4-Bit Video Games: Tron, Scramble, Lupin, and Caveman by Tomy

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Tomy made a lot of great handheld electronic games in the 1970s and 1980s, but my all-time favourite is Tomytronic Tron, based on the 1982 Disney movie. Over the years I picked up Scramble (Tomy) and Caveman (Tandy, by Tomy) and eventually noticed they have exactly the same form factor. With a bit of research I found out Scramble also goes by Alien Attack, Astro Blaster, and Rambler (exactly the same gameplay) but there's one more unique game in this unofficial series: Lupin, which has an interesting story as well, somewhat connected with the Cliffhanger laserdisc game. Finally, I have all four games, so here's a video showing them all in action, and I even have a shot at explaining how they work: they use the earliest SoCs ("system on a chip") available, which are 4-bit CPUs with integrated I/O, ROM, and a little bit of RAM, which were originally designed for use in electronic calculators. So these are essentially 4-bit video games.
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This is sort-of a sequel to my earlier video "Mechanical Handheld Zero-Bit Games from the 1970s": • Mechanical Handheld Ze...
Closing credits song is "Vacuum Fluorescent Display" by Bedford Level Experiment from the album "Place Without A Computer": bedfordlevelexperiment.bandca...
Index:
0:00 Four Tomy games with the same form factor
3:40 Why would people buy these?
5:04 Tron
6:45 Tron Gameplay
12:08 4-Bit Brains: Inside The Games
15:35 Caveman
16:35 Caveman Gameplay
22:11 Scramble
23:10 Scramble Gameplay
29:48 Lupin (including history)
32:51 Lupin Gameplay
37:34 Summary: Visceral
38:14 Thanks!

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23 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 504

@MattMcIrvin 3 года назад

Giving Tron a transparent case and putting theatrically designed extra traces on the board to represent the "World of Tron" inside the device was pretty clever.

@stevethepocket 3 года назад

As soon as I saw the Lupin one I was like "oh I bet it's based on the anime, I wonder if he's aware of it"...and then the answer turned out to be so much more interesting than I could have possibly imagined.

@HappyCodingZX 3 года назад

I had that Tron game, it's clever how they put different modes into it.

@tomy.1846 3 года назад

That game looks fun! Many of those games were kinda lame. But they did look cool for back then!

@DaneArcher 3 года назад

I had Scramble when I was a kid and I loved it. After the batteries died on in I tried a neat trick where you can supply voltage to the battery terminals directly and skip the batteries altogether. I was 7 (or maybe 8?) when I learned that volts are NOT volts. 110V from the wall straight to it's little 6V circuits. That was the exact moment I learned to fear/respect electricity. Never told my parents.

@Sol-Cutta Год назад

I doubt modern viewers will understand just how special and magical these games felt.

@codahighland 3 года назад

I wonder if anyone has managed to dump the ROMs of these games. This is an under-preserved part of gaming history and while this old hardware is pretty durable it won't last forever.

@8_Bit 3 года назад

I just did some searching around, it looks like Kevtris has dumped all them except Lupin.

@Cherijo78 3 года назад

They're in here: blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Handhelds/VFD%20Games/

@Kloverkill Год назад

@@Cherijo78 Thank you!

@DJFace147 4 месяца назад

I had Caveman and Scramble! No blocky pixels with these lol! I always thought the gameplay was actually pretty good for what they were. Better than most lcd game watches. Going to see what emulation options are available…

@Prime-1111X 4 месяца назад

I was playing Tron on my Steam Deck. @@DJFace147

@TheHighlander71 3 года назад

I've always loved these VFD games. My friend Paul had a Scramble he got for his birthday. I remember how jealous I was of it! I currently have "Frisky Tom" and "Puck Man" which are both games I played in the 80's. Great stuff.

@randycharlesjohnson6248 27 дней назад

My parents bought Scramble for me for Christmas of 1982. My friend somehow got it in his head that my parents would buy him a Scramble game too. He was very upset when they didn't buy it for him. He should've known they wouldn't buy it for him.

