2 Matchbox had another crack at real estate with the Mushroom Playhouse, a four-floor fungi flat, but Bluebird had already moved on. Their mobile Big Red Fun Bus continued the primary-coloured fun. Sadly, the property market collapsed before the range could be completed with the release of the adult-oriented Big Blue Hotel.
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The Binatone TV Master was the first computer-game experience witnessed by many Cream-era households, nestling as it did in the Argos catalogue alongside the portable black and white TVs (with which it shared a parasitic relationship). Radio Rentals would even lend you one for the night. Aeons before kids sat hypnotised in front of the latest Grand Theft Auto clone, sacrificing great chunks of their lives to completing the next level, this slab of circuit-based entertainment dragged us in off the streets to watch a box-shaped pixel zigzag its way across the screen. What a choking irony, therefore, that this gatekeeper of the soon-to-be-ushered-in console era attempted to mimic a selection of sports games.
Pre-SCART cable connections, the Binatone would have you scrabbling behind the family telly to plug in the RF aerial lead. That is, if you were lucky enough–in the days before a plasma screen in every room–to be allowed to use it in the first place. Typically, you’d be pushed to squeeze in a game of Binatone tennis between dinner and the start of Nationwide (and only then if your parents didn’t want to watch the News At 5.45). Otherwise, play meant sacrificing valuable Swap Shop or TISWAS time–oh, how we wished for a week-long bout of chickenpox.
See also ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Galaxy Invader 1000
As for the games themselves, they were clunky interpretations of bat ’n’ ball favourites such as squash or, erm, football (actually more like doubles tennis)1 on the basic, easy Jet-orange model. The beige variant promised some capacity for Tin Can Alley-style shooting games with a so-called light gun’, which inevitably didn’t work unless you were holding it so close to the telly you left scratches on the screen.2 The two standard controller ‘bats’ were chunky boxes with Etch-A-Sketch-type knobs that, fantastically, could be packed away into the Binatone’s battery compartment for storage.
The TV Master was superseded almost immediately by brasher, more state-of-the-art TV games such as Mattel Intellivision and Colecovision and then, fatally, by the home computer. How very British. The Binatone logo (was it pronounced By-na-tone or Bin-a-tone?) was a lovely crown-bedecked affair that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the bass drum of a ’60s Merseybeat band. Those sporty games icons, however, were a constant reminder of the local leisure centre and the fact that they had a proper sit-down Galaxians game that you could go on when your mum was having her badminton class.
1 The lack of ‘play against the computer’ option meant that a lot of Binatone-generation kids grew up ambidextrous.
2 If the gun broke, you could still turn the sound off and watch the silent cube ‘target bounce sss-softly off the imaginary walls of your TV set. A nice precursor (hem hem!) of the Windows screensaver, we feel. Plus, the gun itself, cable tucked neatly into your snake belt, made for an excellent Blake’s 7 ray gun.
Atomic mass
Way before Nintendo DS Brain Training and Carol Bloody Vorderman jumping on the Sudoku express, we already obsessed about our IQs. There was always a smart-arsed kid who’d decided to enrol into that original smug-bastards club, MENSA, and would parade his or her certificated ‘intelligence quotient’ of 160 or whatever around the classroom.1 Strangely, rather than resulting in a beating for the boffin, this would actually instigate a school-wide outbreak of competitive puzzle-testing and problem-solving as each pupil sought to out-IQ his or her peers.
While the juniors struggled with such 2D conundrums as spotting the odd one out in a list of prime numbers or reorienting dice from the sides you could see, seniors graduated to proper spatial-awareness posers and brainteasers of the Who was two to the left of the person three to the right of the queen next to the seven of clubs?’ variety. Oh yes, The Krypton Factor had a lot to answer for.
All of which must have alerted the really big brains at the country’s centres of higher learning who–let’s face it–were slouching about in the refectory waiting to appear on University Challenge and wishing someone would hurry up and invent computers so they could practice their FORTRAN and COBOL. Weren’t they?
See also Mastermind, Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons
Well, one such affable graduate was Eric Solomon, already knee-deep in diplomas and employed in civil and structural engineering but, vitally, with a bit of atomic-research work experience under his belt. His game invention, Black Box,2 required players to ‘fire’ X-rays into a darkened vessel in order to determine the positions of ‘atoms’ positioned by an opponent. Hellishly complicated rules governing the behaviour of these beams and their direction apparently revealed the hidden squares, but it was all carried out with coloured pawns and ball-bearings, of course.
Solomon’s other games rejoiced in such fashionably abstract names as Entropy, Hexagrams, Thoughtwaves and, erm, Billabong. Each was clearly intended to be played with a furrowed brow and semi-religious solemnity (except, perhaps, Billabong, which possibly required a corked hat). Widely pirated since (particularly by jealous FORTRAN and COBOL programmers), Black Box’s most recognisable successor is probably the Minesweeper game on your work PC.
1 A hugely impressive score for a teenager–right up there with Sir Jimmy Saville and Lisa Simpson.
2 The game acquired its name not from the flight recorder of a jumbo jet but from a term used by scientists to describe an object or system that operates in an unknown way Although can it be merely coincidence that those Who knows the secret of the Black Magic box?’ Rowntree’s choccie ads were on a lot in the 70s? They should bring those back.
Hand-puppets from hell
You have to hand it to some big brain at Mattel: once they’d