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Game 1
1980 Gravity LED Handheld by Mattel
There’s a bit of a story behind this game for me. It was the first electronic game I ever had, and was a Christmas gift from my parents way back in 1981.
The game, as the title would suggest, is about the effect of gravity on LED lights. There are three games in total, the first is catch. In this there are three rows of lights, and they drip down the screen like an unpredictable leaky tap. You have to press the corresponding button below each row to prevent the lights reaching the bottom. The higher in the game screen you manage to stop them, the more points you get. Once the time is over, so is your game. I know, you think bash all the buttons all the time and you’ll stop everything, but that just doesn’t work with this one.
Game two is Juggle, this time three balls sit at the bottom of the screen, and you bounce them up into the air with the three buttons. Triggering a button as each one lands back in place makes it bounce again, it’s height dependent on your accuracy. The idea is to keep all three balls/lights in the air at the same time. Infuriatingly simply, but really challenging.
The third game is a docking game, and relies on you having good enough reactions to stop a star of LED lights around a single light as they scroll ever faster down the screen. It’s the weakest game of the three.
At the age of ten I was simply blown away by the game, I played it night and day, forever hassling my parents for new batteries. By the time I got to my early teens I’d started taking everything apart and making new things from the lights and wires. Gravity fell victim to my technological cull. It wasn’t until I really started getting back into collecting handhelds and tabletops in my early twenties that I realised I needed it back in my collection.
A huge search ensued, and around six or seven years ago I finally picked one up in the US on ebay, for a staggering $400! That’s how desperate I’d become. Trust my parents to choose the most obscure handheld in the Mattel electronics catalogue; I can only imagine it was on special offer! It’s still an incredible game though, and there’s nothing else quite like it. It will no doubt remain my favourite handheld game of all time.
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