Tiger Electronics

Tiger Electronics Ltd. (also known as Tiger and Tiger Toys) is an American toy manufacturer best known for its handheld electronic games, the Furby, the Talkboy, Giga Pets, the 2-XL robot,[1] and audio games such as Brain Warp and the Brain Shift. When it was an independent company, Tiger Electronics Inc., its headquarters were in Vernon Hills, Illinois.[2][3] It has been a subsidiary of Hasbro since 1998.

History

Gerald Rissman, Randy Rissman and Arnold Rissman founded the company in June 1978. It started with low-tech items like phonographs, then began developing handheld electronic games and educational toys. Prominent among these was the 2-XL Robot in 1978, and K28, Tiger's Talking Learning Computer (1984) which was sold worldwide by Kmart and other chain stores. Tiger also achieved success with many simple handheld electronics games like Electronic Bowling and titles based on licenses, such as RoboCop, Terminator, and Spider-Man. An early 1990s hit was the variable-speed portable cassette player and recorder, the Talkboy (first seen in the 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York), followed by the Brain family of games which include games like Brain Bash, Brain Warp, and Brain Shift. It also licensed the Lazer Tag brand from its inventors, Shoot the Moon Products, which was born from the remnants of the Worlds of Wonder company.

The company's cash cow through much of the 1990s was their line of licensed handheld LCD games.[4] In a 1993 feature on these games, GamePro attributed their success to the following three factors:[5]

Tiger's effective licensing. Director of marketing Tamara Lebovitz stated, "We read all the magazines and talk to all the studios to keep on the cutting edge of what's hot with kids."[5] As a fairly small company at the time, Tiger was able to pursue desirable licenses quickly and aggressively. This allowed them to release licensed games while the properties they were licensed from were still at the peak of their popularity.
The low price per game. Tiger handheld games sold for roughly $20 each. By comparison, most handheld games of the time cost over $30, and required a separately sold system (an additional $50 or more) to play it on.
The simplistic, addictive gameplay of the games. While older gamers tended to find Tiger handheld games one-dimensional and boring, for kids aged five to twelve years old, their simple and easy-to-learn mechanics were more appealing than other video games of the time, which were often frustratingly difficult and dauntingly complex for younger children.

In the fall of 1994, Tiger introduced a specialized line of their handheld LCD games, called Tiger Barcodzz. These were barcode games which read any barcode and used it to generate stats for the player character. The line was a major success in Japan, where there were even reality shows based around gamers competing to find the best barcodes to defeat other players.[6] Tiger produced a version of Lights Out around 1995. In 1997 it produced a quaint fishing game called Fishing Championship, in the shape of a reduced fishing rod. Another 1990s creation was Skip-It.

In 1995, Tiger acquired the Texas Instruments toy division. Tiger agreed to manufacture and market electronic toys for Hasbro and Sega.[7]
Merging with Hasbro

Tiger Electronics has been part of the Hasbro toy company since 1998.[8][9] Hasbro paid approximately $335 million for the acquisition.[10] In 2000, Tiger was licensed to provide a variety of electronics with the Yahoo! brand name, including digital cameras, webcams, and a "Hits Downloader" that made music from the Internet (mp3s, etc.) accessible through Tiger's assorted "HitClips" players.[11] Tiger also produces the long-lasting iDog Interactive Music Companion, the ZoomBox—a portable 3-in-1 home entertainment projector that will play DVDs, CDs and connects to most gaming systems—, as well as a line of Now devices, such as the VideoNow personal video player, the VCamNow digital camcorder, the ChatNow line of kid-oriented two-way radios, the PlayItNow line of portable digital music recorders and game consoles with games licensed by Atari, and the TVNow, a personal handheld DVR player. They released an electronic tabletop version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with voice recordings by host Chris Tarrant. Tiger also released an electronic version of The Weakest Link with voice recordings by Anne Robinson.
Products
Standalone handhelds

Tiger is most well known for their low-end handheld electronic game systems with LCD screens. Each unit contains a fixed image printed onto the handheld that can be seen through the screen. Static images then light up individually in front of the background that represent characters and objects, similar to numbers on a calculator or digital clock. In addition to putting out some of its own games, Tiger was able to secure licenses from many of the time's top selling companies to sell their own versions of games such as Capcom's Street Fighter II, Sega's Sonic 3D Blast, and Konami's Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Later, Tiger introduced what they called "wrist games". These combined a digital watch with a scaled-down version of a Tiger handheld game.

