Documented to the year
A handheld console takes interchangeable cartridges for the first time
Milton Bradley's handheld accepted plug-in cartridges, a decade before the idea worked properly. Fragile screens, a coarse display and a library of about a dozen games kept its life short.
Released in 1979 and withdrawn within roughly two years
Entry 36 of 164 in the record
What happened
Jay Smith's team arranged the hardware unusually. Rather than putting a processor in the unit and code in the cartridge, they put the processor in the cartridge, so each game brought its own logic and the base was little more than a liquid-crystal panel, a rotary knob, a membrane keypad and a battery compartment. Cartridges carried overlays that relabelled the keypad for each game. The display managed a grid of coarse square blocks, enough for a paddle, a bouncing dot or a very abstract tank.
Reliability finished it. Static discharge could kill a cartridge, screens failed or went sluggish in cold weather, and the small library gave owners little reason to persist. Milton Bradley withdrew the product within a couple of years. The concept was nonetheless correct, and the reasons it failed were about components rather than judgment. Better displays, cheaper memory and a processor in the console itself turned the same idea into one of the industry's most successful product lines ten years later.
The world at the time
Handheld electronic games in 1979 were selling in large numbers, all of them single-purpose devices with red light-emitting displays. Cartridge consoles had just proved themselves in living rooms, so combining the two ideas was an obvious move for a toy company. Liquid-crystal panels were new, cheap and considerably less robust than anyone selling them admitted.
Historical significance
One device, many games, in a pocket. That formula defines handheld gaming, and this was the first attempt to build it. The failure is instructive too, since it shows how much of the handheld's eventual success depended on display technology rather than on the design insight, which had been available all along.
What it changed
The product is now largely a collector's curiosity, and surviving units frequently have dead screens. Its designer went on to create a home vector console. The cartridge handheld idea then lay dormant until Nintendo revived it with a monochrome system whose long battery life and durable construction addressed, one by one, the weaknesses that had sunk the original.
Sources consulted
- Replay: The History of Video Games
- The Ultimate History of Video Games
Listed sources support the facts in this entry. Wording throughout is original to this archive. Read more about how entries are researched in sources and methodology.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026. Report a correction