This is another early hand held digital video game from 1979 in the vein of the Tomy series, though in my mind far more sophisticated. In fact, I wasn’t a sports video game fan as a kid, but after playing this at a friend’s house I was blown away. I’m not sure whether it was the remote pitching unit with five different pitches, or the fact that the balls and strikes were tracked by the LED unit, or even the fact that they included paper scoring sheets for you to follow your entire games. But for me, this was a game I was immersed in for hours at a time—almost like a real baseball game. I would often think back to this game when playing the EA Sports baseball series on Playstation. This game was all about verisimilitude, and I have to admit it was pretty impressive back-in-the-day, and the follow-up version, Entex Baseball 2, was supposedly even better.
Update: Just found this review on YouTube by a young kid who is reviewing the Entex Electronic Baseball in response to someone discussing the Milton Bradley Microvision Handheld. As an aside, I dig this kid because he know he is the best 🙂
Wow. I can’t even tell you how many hours upon hours I spent playing the Mattel version of this game. What a flashback. The feeling when you connected on a home run — beeping, lights flashing — was unbelievable. And football? Whoa, yes.
My best friend had this baseball game, but I totally LIVED in the Mattel football game.
@Matt,
This was a classic, and I was pretty excited about the pitching particualrly. it was the first game I can think about that even attempted this level of complexity with bitching until the 90s.
@D’Arcy,
I also lived in the Mattel football handheld, the double-header one, and that is absolutely a staple in this series. I’ll be using the picture you have of it on your blog 🙂
@Jim that was quite possibly the best typo ever.
@Jim the blog post I wrote used a screenshot of the iPhone app – it’s not a photo of the real football game. For that, you’ll want the HandHeld Museum page.
My brother and I had both the ‘Head to Head’ football one and a hockey one that was almost identical to the above. We still have them and they work – I tried to insterest my son in the hockey one when he was 8, he tried it once and just looked kinda cock-eyed at me. Kids today! 😉