In 1995, Tiger introduced Super Data Blasters, a line of sports-themed handhelds. Each featured the contemporary statistics for players in a specific sport, the ability to record new sports statistics, a built-in electronic game for the sport, and typical electronic organizer features such as an address book and calculator.[12]

In 1998, Tiger released 99X Games, a series of handhelds fitted with a dot-matrix screen, allowing a wide variety of backgrounds and different gameplay for a single game. Although running a software program stored in ROM, those systems were dedicated consoles, similarly to the plug-and-play TV games of the 2000s decade. Two systems running the same game could be linked with the included cable to allow two players to challenge each other.[13]
Cartridge-based handhelds

Tiger made three notable cartridge-based systems. The first was the Quiz Wiz, a highly popular interactive quiz game system. Players inserted a cartridge and played using the corresponding quiz book.[4][disputed – discuss] The second was the R-Zone. It employed red LCD cartridges, much like Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which were projected via backlight onto a reflective screen that covered one of the player's eyes. The third was the Game.com handheld system, which was meant to compete with Nintendo's Game Boy and Game Boy Color, as well as Sega's Game Gear and Genesis Nomad, and boasted such novel features as a touchscreen and limited Internet connectivity. However, the R-Zone and Game.com were commercial failures and garnered a negative reception.
Furby

Hasbro, previously shy of high-tech toys, was interested in the development of the Furby. With Hasbro's support, Tiger was able to rush through the development process and get the Furby on the shelves for the 1998 holiday season, during which it was a runaway hit — the "it" toy of the 1998 and 1999 seasons. The continuing development of Furby-type technology led to the release of the FurReal line of toys in 2003, the more modern iteration of the Furby toyline in 2012, and also the high-tech Furby Connect in 2016.
Brain Family
Main article: Brain Warp

From 1994–1999, Tiger invented the Brain Family, which are a line of electronic handheld audio games. In 1994, Tiger released the Brain Bash. It has four inner purple buttons and four yellow buttons outside the unit. It features five game modes. Game One is called Touch Command, where the electronic voice issues a command like "one touch one" and the corresponding player has to press purple one and yellow one.[14]

In 1996, Tiger released the Brain Warp. This game is a spherical unit that has six colored knobs sticking out. There were three different revisions of the circuit board of Brain Warp resulting in audio changes and pitch differences. Two revisions were made in a blue base. Revision 2.0 has a different hidden sound sampling mode to the first revision. When Hasbro re-released Brain Warp in 2002, they took the programming from Revision 2.0 and placed it on a new circuit board with an enhanced speaker which reduced the loudness of the device. This game is very similar to Bop It. A voice that was recorded for the game says a color or a number, or a sequence of colors or numbers, or both depending on the game selected, and the correct knob must be shown facing upwards. In 1997, a Star Wars version called Death Star Escape was released. The game order is different and comes with six Star Wars characters.[15]

In 1998, Tiger released Brain Shift. This game has six colored LED lights. It is known for its distinctive low pitched "Orange!" voice which is heard on the last color of a pattern in Stick Shift and in Memory Shift and Who Shifts It? The player has to use the stick shift to follow the voice commands. There is a memory game, and both Brain Shift and Brain Warp have a code buster game where the player has to find a certain number of colors in sixty seconds.[16] Some Brain Shift game units had a bad chip in the game which causes the game to mess up the audio on low batteries, and in rare cases, the voice in the game will start counting, going through a list of numbers and skipping a few.[17]
Making toys and games for other brands

