Taking advantage of the technology used in the credit-card-sized calculators that had appeared on the market, Yokoi designed the series of LCD-based games to include a digital time display in the corner of the screen. Starting in 1980, Nintendo began to release a series of electronic games designed by Yokoi called the Game & Watch games. Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time. In 1979, Gunpei Yokoi, traveling on a bullet train, saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Other games were miniaturized versions of popular arcade video games. Notable among these were a series of popular 2-player "head-to-head" games from Coleco. The initial success of Mattel and Parker Brothers' entries spawned a wave of similar handheld devices which were released through the early 1980s. Despite their relative simplicity, each of these early games was highly successful. The same year, Parker Brothers also released Merlin, a more sophisticated handheld which could play six different games using an array of 11 buttons with integrated LEDs. Simon had no dedicated display, but featured four colored, lighted buttons the original version was large enough to be used as a tabletop game or a handheld later versions became increasingly smaller. In 1978 the Milton Bradley Company entered the handheld market with Simon, a simple color-and-sound-matching game. Notable early handheld games included the Mattel Auto Race (1976) and Mattel Electronic Football (1977) which featured very simple red- LED displays gameplay involved the player pressing buttons to move his car or quarterback icon (represented by a bright dot) to avoid obstacles (represented by less bright dots). Early handheld games utilized very simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects.
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