A hungry caveman, a dinosaur guarding her eggs and a volcano that won’t stop erupting: Tomy’s Caveman packs a whole prehistoric drama into one glowing, multicoloured screen.
This bright red tabletop is billed on its fascia as a “Micro Computer Game” with a “Dinamic Multi Screen”, an “LSI-CPU” and an “FIP Index Panel”, Tomy’s way of describing its colourful vacuum fluorescent display. A key along the bottom spells out the targets: Dragon 10, Dinosaur 30, Egg 50.
Interesting facts
One caveman, many owners. Tomy didn’t keep its caveman to itself. In the UK he was sold under the Grandstand name, which also licensed Tomy and Epoch tabletops, while in America Tandy’s Radio Shack stores sold him. Grandstand’s version swapped the red case for silver or gold.
A tiny brain behind the drama. All the dinosaurs, dragons and volcanoes are run by one NEC uPD553C microcontroller. MAME, the emulator project that preserves old arcade and handheld games, lists the game as Tomy Caveman TN-12, from 1982.
Back from extinction. In 2019 a fan released an unofficial version of Caveman for the Commodore 64. It recreates the tabletop’s multicoloured screen. The author wrote it as an exercise while teaching himself 6502 assembly language.