Electronic Handheld Sports Games

Before PlayStations, Xboxes, or even Game Boys, there was only one way to get your sports fix on the go: a chunky plastic rectangle filled with blinking red dots and dreams.

I’m talking about the Electronic Football and Baseball games—the handheld kings of the late ’70s and early ’80s. They ran on 9-volt batteries and looked like something you’d use to detonate dynamite, but once you fired one up? Instant magic.

Gameplay was simple in the same way Pong is “simple”:

• In Football, you guided a lone red dash around blinking defenders, hoping to survive long enough to reach the end zone.
• In Baseball, pitches came in at pixel speed, and your “batter” was basically a tiny red LED praying for mercy.

The sound? Legendary. Just a relentless series of BEEPs, BOOPs, and the occasional ZZZAP! when you fumbled. These games were loud, proud, and completely impossible to sneak during math class. Teachers could hear a Mattel Football game from three rooms away.

And yet, we played them everywhere—in the car, under the covers, in church (sorry, Father O’Malley). A high score on one of these was treated with more reverence than most spelling bees.

Were they clunky? Yes. Did they have graphics? Not unless you count “a blinking red dot that kind of looked like a running back.” But they were ours—a simpler, louder, slower, thumb-cramping joyride into pixelated sports greatness.

Before the touchscreen and the console wars, there were just kids, red dots, and the sweet sound of electronic victory.