The Pocket Games We Remember From the 1970s
Before screens, a pocket game was moulded plastic, a spring and something small that rolled. Here is what the seventies actually put in our coat pockets.
Mostly mechanical, mostly pocket-sized
The defining seventies pocket game had no battery at all. A printed plastic case held a steel ball bearing, a maze of moulded walls and a few holes waiting under the obvious route. You tilted, you held your breath, and you started again.
Tomy's small mechanical handhelds — sold in the UK under the Pocketeers name — are the ones most British players remember, alongside a wide field of similar tilt mazes, pinball-style flickers and dexterity puzzles sold in newsagents and seaside shops.
The dexterity puzzle tradition
Pocket games inherited a much older idea: the palm puzzle, where the whole game is a ball, a board and gravity. Sliding-tile puzzles of the fifteen-puzzle type and captive-bead dexterity games had been sold for decades, and the seventies simply made them cheaper, brighter and themed — sharks, space, motor racing, dragons.
That inheritance is why the games are so quick to understand. There is nothing to read. You can see the goal, and you can see the hole.
Electronics arrive late in the decade
Battery-powered handhelds only became a mass-market item towards the end of the seventies. Mattel's Auto Race, released in 1976, is generally credited as the first fully electronic handheld game, followed in 1977 by Mattel Football and its row of red LED blips that stood in for players.
Parker Brothers' Merlin and Milton Bradley's Simon, both from 1978, brought memory and pattern games to the same shelf, and in 1979 Milton Bradley's Microvision became the first handheld to accept interchangeable cartridges. The mechanical games did not disappear — they were cheaper, and they never needed a battery.
Playing the seventies today
The club's seventies collection rebuilds that feel for a phone: tilt to roll, short rounds, no tutorial. The physics run on your handset's motion sensor rather than a bearing, but the question is the same one — can you take the shortcut without losing the ball?