Paperboy - Tiger Electronics | Retro Wrap-Up

Handheld gaming was pretty popular back in the day. In the late ’80s, toy company Tiger Electronics began releasing a series of handheld video games. The games had a simplistic LCD screen that mimicked fluid animation and sound that was closer to the stereotypical beeps and bloops that people thought the old Atari 2600 actually had.

Each individual unit featured a single game (mostly, you’ll see an exception in the videos below) that typically contained multiple gameplay modes to vary it up. Some of them were generic titles like Baseball, Football, Bowling, Pinball, etc. Others, however, were licensed from existing IPs, be they arcade classics, like Paperboy or Double Dragon, or movie tie-ins like Batman or Beetlejuice. Contrary to popular belief, some of these game were actually pretty good, providing hours of entertainment in the pre-Game Boy days.

The oprainfall Retro Commercial Research Team–in other words, me–brings you some interesting TV commercials for the somewhat forgotten part of gaming history. Be sure to let us know some of your favorite Tiger games in the comments.

Here are the highlights for the past week.

REVIEWS

ORIGINAL CONTENT

NEWS

Don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel for a variety of videos, including recaps, trailers and more. For example, this week, we have a special unboxing video of the Pier Solar Collector’s Edition.

And, as always, if you have any ideas or suggestions for retro commercials, let us know either through Facebook, Twitter or just leave a good old-fashioned comment below.

Eric Chetkauskas
Eric has been playing video games for longer than he can remember. His interests skew toward retro games with an emphasis on Japanese RPGs like Chrono Trigger and the Dragon Quest series.