@tarstarkusz 3 года назад

Tomy was infamous for its reliance on interchangeable parts with its physical toys and electromechanical games like hit and missile, atomic arcade pinball and digital derby. Given the mold costs, there is a lot of clever cost-cutting in these games.

@eekee6034 2 года назад

I always loved the interchangable parts. Modularity seemed like a cool trick to me when I was a kid, :) plus I liked cost-saving where it didn't hurt.

@tarstarkusz 2 года назад

@@eekee6034 Most people think of the bad aspects of cost-cutting, where shortcuts make the thing inferior. But when it's done right, it makes it better and cheaper. Tomy mostly did it right.

@chinabluewho Год назад

As someone who has spent his life in the plastic molding business it is insane how much some of the mold costs just to make a plastic cap, a company could easily go out of business if something happened to one of its higher dollar molds and were lost/stolen with the cavities in them in transport.

@MeanGeneHacks 3 года назад

I had Tron as a kid, thanks for bringing back old memories. Kids these days will never know how much imagination was necessary for handheld gaming back in the days.

@HelloKittyFanMan. 3 года назад

"The ROM code is actually included in the microprocessor." Oh wow, so these would be some of the very first systems-on-a-chip (SOCs), huh? Interesting!

@paulstubbs7678 3 года назад

This was fairly common, then some smart arse decided it needed a new fangled name so SOC came to be.

@HelloKittyFanMan. 3 года назад

@@paulstubbs7678: Why do you believe the term "system on a chip" came from what you call a "smart arse"?

@MrKata55 3 года назад

AFAIK It was actually factory-preprogrammed(the actual chip's silicon-wafer had fixed memory contents by design). The original Intel 8051 microprocessor(the AVR's grandpa) had the same kind of memory built-in, however it also had an external memory bus which allowed to store the program in a seperate EPROM chip or such.

@HelloKittyFanMan. 3 года назад

@@MrKata55: So we're still talking about an SOC.

@TheTurnipKing 3 года назад

Technically that probably would have been calculators, of which these were an offshoot.

@donkmeister 3 года назад

I'm amazed at the vibrant colours and how the designers cleverly made the display segments work so well for the graphics - VFDs were such an under-rated display tech, at a time when LCD and LED were so bland by comparison. My first CD changer and home cinema amp in the mid-90s both had VFD displays, with an option to turn it off that was intended to improve sound quality (presumably VFDs are electrically noisy?) but I loved the bright turquoise/blue they put out.

@rugan0723 3 года назад

I use to develop assembly code for National Semiconductor's COPS 4-bit microprocessors in the early 80's. We used them in TV cable converter boxes. I was sent to a training seminar once and everyone else there was pretty evenly split between toy companies (mostly from Mattel) and car manufacturers.

@8_Bit 3 года назад

Very cool! I've never heard from anyone who worked with them. I'd love to hear about the tools and process you used; did you have special development boards? I assume you did the programming on a fairly powerful desktop computer (or maybe a mini?) and then did you have to burn ROMs to test the code, or was there some serial link? What did you use for your display while testing, before the production VFDs (or LCDs or whatever) were made? That kind of thing. Sorry for the nerdy questions, I'm just very curious :)

@rugan0723 3 года назад

@@8_BitProgram development was much lower tech than you might imagine. We were using standard seven-segment led displays, so no cool VFD screens. You prototyped with a ROM-less version of your target micro-controller. The development system, supplied by National, used a single 8-inch floppy to store all your source and assembled files. It was connected to a terminal, printer, and PROM programmer. You used an O-scope for all your circuit/code debugging. We were generally only dealing with 1k of memory. But, it was amazing how much you could shoehorn into it.

@8_Bit 3 года назад

Awesome, thanks for the info. I sometimes think that sort of thing would have been my dream job had I been born 10 years earlier!

@talideon 3 года назад

One other fun thing is that there was an unlicensed quasi-crossover with Sherlock Holmes in the form of a character called Herlock Sholmès, who also kind of crops up in the Ace Attorney games!

