To those that believe handheld gaming began with the Gameboy, I bring you the VFD electronic game:
The sights! The sounds! Especially the sounds 🙂
That video shows a game called Alien Attack, released by Tomy in the early 1980s. It was licensed by many other manufacturers, and in countries where copyright wasn’t so strong it was renamed Scramble to capitalize on the arcade game it had ripped off.
We owned it, and we loved it! Here’s a shot of what the game itself looked like:
It was technically portable, since it could be battery powered. VFD displays however are notoriously energy inefficient (at least the early ones of those days were) so we usually played using an AC Adaptor. Our version was differently coloured than the UK version seen above. If I recall, it was blue, orange and (mostly) white.
With one game and two players the situation was hardly satisfactory, and was shortly remedied with the aquisition of this guy:
Yep, Puck Monster by CGL! This was, as the name would imply, an excellent rip-off of the arcade game Donkey Kong Pac-Man. For me, it was even better than Scramble and I played the thing like I was possessed.
Here’s what it looked like in action.
I can remember playing these in bed with the covers over my head. I can remember playing them in cars during trips, playing them at the table during meals and even bringing them to school and playing them (or swapping with other people to play their games, such as Frogger or Dig Dug). I can even remember opening them, removing the screen and electronics, and playing sans case. These were all the rage from about 1981 to 1983, and were perhaps my favourite toys in those days.
So what happened to our VFD games? Perhaps my brother remembers?
And speaking of him, many of you probably know he lives in Silicon Valley. What you may not know is that Silicon Valley is rumoured to be the home of the world’s best used electronic stores specializing in 1980s games. Since this is the case, I figured I’d be easy on him this Christmas and rather than expect him to go and hunt for something impossible-to-find for his impossible-t0-buy-for brother, he could just nip down to one of those stores and pick me up a VFD game or two. In working order.
And boxed, of course 😉
