Tomy is a Japanese company that has been around since 1927, and is still quite successful today with Pokemons and models. I have had a difficult time finding details about their history, but ever since I was kid I can remember enjoying their toys. From 1977 to 1987 they made a wide variety of handheld games, and in my opinion they were one of the best manufacturers of them. Their games were accessible in almost every corner of the globe, from Asia to Europe to the Americas. From Robots to Baby-Dolls to Video Games, they had something for every boy and girl.
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In the early to mid 70's, they released a slew of mechanical dexterity games that were quite original and fun. Some of these included the Waterful games (water filled games using jet forces of water for gameplay), and the Pocket games (plastic boxes with steel balls using levers or springs for gameplay). These ideas followed into the design of their early handheld video games - ones that involved mechanics and electronics together. Games like Digital Derby, Hit and Missile, and Blip were classic examples of these. They were battery operated, and the gameplay and screens were comprised of transparent film looping around on belts. LED lights underneath the film highlighted key points such as a car crash or a successful hit. The control buttons triggered the belts and lights in various ways, and the scoring was usually a dial that would automatically rotate 1 notch per scoring event, but it had to be reset manually after the game ended. This was back in the day when automatic scoring was really a hot, technical feature!
After the success of these electro-mechanical games, they released lots of really nice VFD and LCD games. They were the only company to obtain a license for a Tron handheld (an absolute classic!), and they produced licensed versions of stand-up arcade classics like pacman and scramble. Perhaps most memorable for some, was their line of 3-D Color-LCD binocular styled games. They were one of the first companies (along with Nintendo) to figure out how to convert a standard, black-and-white LCD display into a color one using light and filters. These 3-D games were also cool because they had stereo sound - the sound effects could be panned to a left and right speaker, each only inches away from the player's ear!
Here are the tomy games that I have, grouped
by display type:
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