Handheld game console

The handheld game console—a portable device with interchangeable game cartridges—emerged in November 1979 when Milton Bradley released the Microvision at $49.99. Designed by Jay Smith, who would later create the Vectrex, the Microvision was the first handheld gaming device that could play different games by swapping cartridges. It was, in essence, a very primitive Game Boy—and according to Nintendo's Satoru Okada, the Microvision directly inspired the Game Boy's development a decade later.

The Microvision's architecture was unusual even by 1979 standards. The console itself contained only controls, an LCD panel, and a controller chip for the display. Each cartridge contained the actual microprocessor—either an Intel 8021 or Texas Instruments TMS1100—with game code loaded onto its small ROM. When you changed games, you changed the entire computing brain of the device. This design emerged because microprocessors were still expensive enough that putting one in every console would have raised prices unacceptably.

Jay Smith, a 39-year-old engineer who had previously worked on Mattel Football, operated Smith Engineering when Milton Bradley commissioned him to develop their new toy line for 1979. The result was a device with a 16x16 pixel LCD screen—crude by any standard, but sufficient for simple games like Block Buster (a Breakout clone) and Connect Four.

The adjacent possible for handheld consoles had been opened by handheld electronic games like Mattel Auto Race (1976-77), which proved consumers would buy portable electronic entertainment. LCD technology had advanced enough to provide displays, though primitive ones. Microprocessors were available in sufficient variety that multiple chip architectures could power different games.

The Microvision suffered from design problems that limited its lifespan. The microprocessor in each cartridge lacked electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection and was directly connected to exposed copper pins. If a user touched those pins while carrying static charge, the processor could be destroyed. The LCD manufacturing process was also primitive; poor sealing introduced impurities that caused 'screen rot'—the liquid crystal spontaneously darkening over time. Many surviving Microvisions are unplayable due to rotted screens.

Despite these problems, the Microvision was commercially successful, grossing $8 million for Milton Bradley and establishing Smith Engineering as a million-dollar operation. Twelve game titles were released before the device was discontinued. More importantly, the Microvision established the handheld console category—the idea that a portable device could play multiple games via interchangeable media.

Nintendo's Game & Watch series (1980) took a different approach—single-game devices without cartridges—but the Game Boy (1989) returned to the Microvision's cartridge-based concept. Okada explicitly cited learning from the Microvision's limitations when designing the Game Boy. The handheld console lineage runs directly from Springfield, Massachusetts in 1979 to the Nintendo Switch in 2017.