@ScottACall 3 года назад

The Lupin novels had Sherlock Holmes in French but the author was sued so the English version have Herlock Sholmes or Homeock Shears, depending on the translation.

@eekee6034 2 года назад

The funny thing is Doyle's brother in law created a character who was inspired by Lupin as a counterpoint to Sherlock Holmes. :) He had nothing like the same name, he was Raffles the amateur cracksman.

@msfelicat 3 года назад

Lupin was released in germany too... drove my mother nearly to madness with the sound of it *laughs* and i think i still could play it nearly blind ...

@Inadvisablescience Год назад

I had the Tron game years back. I got so good at it, I flipped the score. Good memories. Thank you for sharing!

@NumosG 3 года назад

I never expected those VDFs to be so detailed. The Tron one shows such a great usage of the technology with the re-using and the different colors, I've never seen this before.

@SergiuszRoszczyk 3 года назад

CPU has 8x12 GPIO lines which can drive matrix. Also 4 lines are bit accessed and I guess they are for keyboard scan mostly. Rest of the screen must come from Patterns that Robin mentioned when walking through PDFs. But I agree that authors were very creative on colors and clever segment reuse.

@BastichB64K 3 года назад

I had a friend who had the Tron version in the 80's ... He was very popular 😄 and we all wanted it

@KlausWulfenbach 3 года назад

I wasn't aware that 4 bit processors were used for things like this after 8 bit ones were available. But it makes sense that 4 bit chips would be repurposed for handhelds when 8 bit chips were still relatively new and expensive.

@Torbjorn.Lindgren 3 года назад

The 8-bit processors of the time couldn't drive high-voltage VFD's and tended to require external support chips (memory, ROM, timers, transistors for the VFD drive and so on). So it wasn't just the processor, the support circuits could easily cost as much as the cpu itself. In comparison the 4-bit calculator chip used had all that integrated to make the cheapest possible VFD based calculators, they were close to being the first modern "SOC" (complete system) in comparison and was cheap because calculators used a LOT of these and was extremely price sensitive. AFAIK most pocket calculators still use 4-bit CPUs to this day (obviously driving LCDs instead). Best guess, using 8-bit processor would have made them totally non-viable (as in "massively increase production cost"). As mentioned these were priced similar to higher end cartridge games which pretty much only has a few dirt cheap ROMs in them. Basically these only exist BECAUSE of those 4-bit calculator chips was already there and someone figured out a secondary market for them.

@oldguy9051 3 года назад

@@Torbjorn.Lindgren Great explanation!

@grantd165 3 года назад

Oh man I had caveman and scramble. Still at my mum and dad's and still working.

@Relugus 3 года назад

Caveman I played a ton. Has surprisingly enjoyable gameplay.

@The_Wandering_Nerd 3 года назад

I first saw that Tron game at my cousin's house when I was about three or four. The translucent plastic, the glowing VFD display, and the high-pitched piezo beeper sound made it seem ultra-futuristic and almost magical in a way. I never did get past the first disk level but the sights and sounds were firmly etched in my memory ever since. Thanks for sharing your collection of these handheld games.

@Fanny-Fanny 3 года назад

Last time I was this early, it was 1982 and I'd had my first glimpse as a 5 year old of a C64 at a family friends house.

@HelloKittyFanMan. 3 года назад

Harrr haaaarrrrr! :-D

@martynlewis5901 3 года назад

Growing up here in the U.K. I had and loved the Tron game, it’s great to see it working again. Thanks for your time and effort on this 👍🏻

@AppliedCryogenics 3 года назад

I had Caveman! Super fun for the time. Also, around the same time had a racing game shaped like space-age binoculars, and it was 3D! I think that was a Tomy.

@8_Bit 3 года назад

Yes, they did a series of 3D games with the binocular form factor. Trying to capture that gameplay on video would be really difficult I bet!

@lubricatedgoat 3 года назад

I had a couple of those; of course my mother thought they were junk and chucked them :( Scramble was my fave by far. It inspired me to write my own version in machine language on the 64. Very nostalgic.