The company became one of the most prominent producers of electronic toys based on a wide variety of licenses, including Star Trek, Star Wars, Barney & Friends, Arthur, Teletubbies, Winnie the Pooh, Franklin, Neopets, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, Weakest Link, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Batman Returns, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Sonic the Hedgehog.[citation needed]

In 1996, Tiger produced replicas of the Turbo Man doll, which was featured in the 1996 holiday comedy Jingle All the Way. It retained most of the features of the film version, including the disk shooter, boomerang accessory, light and sound jetpack, and a voice box. Despite being advertised as having five phrases in the movie, the actual toy only possessed four.
Boogey Ball

In 1999, Tiger Electronics released an electronic LED light game called Boogey Ball. There were 2 versions of the game released. The first version was buggy and it had issues playing several games (games 2, 3, and 5). In games 2 and 3, the player failed automatically sometime after 20 seconds due to the speed of the red light being impossible to stay away from. In game 5, the light patterns went in different directions and it was harder to play. Also, the game had a loud voice but quiet background music. In version 2.0, all the issues were fixed in the audio and game modes. The gameplay is similar to Pac-Man, in that the player maneuvers a green LED light through a maze of 30 LED lights and has to either avoid (ditch) the red light or catch (snag) the yellow light. The game was known for its Austin Powers and Melle Mel style voices; the electronic voice would often say "baby". When the game was first turned on, it said "Oh you turned me on baby, let's boogey!" When the player failed, the game said "Oh drat!".[18] This game was also published by Hasbro.[19] The game also suffered from a glitch: it would become stuck, playing every sound from the game, and pressing the power button would not turn the game off. The loud crackling over the top of the rapidfire used to scare people. The cause for this glitch is unknown but it might be trying to go through an automatic test mode.[citation needed]
Harry Potter Challenge Wand

In 2001, Tiger Electronics released a memory game called the Harry Potter Magic Spell Challenge, simply known as the 'Challenge Wand', on which the game sees the player up against an Evil Wizard as he casts a spell on the wand unit which the player must memorize in order. The first game in the unit is called 'Compete Against an Evil Wizard'. In this game, the Evil Wizard says "Try and stop this!" (or me - the word 'this' is being interpret for 'me') and starts to cast a spell on the wand. The game has 4 auditory command sounds and 2 vocal commands "Wingardium" which requires the player to tilt the wand down 90 degrees, and "Leviosa!" which requires the player to tilt it up 90 degrees. The game has 8 levels and each level the patterns get longer and longer. On the last pattern on level 8, the pattern is so long that only the masters at Hogwarts can finish the game! If the player makes a mistake trying to memorize the pattern, the Evil Wiard will say something like "Now the pain begins!" or "No match for me!" and if the player makes 3 mistakes in a round, the game is over and the Evil Wizard will say "Your powers are now mine!". The announcer will announce how many rounds the player has completed. The game also includes a Simon like game called '2 Wizards are Better Than One' which involves sticking with one pattern and adding an extra command on it each time. Game 3 has different music to the other 2 games on which requires 2 wands. One player makes a pattern and sends it to the other wand and then the other player has to repeat it back.[20]
Test modes/demo modes
Tiger Electronics and Hasbro are known to include a hidden test mode (also known as a demo mode) in all their electronic games. These test modes signal either a sine wave or a square wave tone usually at 1000hz as a way of testing the speaker and then play through all of the sounds that are pre-programmed in the device either manually (by pushing a button), or automatic (playing every sound by itself). Games like Brain Warp, Brain Shift, Boogey Ball, and Brain Bash have these test modes, as do tabletop games (such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?).

Friends, if you think back to nearly three years ago (as of this writing), hopefully you’ll recall my big ol’ pandemic time passin’ post. You know, we’re actually in the tenth anniversary (!) month of this blog, and in all that time, that pandemic post has proven to be one of my personal favorites here. Sure, it was highly personal and more for fun than anything (plus it killed time while we were in lockdown), but the diggin’ and searchin’ and eventual writin’ wound up being sincerely enjoyable for yours truly.

