Tomy’s Electro-Mechanical Wonder, Blip
September 27, 2020A year after Mattel released the first electronic handheld, a Japanese company released a very different sort of hand gaming device.
Blip. The Digital Game released in the U.S. in 1977 and the same year as World Tennis in Japan. And technically, it’s not really an electric handheld video game, it is an electro-mechanical handheld. Where Mattel’s popular line of sports-themed gaming systems was essentially built on the guts of calculators, Tomy’s Blip was a wonderous mash-up of the digital and the mechanical.
While Blip makes use of a bright red LED as its ball, the inner workings of the gameplay are mostly mechanical. Players wind up a timer which also lends motion to the game. The spring timer uses gears to randomly move an arm — with the LED affixed to it — back and forth under the plastic screen of the game.
Players predict which of the three spots the ball is headed to and press the button under that spot before the LED arrives. If they succeeded, the blip crosses back over the screen’s white center line and it then it’s the other player’s turn to try and intercept the ball.
The game even has a one-player mode which allows players to take on Blip’s geared randomization and seemingly inability to miss a return shot.
Interestingly, if you count electro-mechanical games in with purely electronic handhelds, then the first handheld ever released wasn’t 1976’s Auto Race, but the electro-mechanical Electronic Tic-Tac-Toe in 1972.
Either way, Blip is an interesting piece of handheld history.
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