Mattel’s Most Important Handheld Wasn’t About Football
August 30, 2020Years before the release of Nintendo’s popular Game & Watch series of handhelds, even before Coleco and Milton Bradley handhelds and the Microvision, there was Mattel.
While most people might think of Mattel’s Football handheld as the company’s first foray into electronic gaming, it was actually its second.
Auto Race was the first, and it was because of the success of the 1976 game that Mattel decided to jump into the market with a slew of new titles based on different sports.
What’s fascinating is that Auto Race came about as a sort of side project developed by George J. Klose, a development engineer at the company, who was trying to figure out how to make use of calculator parts. His idea was to make a game that used an LED display to show a red blip that could be moved by the player.
Once approved, Mattell partnered with Rockwell International to design a compact circuit board for the game.
It was Mark Lesser who wrote the code for Auto Race, still using the existing calculator chip. The assembly language program fit into the chip’s 512 bytes of ROM.
The final game has players shifting a plastic car icon right and left to maneuver their red-blip car between the dots of other cars as they try to work their way up to the screen four times before the 99-second timer runs out. A little gear shifter on the left side of the game controls the speed of the car.
The success of the $25 handheld led first to the creation and release of Mattel Football, and then the creation of the incredibly successful Mattel Electronics Division in 1978. Two years later, Nintendo released the first of what would become a long-run of Game & Watch handhelds.
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