It also provided the catalyst for today’s topic. In that old article, at one point I waxed nostalgic for the long, long line of licensed handheld LCD video games put out by Tiger Electronics in the late-80s and up throughout the 1990s. You may have had to grow up with them to truly appreciate them nowadays (more on that in a bit), but for those of us a certain age, these things were beyond ubiquitous – which was good, because if you were a popular arcade game, console game, movie, TV show, cartoon, or pop culture figure that would appeal to kids, there was a very, very good chance you’d see a Tiger adaptation at some point.

I’ve been wanting to give one of these a specific spotlight for a while now, and when I recently picked up a cheap Tiger Heavy Barrel handheld, I first figured that was going to finally be it. But, for as neat as Heavy Barrel is, when I really thought about it, I decided if I was going to go through the process of writing a whole article on one of these, I might as well do it right. And if you remember this oldie, you’d know there was only one proper choice, one logical choice.

Yes indeed, legendary arcade (and console) beat-’em-up Double Dragon saw a Tiger iteration! I mean, Heavy Barrel was a popular game, but it never had the clout the Double Dragon series had in the late-80’s and early-90s. So if Heavy Barrel got the LCD treatment back in the day, you best believe Double Dragon would as well!

The original Double Dragon trilogy plus Super Double Dragon all saw Tiger ports, but from a sheer status-standpoint, the first is, in my opinion, the chaser. Plus, it’s the easiest to obtain. Well, the first three are actually all pretty easy to obtain, though Super seems to be notably tougher to be had. But for pure late-80s fightin’ action (not to mention that iconic artwork), I still say you go for the original.

It’s also the most emblematic of what I’m talking about with these Tigers: an uber-popular, big name game in both arcade and console circles. Not that the company didn’t put out ‘regular’ kinda games (think generic baseball, pinball, etc.), they did, and they had games based on licensed properties prior, but when I (and I’d guess most people) talk about these Tiger handhelds, generally that’s referring to the ones I mentioned in my intro. No joshin’, it seemed pretty much every hot, remotely-kid-friendly property of the late-80s to late-90s got transformed into a Tiger. Not every one did, of course, but many, many were. A good portion of these are still easily acquired nowadays (though not always as cheaply as you might think/hope), though others are surprisingly rare; not that I’m constantly on the lookout for it, but I’ve only seen the game based on the first Wayne’s World movie for sale once, for example. And the asking price wasn’t low.

(My guess is that, in some cases, the game only had enough units made to last the duration of a property’s peak popularity. When the promotional hype for whatever died down, the title would be phased out. That’s merely and completely guesswork on my part, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? That would account for the relative rarity of some of these, anyway. Sorta like licensed cereals; they’d be around for a bit, but who’s gonna keep buying Batman Returns for breakfast when Batman Forever is in theaters?)

It still works! There it is, all turned on. We’ll take closer looks at the actual gameplay momentarily.

Double Dragon, like pretty much all of these Tigers, is a simple LCD game, limited in graphics, animation and sound, only loosely resembling the real property it’s mimicking. When it came to the ports anyway, the old commercials promised something akin to the original arcade (or console) game in your pocket; I still fondly recall the ad in which kids went to great lengths, including hauling a full size coin-op down the hall, to play their favorite games at school, until Tiger simplified the issue for them with these handhelds.