@MurderMostFowl 3 года назад

I love the extra details they did on the Tron console

@Medenmath 3 года назад

I'm impressed by how good these look for the (original) price. The art for the caveman game is really cute too.

@EmergencyChannel 3 года назад

$20 in 1981 is the same as $60-$65 today.

@solar3mpire 3 года назад

Lupin III : The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), was the first film by Miyazaki better known for Studio Ghibli

@eviljigglypuff2254 3 года назад

Secret of Momo was 1st

@footiebloke 3 года назад

This takes me back. I played that Scramble game so much when I was a kid.

@melody3741 3 года назад

I honestly expected these to be terrible but they seriously did everything they could with what they had I mean four freaking games with that wacky LCD thing? That's genius I guess it makes sense that it would be a vfd.

@pauldaniel6208 3 года назад

Happily found your channel. Great content and narration. I had not seen these games way back when. Thanks the demonstration. Subscribed!

@RalphBarbagallo 3 года назад

Bought the Tron one at a Flea Market in the 90s for $5 or so.

@bcostin 3 года назад

Thank you for making this great video. As a kid in the 80s I went down the other Wishbook path to the Atari VCS, but I've always been fascinated by these VFD games. The Tomy ones, especially. It's really ingenious how they worked around the limitations of the technology (and the price point.)

@cjmfebruary 3 года назад

I remember Tron and Scramble from my childhood (I never owned either but saw them in some stores). I did not know about Caveman or Lupin. I would love to have any or all of these games now as they remind me of my youth. I appreciate the time you took to film this review and playthrough of each of these games. I have subscribed to your channel. Thanks for sharing!

@matthewweng8483 Год назад

These are really great nostalgia trips back to the early 80s, I literally get flashbacks everytime you fire up the old Tomy and Tiger games... 12 year old me thanks you.

@aussieweaboo1054 3 года назад

Thanks for taking the time to film for us, never seen these before.

@mikemolt9770 3 года назад

Scramble! This is awesome. I had this game as a kid. Thank you for putting the nostalgic smile on my face.

@FuzzWoof 3 года назад

Ahh, I had all of those except Lupin when I was a kid. I hate to think how many hours I spent playing Scramble in particular! Such good memories.

@lbruington 3 года назад

I had Scramble when I was a kid. I played that thing for hours and hours. Totally forgot the name of it until I watched this video. Thanks for the refreshing my memory.

@pabletoday9782 3 года назад

These videos are both interesting and informative. I love this channel.

@IvoryTowerCollections 3 года назад

Excellent to see these together and have you completely play through them. I've also been looking for a Lupin since I first found out about it about nearly a decade ago.

@IvoryTowerCollections 2 года назад

It has been 10 months since my reply, but I received my Lupin in the mail today! It required quite the cleaning but is otherwise in really good shape. Like you noticed, I haven't figured out what the Alarm indication going off on occasion means in the game if anything.

@anthonymoloney3671 3 года назад

Thanks so much for the video. I had Scramble as a kid and really loved it, though can't remember being any good at it! Brings back some fond memories.

@Th3Pr0digalS0n 3 года назад

Those games are truly amazing pieces of tech. I grew up with tiger black and white garbage... Thank you for your demonstration.

@missumenimsatanass 3 года назад

Omg! I never knew about this game. I was hoping he was going to show game play. Thanks for this. I remembered most of the games but I don't recall ever seeing the Tron game. Tron was one of my favorites back in the day. There will never be another awesome decade like the 80s.

@DrakeNS42 3 года назад

Wow, we had the Caveman game as a kid (and probably drove our parents nuts with the music it plays). I didn't realize that there were other similar games, but I guess it shouldn't surprise me. Thanks for the vid!

@chrisb7528 3 года назад

I remember these as a kid funny how the games went from these, great graphics and highly playable to tiger crap. Tron looks amazing!!

@kisupantteri 3 года назад

These look awesome, never stumbled on these when I was younger

@kamp_ve_enduro 3 года назад

When i was child i have Lupin. Tank you. i went back to my childhood.

@Taterniac 3 года назад

Love the video buddy...this brings back memories

@eldontyrellcorp Год назад

Fantastic memories. For my birthday I got the frogger game, that I played to death My cousin had the double players pac man game and I really was jealous at it. 20 years later I asked him if he could give me and he did. On a flea market I found caveman (boxed). And I also have the DK game. Thanks for bringing back memories of a fantastic and unique era, with extremely creative people behind these vfd's (clever segments reuse)

@overdriver99 3 года назад

thanks. your review shows me how to play on each games. I love it! I had Scamble long long time ago but my cousin borrowed and lost it LOL.

@modsleix6 2 года назад

Really cool video here! I remember a childhood friend of mine lending me his TRON game for a day or two. I was lucky to have a power supply at home that was compatible with it so I didn't have to use batteries with it. I also bought my very first LCD game called SPACE CRUSHER by Radio Shack with was basically the same as Scramble. I still have that little game and it's in near mint condition. Such great memories of such a simple but very rich childhood due to toys that really inspired you to use your imagination or that captured your attention in a whole new way despite being very simplistic by today's standards. Again, great video here! Nostalgic and fun _(and slightly bittersweet)_ blast from the past...

@Icelink256 3 года назад

Oh man, I love these old VFD games! They were so creative with how they incorporated multiple game modes, using a single, non-overlapping grid. I've been developing a Tiger Electronics styled game for fun, but I do want to try making a simpler VFD styled game, eventually.

@GeorgesChannel 3 года назад

Great video and great memories from the 80's. We also played with this at a friends house. He also had a digital wrist-watch with a UFO-game, which i also found extremly fascinating...

@bengmo64 3 года назад

You're pretty good at these games! Those VFDs sure are nicer looking than the tiger LCDs, and the games have a lot more effort put into them also.

@penatio 3 года назад

Thank you for showing us these!

@geekwithsocialskills 3 года назад

Nice collection! I own the Tron and Scramble units. I actually fired up my Tron unit the other day for the first time in about a year. It still works great!

@mrjones29 2 года назад

Used to love these vintage tabletop electronic games from the early 1980s. My parents used to take me to Toys R Us during the Christmas holidays after junior high to pick one or two up. I had classic Galaxy Invaders, Missile Invaders and Astro Wars which are all now worth 100s of dollars second hand. Great times and wish I kept them. But hey kids swapped absolutely everything back in the 1980s for other toys and sports cards lol.

@highwayman187 3 года назад

I had the Tron game back in the day man that thing was a blast thanks for the memories brother

@shinjosho Год назад

Omg, i'm once have that Scramble when i was i kid. When i see your video i suddenly recall that opening melody. So wonder it still stuck on my head this long. Can't remember what happen to it.

@eng3d 3 года назад

Scramble has a visual grid is 4x8 = 32 words. Each word is able to represent 4 bits, so it is what we are seeing at least in Scramble, the line at the bottom, the square at the top, the bullet, the wings and the rocket (I think they allowed some combinations of them instead of one-byte one symbol). The player has 4 positions = 1 word but it is always at the left. Each missile should have a position x,y (X uses 2 words and Y uses a word), or using an index (2 words). Each enemy uses 2 words or 3 words (I think it could hold up to 4-5 enemies, 5 x 3 = 15). 32 + 1 + 3 + 15 = 51 words out of 160, so there is room for other things such as the boss, the level, the lives, the score, the program, music and level are in the ROM, so there is enough RAM for more stuff, Lupin uses a 5x9 grid so it is a waste of more resources. So, what I am talking about, the CPU is slow but it is enough for even more. The RAM was the main constraint. The Atari 2600 has 128 bytes of ram but it was 8 bytes, so it was almost the same as this 4-bit chips.

@elaineortiz653 7 месяцев назад

I have been trying to remember the game I had and loved so much. As soon as you started up Scramble, I was back in my childhood! I wish I had seen this video 2 years ago. Now I hope I can find Scramble online somewhere that's not too expensive.

