Football was released in 1977 and it was labeled either Football or Football I depending on the date the game was released. This was the second game released by Mattel (Auto Race was the first) and sold through Sears. After less than 100,000 were made, Sears (using a computer model based on initial sales figures) determined that the games would not be big sellers, and most of the production for Football and Auto Race was stopped. Sears was definitely proven wrong. Within six months, it became obvious to that their prediction was false, and production was started up again and reached record levels.

The game was played by using direction keys to run a blinking red dot through a maze of defensive dots. A kickoff would result in a chirping version of the “Charge!” melody. A simple game and quite prehistoric when compared to the handheld games of today, the Football game was for football and football only. As for sound, it was dominated by bleeps and blips and it ran on a single 9V battery.

The game had two levels of play: Pro 1 and Pro 2. The graphics were all red lit dots and the player was the brightest of the six. The object was to get across the screen without getting tackled by the five remaining dots – a simple concept, but not easily accomplished.

Though its lack of true passing and inability to let the player run backwards limited the games overall realistic feel, it offered a compelling challenge to a generation quickly becoming fascinated with electronic entertainment. In fact, the game was re-issued by Mattel in 2000 thanks to its overwhelming popularity in the ‘70s.

The MuMoH physical collection includes an actual working model from 1977.

References:
http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Mattel/FB.htm
http://www.bigredtoybox.com/articles/fbindex.shtml
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9913124-1.html
http://www.thocp.net/software/games/golden_age.htm

The Game Boy was the first cartridge-based gaming system to allow up to four players to be linked through serial ports on their own systems for multi-player fun. The compact video game system manufactured by Nintendo was released in 1989 in the U.S. and Japan. The Game Boy was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, former creator of the UltraHand, an expanding arm toy made and sold in 1970.

The Game Boy ran on a CPU with integrated sound generation and allowed users to pop in different cartridges, known as Game Paks, to play a variety of different games. Yokoi designed the Game Boy to be a small, inexpensive entertainment device in which the cartridge would provide the data, logic and rules of the game to the processor.

Originally sold with the puzzle game Tetris, Game Boy soon developed many games for their system, including sports, action and fantasy games, available for around $15 a pop. The most popular Game Boy games include: Tetris, Zelda, Mario Brothers and, more recently, Pokemon. The system itself cost around $90 in 1989 and ran in four shades of “gray” which appeared as green to dark green.

Eventually, Game Boy developed the Game Boy Color, making games viewable in additional colors, and in 1995, the company produced a rainbow of colored cases for their systems. Since then, Game Boy has released several versions of their original system, including the Game Boy Advanced and Game Boy Evolution.

Other Game Boy-related products include the Game Boy Camera which was released in 1998 with the Game Boy printer, which allowed users to print black and white, low resolution photographs.

The MuMoH physical collection includes an early 1990s version of the Game Boy.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy
http://www.vidgame.net/NINTENDO/GB.html

Because of the show Rock Star: INXS (soon to be a subject of another post), I started uploading lots of 80s music to my iPod. A friend asked me if I liked INXS back in the 80s, and I responded, “You bet I did! I had all their cassettes!”Cassettes were awesome! You weren’t just restricted to listening to albums, but you could easily record your own playlists, like a real disk jockey! Most of these custom cassettes were recorded one at a time, painstakingly in the order of how we wanted to hear them – at least at the time we made the recording. Remember how cool it was when someone invented the fast-forward feature that could stop in the silence between the end of one song and the beginning of the next? That allowed us to fast-forward over the song we regretted accidentally putting on the tape.

But to enjoy my music collection in my car meant bringing with me something that resembled a suitcase, which I had keep stashed underneath the passenger seat whenever I parked the car. If you had a car in the 1980s, you also had that suitcase – don’t lie, of course you did. We all did. Anything smaller than that suitcase would limit you to some unsatisfyingly small number of cassettes (some older folks remember the steamer trunk sized container of 8-tracks they had to lug around to enjoy their music collection in their vans back in the 70s).

The advent of CDs reduced the suitcase to a “wallet” or even a smaller collection fanned across the back of a sun visor. When CDs became recordable, man that was revolutionary! We still painstakingly recorded songs one at a time to create our own playlists, but at least the music was digital.

The thing is, people have always wanted to bring the entertainment media they enjoy along for the ride. It’s all about having anything you want, anytime you want it, anyplace you are.

Chrysler Motors knew this, even way back when. In 1956 they teamed with CBS to create the “Highway Hi-Fi” – an under-dash phonograph that played vinyl records at a super-slow 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. The slow speed allowed a small disc to pack up to an hour of entertainment on each side. Special mechanical engineering reduced the number of times and distance the needle would skip across the disc as the car drove over bumps in the road.

Technology really didn’t catch up with Chrysler’s vision until the invention of the iPod. The iPod lets you carry with you virtually your entire multimedia library wherever you go.

Now cars come equipped with iPod-ready sound systems. You can control your iPod from the steering wheel as the device sits in the cradle getting charged. Of course satellite radio is there for those times when you grow tired of the 60 megabytes of music you have stored on your iPod. And just in case, the theater-quality surround sound works great with the built-in DVD player (with a cartridge to keep multiple DVDs ready to play).

If only there was a way to listen to INXS in the front while the kids watch Sponge Bob in the back…

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations