Top 10 Video Game Firsts
09. First Hand-held Video Game Console
If you thought that Nintendo's Game Boy was the first handheld game console -- or the first to use game cartridges -- we will forgive you, you child of the New Millennium! The actual first cartridge-based hand-held gaming console was actually called the Microvision, and was manufactured and sold by the Milton Bradley Toy Company.
Milton Bradley, if you do not realize this, is the toy company that brought the world such classic table-top games as Life, Yahtzee, if you were a child of the '70s it is perhaps best known for the physically challenging game Twister (which most parents thought of as foreplay not game play and forbid their children to play) and if you were a child of the '80's no doubt the game you remember best form the company is Jenga.
Our personal table-top favorites were Stratego and Operation, but we are talking about electronic hand-held game consoles now, not table-top games, so let us get back to the Microvision shall we?
Released by Milton Bradley in November of 1979, the Microvision was designed by Jay Smith (the same engineer who would later design the Vectrex game console). The first hand-held gaming system to use game consoles made it a pioneer, but there were issues that prevented it from really taking the world by storm, starting with its small LCD screen.It was not so much that the screen was too small -- it was not -- rather it was the very crude state of LCD manufacturing at the time, with the displays having limited life-spans due to leakage of the LCD cells that turned the screens brown in spots. This was called “screen rot” at the time, and was a significant and widespread issue.
The second factor that prevented it from becoming a gaming icon (like the Game Boy) was its very small library of game titles -- basically at launch there were only five titles available: Block Buster, Bowling, Connect Four, Shooting Star, and Pinball. Additional titles were released over the course of the following three years, including some original and very popular ones like Star Trek: Phaser Strike, Sea Duel, and Alien Raiders, bit alas the games did not come fast enough to make their mark.
Interestingly, MB took what it learned from the Microvision and used that experience as a springboard to launching a large number of dedicated portable and hand-held gaming systems, including some games that are still popular today like Electronic Battleship and Electronic Yahtzee.
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I was thrown off by the "First 3D shooter question, as it isn't necessarily accurate.
For one thing, it associates 3D to equate to FPS, which is incorrect. Considering the number of vector-based or even sprite-based flight games that started in the 80s, many of these had a step up on Wolfenstein as far as 3D engines go. I mean, Red Baron's vector graphics presented a much more real 3D "shooter" than Wolfenstein.
Secondly, if you ARE simply talking FPSes, while Wolfenstein 3D is the first widely honored game, the same engine was used for the older Catacombs 3D, featuring largely identical mechanics, minus the commercial success and recognize-ability.
Given your attention to detail in so much else on this article, this seems a rather strange area to veer away from the otherwise well-researched path.
turns out you can do good and still turn out evil. Just saying.
that descibes ea and activision