@8_Bit 7 месяцев назад

If you set up a saved search on eBay for Tomy Scramble you'll eventually find one for about $50-$60 US. Right now there's a couple that would cost around $100 shipped but you should be able to do better than that if you watch and wait.

@RichardCyberPunk 3 года назад

Great video. I enjoyed watching it. I played the Tandy Scramble game in the 80s when I was a kid. Great game.

@tombrady5433 3 года назад

If somebody had one of these in the 80's when were kids in Grade School they were the freaking KINGS on the playground at recess. Fun times. 😊

@FreihEitner 3 года назад

The Caveman game looks pretty awesome, especially for it's time. With multiple, changing, levels these games were far more advanced than play 'n watch style handhelds.

@arostwocents 7 месяцев назад

Had never seen Caveman before, looks awesome. Never seen Lupin gameplay before, looks great too, Lupin is possibly the best one of this type of game overall! Would love for that to come to RA emulation. These games were actually really good. Astro Wars really holds up today i think. Thanks for the video 🎉

@freddymeier2697 3 года назад

Thanks Robin, we love your Video's for our beloved C64 but this brought back some great memories Living in Scotland, we had Astro blaster

@RandiRain 3 года назад

Those games aren't cheap. Been looking for affordable versions for a long time.

@johneymute 3 года назад

Not only that but the technology just wasn’t there yet.

@twt000 3 года назад

I have Caveman, the funnest one.

@SRDhain 3 года назад

This gave me such a warm feeling of nostalgia. Lupin looks and sounds the best of the bunch. I suspect it's probably the most expensive of all of them too, both now and back then. I can just about remember Scramble, possibly because i had another version called Super Cobra, which was another Arcade conversion to electronic game. It had a bigger playing field and had more adjustable parameters in real time, including the speed and level start. I also had one of the tomytronic 3D ones as well, which i think had stereo sound. Some sort of dogfight game, which was astounding to me back then. As you mentioned in your video, the consoles and home computers were expensive by comparison. Thanks for uploading & doing such a stellar job on the visuals, audio and research on the chipsets too.

@Lumibear. 3 года назад

And the memories come flooding back, mainly of the Scramble one, sneaking goes under my bed covers in the night, hahaha. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the screens of these presented so well, before, btw.

@paparansen 3 года назад

great content...thank you :) closing song is awesome ^^

@QUIZFILTER 3 года назад

Yeah, the screen capture close-ups of the TRON screen look great!!! I love the MPC graphic "spinning around" look that they did... this is AWESOME!!

@HelloKittyFanMan. 3 года назад

"Translucent shell..." It actually _transparent_ and shaded. When something is translucent that means that it lets light through but is textured/scrambled so you can't see the detail on the other side.

@io4439 3 года назад

@6:24 They are real life motorbike model numbers probably meant as an ode to the lightcycles in the movie Tron

@dan734 3 года назад

Great Video - I had Scramble as a 4 year old in 1982.

@kke 3 года назад

Pretty darn awesome what they could do with those VFD displays, especially in Scramble. The same could have been done in Game & Watch, but they never had anything like scrolling.

@me_fault 2 года назад

Super Mario Bros Game&Watch June 25, 1986 had scrolling.

@londongaz2 3 года назад

Love the look of these games!

@McOuchies 3 года назад

Man, these actually look pretty cool!

@Waccoon 3 года назад

I can't even recall how many hours of Tron I played back in the day. It was my second experience with a computerized electronic device, next to Merlin, and thankfully I still have both of those games. I remember playing Scramble back then, too, but I don't seem to have it anymore.

@fancifilms 2 года назад

Well done, this was great!

@mitchelldries6628 2 года назад

great video and very informative! i used to have tron and loved it! can't believe how creative they were with the three levels. don't know if i just discovered it, because i don't remember for sure, but, when you play against Sark, the more rings you keep, the more you have as a timer for defeating the MCP cone. very clever!

@HouseholdDog Год назад

Brings back a hell of a lot of memories.

