This post over at Battlegrip got me to thinking about other early handheld electronic games - and there are few earlier than Tomy's Blip.
Like most pre-Space Invaders arcade cabinets, Blip was in fact a mechanical game. That ''timer'' you wound-up to play? It's actually a clockwork mechanism that powers the movement of the game's ''ball'' - an LED mounted on a moving pivot that would idle its way to and fro across the game ''screen'' in response to your button presses. Or rather, button very hard holds...
Yes, even by the standards of the day it was primitive. And whilst many people attribute the Game and Watch series to kickstarting the hand-held gaming revolution, credit must go to Blip for being the Granddaddy of them all.
