Tomy's 1982 wind-up powered "Pocket Arcade" shmup

[PC Engine Fan X!]

If you flashback to the year of 1982, which was a cool year for Coleco's portable electronic tabletop arcade games...games like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger, Galaxian, Zaxxon and Q*bert were sold at expensive prices back in the early 1980's at $50.00-70.00 USD!

Tomy had brought out it's cool Pocket Arcade games that didn't need any batteries to play them but by winding them up and flicking the power switch to "On", you could play a serious gaming session until the game lost it's mechanical "juice". The Pocket Arcade games were sold across the USA (for a mere $20.00 USD) & Japan as well (but under a different name). Only three Pocket Arcade games came out in 1982 timeline: Space Dock, Attack In Space and a third one (I forget the name of it though but featured a mouse who had to get a stack of cheese and avoid the two cats along it's path -- crazy game for it's time & even featured a score counter as well!).

Anyways, the Tomy Pocket Arcade game of "Attack In Space" was a mechanical version of Space Invaders. Your missile would move move back and forth on a single plane and your goal was to destory the advancing invaders before your base station lost power to launch it's missiles. Upon hitting the invaders, they would animate with a white-colored explosion flash. There was no record of keeping score but it was cool to see how many invaders you could destory before the game ran out of "juice".

Tomy would later release two more Pocket Arcade games for a grand total of five different games altogether. In the late 1980's, Tomy re-released the Pocket Arcade games with different graphics and different names but used the same mechanical wind-up motors to power them up.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[BrianC]

I used to have some of those pocket arcade games. Some of them were extremely simple, but I used to love those things.