@EdsterIII 2 года назад

Whoa these are awesome older toys. Back in the 70's we didn't have the technological nightmare kids have now. He had Mattel Hand Held games. I had the Football🏉, Basketball🏀, Baseball⚾️, Soccer⚽️, and Hockey🏒. They also had Head to Head versions too, for 2 players or just one if you wanted to play alone. They were fun as was the 70's themselves.

@OisEucalypt 3 года назад

Scramble! As a kid visiting my younger cousin in the 80s I would always try to sneak in a few games of this when my family visited his. I still want to track down a working copy for myself at some point, just for the nostalgia. Was aware of Tron and Caveman, but did just learn that there was one of Lupin. neat.

@DavidWonn 3 года назад

These are way more colorful than my aunt's late 1970s handheld games of Mattel Football, Basketball, and Blip, which only displayed red hyphens ( - ) on the screen! I’d even argue that the choice of cyan, green, and red on a black background was far better than IBM's fugly palettes on CGA monitors of the era.

@Beamerverleih2012 3 года назад

Just terrific games! I have all 4, even some color variants, in my collection. These vfd mini arcades need more love

@MattMcIrvin 3 года назад

The Caveman theme at 16:40 sounds suspiciously like Henry Mancini's iconic Pink Panther theme. (Seems to me the "gentleman thief" theme of Lupin would have been more in keeping with that music, since the first Pink Panther film had a character like that.)

@rayf2145 3 года назад

I was pretty sure I never owned one of these, and even that I never played one of these. But when I saw the Caveman gameplay, something in my brain clicked. It´s amazing how after 35-40years, your memory tells you: I´ve seen that before! I have no clue when and where, but I know I have played this as a young child. Of course without appreciating it back then. In Germany that is...Thanks for the spark!

@kinneticsand5787 3 года назад

NOT THE LCDS!!! NOOOOOOOOO (great video though :D) EDIT: Wow, the Tron game was super innovative. I was expecting Game & Watch style stuff. Also, great camerawork!

@Andros2709 3 года назад

Great video, very informative! As a side note, I didn't know that Lisa Simpson was a prehistoric egg hunter, LOL

@zo1dberg 3 года назад

I had cave man when I was little. Thanks for this, brought back some fond memories!

@JrGoonior 3 года назад

Got the TRON game for Christmas 1982, still have it and it still works.

@jonb1172 3 года назад

I had Caveman! Mine had a green surround on the screen rather than your blue and, despite having the "TOMY" emblem on the case it was distributed by Grandstand here in the UK (the Grandstand logo was printed on the screen surround). I put a lot of hours into that game back in the day. Thanks for memories!

@MrDirkles Год назад

I got Tron for Christmas 1982. I was so excited i got up at 4 am Christmas day to play it

@tolentarpay5464 3 года назад

The sound of the D-pad is very distinctive; that's what brings it all back for me.

@zenogoberti9003 3 года назад

Nice vid! I had a similar machine -Space Invaders style- back in the day.. Cheers from Italy!

@beverleyhicks2952 3 года назад

Great vid, thanks. I had a Lupin in Australia, still in my parents house somewhere along with an Astro Wars.

@TwinOpinion 3 года назад

Never seen these before. Really incredible. Far better than the Tiger Electronic games I grew up with.

@AkAkAkNeil 3 года назад

nice video, great game footage and details. I'm sure here in New Zealand a friend had a Scramble just the same, can not recall the brand...

@MrMegaManFan 11 месяцев назад

You just evoked a childhood memory of playing that Tron as a kid. I don't know who owned it (I didn't) but I remember all of the sounds and gameplay!

@8_Bit 11 месяцев назад

I'm not in the habit of using the word "visceral" often, but that's what this Tron game is for me. It's amazing: the intense sound and the glow of the VFD bring me back to my childhood maybe more than anything else.

@MrMegaManFan 11 месяцев назад

@@8_Bit My desire to relive this experience was so intense "visceral" is apt -- I immediately went looking for one on eBay. Sadly at $100 (the cheapest option) I just couldn't justify pulling the trigger.