Mattel Electronic Football / Simon

The first button masher?

I never had an Atari game system as a child¹… that was something I only got to play at sleep-overs or a cousin’s house. Eventually (as children measure these things) we got an Intellivision. But even in those early days of computer and electronic gaming I did manage to get my hands on a Mattel Electronic Football game.

The original (I’m told). Image from Handheldmuseum.com

In the late 70s and early eighties, Richard Chang’s and George Klose’s²³ Electronic Football created a firestorm among the neighborhood kids. Sure the Atari (etc) was better … but you couldn’t sneak that into school and play (assuming you didn’t attract a crowd). More realistically — you could play Football⁴ on the school bus; or in the back of a station wagon for a family trip where an hour gained you barely more than fifty-five miles.

As for the game play … well, this is almost certainly the worst game we’re ever going to discuss. You are a blinking light, and you move up/down and forward and don’t try to hit any of the other lights (which slowly converge on you). If you make it to the edge of the screen it “scrolls” … you pop back to the other edge and have to race past more lights, until you score a touchdown.⁵

It’s honestly not a great game. It’s a dancing bear, though. Any computer/video game beat this by a mile, but those were full cabinets (or attached to your TV). You could hold this in your hand.

The first edition was sold through Sears, which originally ordered something like 100,000 then discontinued the order when it didn’t sell fast enough, only for it to start selling half a million a week a mere six months later (after a Christmas Season) and after that the floodgates were opened. Mattel, Coleco, and others created game after game, mostly sports game.

One exception to this was Ralph Baer’s Simon, the iconic memory game that was released a year after Mattel Football’s debut. Simon is technically a hand held, but more realistically you played with it on the floor or table.

Image from Wikipedia

Simon “became a pop culture phenomenon,” probably helped by the art deco look and its launch … at Studio 54! It is also helped because Simon is an actual interesting challenge, the noisy spiritual successor to Memory, the children’s game where you match cards together.

As a genre, handheld games were a ‘flash in the pan,’ lasting a decade or two (ignoring nostalgia). Now you can play games in a web browser or smartphone, and if Candy Crush is a better game (I really have no idea), just remember that Mattel Auto Racing (the precursor to Football) fit in a mere 511 bytes⁶! Nowadays handheld gaming can mean anything up to a Steam Deck.

I am torn between which of these two games was more impactful. Both have their place, but it feels like Mattel Football was the more influential game, with Simon being more of a one-hit wonder. Perhaps both should be included in our final last of 100 Most Influential Games of the 20th Century?

I don’t know. What do you think?

1. As an adult I bought one of those Joysticks with a built in Atari and 100 games for something like $20. Ah … Moore’s law!

2. Surprisingly, there is no Wikipedia page on Mattel Football , just a page on “Handheld Electronic Games” And VideoGameGeek isn’t much help. But the inventor names are listed on the patent.

3. Mark Lesser (the original Electrical Engineer/Programmer) also credits them with the idea.

4. Or many of the other sports, but Football was first and king.

5. Later editions allows passing, meant you controlled two (!) LEDs.

6. The average smartphone consumes 0.5 - 1 Gig of data per day.