Simpler in the 70s: Handheld Video Games

Some of the more astute of you will have noticed that up there in the title banner, one of the ghostly images superimposed behind the title itself is that of a game called Blip.

As you can see from this 1977 commercial, it's basically a handheld version of Pong, but it's half-mechanical, half-electronic. You have a timer, and three buttons, and you have to hit the LED ball back across the screen using the buttons. The weird thing in the commercial, though, is that the LED ball doesn't seem to conform to any kind of laws of physics. It seems to bend and land wherever it feels like.

I had this game as a kid, and remember loving it, but, of course, had no one to play it with. So I basically played it in one-player mode until the batteries died, then it ended up as trash in the bottom of my MFI toy chest until we finally threw it out.

Anywho, roll on next Christmas, and I got a Merlin (commercial in the post above), the Electronic Wizard, which had 11 buttons and 6 different games. Unlike the far inferior Blip, Merlin taught me how to play Blackjack. Later additions to game also taught me how to smoke and drink neat scotch with a little water to bring out the flavor, and to make sure that I wear dark sunglasses while playing Tic Tac Toe so I don't give away any 'tells'.

Merlin was worth buying new batteries for. In fact, I remember playing that damned thing so much that I had worn the circles off the buttons, and you could actually see the switches underneath the plastic. I was a Blackjack fiend back then, as long as I wasn't playing with actual real people and cards and such.

About 4 years later, I got a second-hand Atari console, and could play proper Pong until the cows came home. But that was the 80s, and the 80s don't play here.