Klose who was messing around with other uses for standard calculator hardware.

It turns out there’s a bit of shared history for both handheld games and game watches that can be traced back to, of all things, calculators.īack in 1976, Mattel created one of the first handheld game and launched both its own line of Mattel Electronics games and handheld games with the release of Auto Race.Īuto Race, or so the story goes, was the concept of product development engineer George J. Unfortunately, my research also sparked a bit of an obsession for me in handheld gaming systems. The research led to a fascinating piece I called “Time Killers,” which ran on Polygon. Back in 2015, I spent a month or so researching the history of watches that play video games.