It's my day off, and I decided it was time to return to handheld games. As it happens, I had just found something that I had in mind when I thought of this feature. Nowadays, it's fashionable to make fun of 1980s LCD games, which I covered last time. What has long since been forgotten is that those games were the successors and potential competitors to a much older class of handheld mechanical games. I speak of the handheld pinball game, and if Tiger games were the cave man's videogame, these were what you would find in a Paleocene lemur's grip at the bottom of Lake Messel, and I was playing with them well into the age of Game Boy. Here's a pic of the game with the full load racked.
The real backstory here is that in the 1800s and 1900s, the first mechanical pinball machines were developed, based on the game of bagatelle. These rudimentary machines had little in common with later pinball games, as there were no flippers. Around the late 1950s, the lineage split in several directions. In American arcades, they became the modern pinball we know. In Japan, they were upgraded with electronics into the pachinko machine. But in the meantime, the original concept was scaled down into handheld games for children. Here's a pic I found of example I've sighted in the wild previously. There's nothing for scale in this or any other pic I could find, but I can attest it's quite large, with a metal back that gives it extra robustness.
Of course, these things stayed in production long after kids knew anything about the pinball name. I just thought of them as ball-bearing games. Many of them lacked the launcher, which made them closer to "dexterity" puzzles I've covered elsewhere. The one I have the earliest and clearest recollection of is a baseball-themed game, with the baseball part just consisting of a picture of a baseball player. The present specimen must have been picked up later. In fact, when I looked it up, I found out it was made at the mindbogglingly late date of 1987 by Tomy, previously featured for their windup bots. Here's the back of the game, which is just a little smaller than a paperback.
In addition to their windups, Tomy was a prolific producer of pinball games, including the Waterful line. With this game, the main gimmick is that there's a magnet to catch the balls as they launch until they form a line. I found certain other variations, apparently dating back to the late '70s. notably including one made to look like a helicopter rescue. This game desperately updated it into a knockoff of the already venerable arcade game Centipede. The problem is that after about the fourth or fifth ball, the magnet gimmick starts wearing off. Then the balls either bounce off or stick to the ones higher up in one big knot. Here's a typical outcome.
You might think this was the end of the line for Tomy mechanical games. In fact, Tomy was already making LCD games. They also continued to make wind-up handheld games that approximated the tech of electromechanical arcade games, which had survived long enough to be featured in Dawn of the Dead (see video here). Early examples had imitated arcade classics like pace Invaders, while later examples included licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tie-ins. This led to the even more incomprehensible experiment known as Game Buddy. My own recollection from this strange dead end is that I saw a few mechanical handheld games at a discount mall in the mid- to late 1990s, complete with the scrolling background. I had no idea what they were at the time, and I still cannot find any record of who might have made them (I'm sure they were way below Tomy's standards). Now, I regret not buying one just to have an example, but having seen footage of other examples, I can't call it a loss.
That ends this trip down memory lane. For this particular game, I can at least say it's still mildly entertaining, if only to see the carnage when it doesn't work. If there's a lesson, it's that even the "bad" people remember usually isn't the worst. That's all for now, more to come!
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