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The Handheld Museum: A tribute to the early history of handheld gaming

Aug 30, 2008

Maintained soley by a man known as Rik M., there seem to be thousands of different handheld games on the page from the 1970s on. Take a tour.

To say that technology has changed in the last 20-30 years is really nothing short of an understatement.

Those of us who remember rotary phones and three television channels, frequently receive blank stares and downturned mouths when we refer to those things in the presence of our younger co-workers.

It is important to remember that it was right about the time of Tron, and the advent of cable TV, that computer technology really started to become mainstream.

Remembering these things is more than just entertainment, it is also a useful reminder about how far we've come technologically, and maybe a good sounding board to ask ourselves how this has affected us as a society. But I digress.

I love the nostalgia of old games, mainly because they were the mainstream manifestations of major technological advancements. I asked to do a series on vintage handheld games, and our intrepid editor came across a Web site that had them all. It was called the Handheld Museum and is maintained solely by a man we know as Rik M. There seem to be thousands of different handheld games on the page from the 1970s on.

Instead of a series, we decided to do a single large gallery that highlighted a number of the handhelds. All of the images are taken from Rik's site and 90 percent of the captions, too. I have put my own comments in at the end, preceded by "**". Some of the games have more pictures on the website with boxes and some instruction manuals, even movie clips from when the games appeared in movies.

If you want to find more info or pictures of a particular item, Rik has the items nicely cataloged by manufacturer and by item title. I sorted the gallery here in this order:

1 - watch games
2 - Sports games
3 - All of the others

I tried to keep similar genres together as well. I found that the watch games had a lot of sales images for the Sears catalogs and the like. The Sears catalog, kiddies, was all we had for browsing "back in the day". So without any additional delay, we give you... The Handheld Museum: A tribute to the early history of handheld gaming.

Be sure to visit Rik's site when you are done here.

Alba Baseball (19??, LCD, Watch batteries, Model

Credit: Drew McBee/Tech Republic