Those 80s Electronic Games That Raced Through Batteries

I scanned this image out of an old UK Doctor Who magazine from December 1982. At first I have to admit that I thought it was some kind of spaceship (I'm SUCH a nerd), but it quickly resolved into a race car made out of at least, oh I dunno... $30 worth of batteries these days. The ad promises rebates when you buy certain electronic games.

The games are what's interesting... by 1982 the handheld electronic revolution was in full swing. We were still nearly a decade away from a single efficient handheld that used carts (the MicroVision being a reluctant exception), so these expensive little handhelds only played a single game most of the time. Let's take a moment to remember a couple of those fun-filled battery sucking games...

I actually have this electronic Scramble that's vaguely reminisicient of a mini arcade cabinet. Considering that in the arcade Scramble is a game with a scrolling landscape, it's a minor miracle that they were able to reproduce the fun with an LED screen.

Puck Monster is one of the innumerable Pac-Man clones of the era... a wholesale infringement that could never fly today. Pac-Man is pretty easy to capture in an LCD game, but the title of this game is what's interesting. Originally Pac-Man was going to be called "Puck Man" in the US, but an executive at Midway reasoned that it would be too easy for unruly teens to vandalize "Puck" into saying something else... if you catch my drift (and let's not even think of what could be made out of Pac-Man's nose). "Puck Monster" clearly didn't get the memo, and the poor print quality of the ad does make the title look a little... ahem... questionable.
"Contraption" was sold in the US by Lakeside. Two D cells start the gears in motion, and players try to migrate their colored marbles from one side of the board to the other. I imagine a loud time, but I think that would add to the clanky gear gameplay. Looks like it would be fun for adults too. Gotta try to find one of these...

Touch N' Tell is more of an educational game. Created by the same geniuses at TI who created Speak & Spell, Touch N' Tell has replaceable color sheets that invite pre-schoolers to point to items named by the not-at-all-sinister robot voice. Today the Touch N' Tell is a frequent platform for "circuit-bending", experimental audio devices created by kitbashing old electronics. I'd characterize the results as possibly "interesting", but the rest of the band might stop telling you when practice is...

The original magazine ad's rebate offer sounds like a generous chunk of change, but it's money that will go right back into Duracell's pockets since these games tended to burn through batteries. Remember how quickly your dead battery pile grew after a few hours of electronic excitement? Now we all know what to do with those dead batteries... build a vague model of a race car that isn't going anywhere.