco. Other games were miniaturized versions of popular arcade video games.

During the 1980s, LCD displays became inexpensive and largely replaced LED displays in handheld games. The use of custom images in LCD and VFD games allows them to have greater detail and avoid the blocky, pixellated look of console screens, but not without drawbacks. All graphics are fixed in place, so every possible location and state of game objects has to be preset(and are usually visible when resetting a game), with no overlap. Illusion of movement is created by sequentially flashing objects between their possible states. Backgrounds for these games are static drawings, layered behind the "moving" graphics which are transparent when not in use. Partly due to these limitations, the gameplay of early LCD games was often even more crude than for their LED antecedents. Some of the more well-known handheld games of the LCD display era are the Nintendo Game & Watch series, and many titles from other companies were also popular, especially conversions of arcade games. New games are still being made, but most are based on relatively simple card and board games.

Despite the increasing sophistication of handheld consoles such as the Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance and Playstation Portable, dedicated handhelds continue to find a niche. Adult fads such as blackjack, poker, and Sudoku spawn dozens of original and knockoff handheld games. Tetris, in all its addictive simplicity, is also a prime target for knockoffs. Many Tetris clones also include other games using the array of Tetris blocks as a crude, low resolution dot matrix screen. Such devices often have many variations of the original Tetris game and sometimes even other kinds of games like racing or even space shooters, such as Space Invaders, where one box projects boxes at the enemy boxes. The most advanced of these designs can easily have more than 20 distinct games implemented and feature multi-channel sound, voice synthesis or digital sounds samples, and internal CMOS memory which can save the current game progress and high scores when the system is turned off. Many of these handhelds with Tetris and other games are marketed as having hundreds, or even thousands, of games, though the vast majority are copies with edited speed and difficulty levels. The most basic can now be sold for less than the cost of a glossy magazine.

A modern multi-Tetris handheld

At the lowest end of handheld game sophistication, there is also the "miss/catch the falling objects" game. These games are controlled with 2 movement buttons, and sport a screen with a column of player positions, and rows of projectiles to animate towards the player. The player and projectiles could be any picture, from tanks dodging missiles to a dog catching sausages. This variety of game is cheap enough to bundle with a fast food meal.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Category:Handheld electronic games

• Handheld game console
• Mobile game
• Calculator gaming

• Electronic Handheld Game Museum - the largest handheld museum on the web
• Guide to Handhelds
• Handheld Remakes - downloadable freeware handhelds simulators and remakes
• Game & Watch Mania - Italian Game & Watch central with reviews and downloads