Mattel’s Auto Race is widely regarded as the first handheld game to be entirely electronic. Steer a blip of red light up a three-lane track, dodge the oncoming traffic and complete four laps in the shortest time you can.
A short column of red LEDs is the racetrack, with a two-digit lap timer above it. Three slide switches do the rest.
Interesting facts
Half a kilobyte. The game runs on a Rockwell pocket-calculator chip, reworked and programmed by Rockwell’s Mark Lesser to an idea from Mattel’s George Klose and Richard Cheng. The program fills 512 bytes; Lesser recalls 511.
Sound from nothing. The chip had no sound hardware. Lesser has explained that a single output line was wired to a piezo-ceramic speaker and switched on and off from inside the program loop, with the timing varied to produce the different tones.
Skis and a Soviet twin. In 1980 Auto Race was re-dressed as Ski Slalom for sale outside the US, its four gears relabelled Slalom, Bronze, Silver and Gold. In 1983 a Soviet-made clone appeared: the Elektronika IER-01.