Bandai was the number 1 manufacturer of handheld games in Japan from the 1970's through the 1990's. Their entry into the electronic game market began very early, around 1978 with the release of LSI Baseball. That same year, they established a US division (Bandai America Inc.), so american kids like me had access to some of their great games. Bandai has been manufacturing toys since 1950, and they still are a great and successful company today. Many of their early toys were items like die cast vehicles, plastic models, electronic cars. |
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When robots and licensed characters were the craze (aren't they still?), they produced toys after Astroboy, Mazinger Z, Gundam, and others.More recently, they produced countless numbers of mighty morphin power rangers, digimons, and gundam toys. In 1999, they released the WonderSwan - a very compact cartridge based handheld system with a nice, greyscale, LCD screen and cool sounds. In my opinion, this system is a must have for game collectors, if for no other reason than to play new versions of Crazy Climber and Ghosts n' Goblins!
Between 1978 and 1990, Bandai created so many electronic games of varying types and sizes that it is quite a challenge to collect them. I am talking hundreds of them! Most of their games were distributed in Japan and Europe only, so they can be hard to find here in america.
Here are the bandai games that I have, grouped
by display type:
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