Trying to take advantage of nostalgia, Tiger Electronics’ 90s LCD games are making a big comeback with four portable titles.
The year was 1988. I was a little friend. The world was different. Toy R’s was too big to fail. TV was on the program and if you missed a show, it was that.
Sometimes you would walk to someone’s house, walk, and you have no idea if they were at home. And we didn’t have the Internet there to absolutely ruin everything we loved. For that, we had something called grandparents.
I will add, sidebar, that I loved my parents. They were really good people. They could also ruin things really well; but they did it with love.
Case in point, I found that they were releasing a domestic version of the Arcade hit gauntlet on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I would no longer have to convert my allowance into neighborhoods and pump those neighborhoods into the nearby car from a bowling alley (shout at Yorktown Lanes, which is somehow still standing). Now I would be able to play at home, for free, whenever I wanted. I have been advertised.
I told my parents about it at the beginning. I begged them later. One day we were at the home of visiting grandparents and my parents educated him with me. My grandparents would make a statement that I would listen to forever thereafter, for the rest of their lives. They said, “Oh, if that’s a gift idea, we’ll take it for him.”
I was young. I still did not know disappointment.
In short, my birthday rotates and my grandparents give me a box. It is small, it is close to the size of a Nintendo game and my grandparents smiled like Jack-O-Lantern and told me how they got me what I was asking for.
The paper tore. Inside? This.
My reality has failed. If life was really a simulation, this was the point the blue screen would get.
I didn’t know how to react. I had spent the whole month dreaming about this moment and now I had this … calculator. This … impostor.
This disappointment? These were Tiger Electronics’ portable LCD games.
If there was a big trend in games, Tiger would be there to sell an economic knockoff to people trying to save money, thinking that their children wouldn’t mind. when Sonic the Hedgehog 3 came out, they made an LCD version. When did Virtual Boy come out? They created an LCD game that you could literally tie to your head. They were there to ruin everything and destroy families.
Now they are returning under the false pretense of nostalgia.
See, I work in a Gamestop. (Stop, I’ve already heard it. Whatever comments you are writing, stop. I know.) We recently received this great and exciting reminder that we started taking pre-orders on a new nostalgia object, following “classic” Palm Electronics Tiger Electronics .
Four incredibly disconcerting titles are coming up that really make me wonder how licenses can afford: Mermaid, transformers, X-Men and the aforementioned Sonic the Hedgehog 3. For $ 14.99, you can go ahead and relive the confusion of knowing what you want to do but be limited to playing on a glorified calculator.
Somewhere, my grandparents’ bodies are making their way to the surface knowing that I have been given one last chance to ruin a gift. Honestly, I would be less happy to see one of these PDAs than I would see them as zombies.
If you are a masochist, however, they will drop by the end of the year. Tiger Electronics handhelds will retrieve for $ 14.99 at GameStop and presumably other retailers.