Every game gets a double-page spread: the photograph on the left and its story on the right, with the specs, how to play and three interesting facts. Tap any spread to see it larger.
Game excerpts
A taste of the stories behind the games, from both volumes.
Auto Race
Mattel’s Auto Race is widely regarded as the first handheld game to be entirely electronic.
Simon
Watch, listen, repeat. Simon plays a sequence of lights and tones on four coloured lenses and dares you to copy it, one step longer every round.
Speak & Spell
Listen to the synthesised voice say a word, spell it out on the alphabetical keyboard and see how many you get right out of ten: Speak & Spell is the talking tutor that put a speech synthesiser in…
Electronic Detective
Ideal’s Electronic Detective is a battery-powered whodunnit: a computer holds every alibi, and one to four detectives race to question the suspects and name the killer.
Merlin
Merlin was one of the first hand-held games with a computer inside. Its leaflet calls it “a remarkably intelligent computer” that plays six games “of chance, strategy, memory, logic and skill”…
Star Wars
Long before Star Wars reached the arcades, Kenner put it on the kitchen table: a tabletop “micro-computer” game of “Hyperspace Dogfights” for one to four players, played on a glowing grid of red…
Astro Wars
Astro Wars brought the colour and racket of the arcade shoot-’em-up to the kitchen table: a chunky tabletop machine whose glowing screen pits a lone earth ship against waves of diving aliens.
Pac-Man
Coleco’s Pac-Man shrank the arcade hit of 1981 into a miniature cabinet for the table top, with marquee, side art and two joysticks.
Donkey Kong
Coleco’s Donkey Kong shrinks Nintendo’s 1981 arcade hit into a miniature tabletop cabinet, complete with joystick, marquee and side art modelled on the stand-up original.
Donkey Kong Jr.
In 1983 Nintendo’s Game & Watch grew up into a miniature arcade cabinet. The Table Top series gave the LCD games a full-colour screen.
Mario’s Cement Factory
Mario’s Cement Factory puts Nintendo’s hero in a hard hat: riding lifts up and down a concrete plant, he must open the hopper valves in time to fill the waiting mixer trucks without burying their…
Thundering Turbo
Strap a motorway to your face. Thundering Turbo is the racer in Tomy’s Tomytronic 3-D series: peer into twin eyepieces and weave through traffic on a colour track that stretches into the distance.