Of course, in reality these things were approximations at best. Considering real consoles and computers often had a hard time bringing the latest arcade games home, there was just no way a cheap LCD handheld was going to be an accurate representation of whatever. In the handheld realm, even a real Game Boy couldn’t do that. Didn’t stop us from daydreaming about the possibilities, though; I grew up with these, and to this day I recall imagining all the fun I’d have once I had Tiger’s Batman wristwatch on my, uh, wrist. I eventually got that watch, and while I’m guessing the real product deflated some of those fantasies once I started playing it, I was also young enough to not really care. (I still have that watch, and actually just dug it out the other day. ‘Course, since I can’t recall ever changing the battery in it, the possibility of it still functioning correctly is quite low, methinks)

Simple as they may have been, if you were a certain age, these Tigers still managed to feel special though. Maybe it was that whole single-game-in-your-pocket, complete with marquee (thus recalling actual arcade machines) thing that did it. Or maybe it was just because they were cheap and everywhere. At any rate, and despite natively being a Nintendo kid, in the days before I had a Sega Genesis to call my own, I was as excited for Tiger’s Sonic 2 as I would have been for any ‘real’ video game. (I played that thing like crazy, too.)

But then, this all might be hard for newer gamers to appreciate; in this day and age, we have portables with real licensed arcade/console titles. For someone who didn’t grow up with them, looking at these Tiger games with their monochrome graphics, limited animation, simple gameplay and beeps and boops constituting music, that might all elicit a severe “so what?” at best, “this is garbage!” at worst. But frankly, those might be the reactions from some people who did grow up with these, too; nostalgia’s a powerful thing, but when a revival of these popped up a few years back, it was both exciting and confusing. It was cool they were back, but would modern gamers care? Would the people who had them back in the day still care? Had the time of these handhelds passed beyond any revival? That’s all up to your personal viewpoints on these, I s’pose.

In my pandemic post, I said something along the lines of these Tigers really not being very good. In some cases that was true, but in hindsight, that wasn’t a totally fair assessment. Granted, generally these lack the simple-yet-addictive twitch gameplay of Nintendo’s best Game & Watch offerings, but I’ve picked up a few old Tigers recently, and I’ve actually been a bit impressed with how they attempted to cram the ‘genuine’ experience into them. I’ve had more fun playing these than I haven’t. (Hey, no jive, while writing this article, Tiger’s Star Trek: The Next Generation handheld arrived in the mail, providing me with a little game break before getting back to writing about, erm, game breaks.)

Getting back to this Double Dragon, you may be wondering just how a full-size, big time beat-’em-up translates into LCD form. Believe it or not, a decent facsimile of a beat-’em-up was possible on an LCD handheld; Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 was terrific. (Or at least I remember it being terrific.) I’m not sure Double Dragon reaches those lofty heights, but it fares better than it doesn’t.

Double Dragon in the arcades was a side-scrolling brawler in which one Billy Lee (and his brother Jimmy Lee in two player mode) traverse diverse areas and fight an assortment of enemies in a quest to rescue Billy’s kidnapped girlfriend Marian and wipe out city-terrorizin’ gang The Black Warriors. With a bunch of moves and weapons, simultaneous two player action and a truly awesome soundtrack, it was a smash hit; console and computer ports followed, with varying degrees of success.

For this Tiger, while it takes some cues from the coin-op source material, it seems to take as much inspiration from the mega-popular Nintendo Entertainment System port as anything; new moves are gained as you progress, and since it’s single player only, instead of a fighting partner, Jimmy Lee is instead the final boss here (as per the original ad for the game and just like the NES version). The basics of walking the street and pummelin’ baddies remains, however.

In this case, the number of enemies (as in, variety) has been shortened dramatically; there’s a dynamite thrower who appears at the top of the screen occasionally, but for the most part your main adversary is some generic thug. (That’s who you’re seeing above; sorry about that yellow scratch on the screen, by the way – I didn’t feel confident in attempting to clean it off.) Whether the original instructions gave him an official name, I do not know, but he looks more like a biker or something than anyone seen in the arcade original or NES port. I guess he’s kinda Abobo-esque, though I’m not sure if that’s who he’s supposed to officially be.

Don’t go in expecting a myriad of moves at your disposal; you’ll gain the ability to jump and then later jump kick as you go on, but for the most part you’re limited to rapidly punching and kicking your opponent. This is actually more fun than you might expect it to be, especially when you’re dodging the dynamite thrower and it’s getting near the end of the stage and your health is running low. The kick looks incredibly goofy, though I appreciate that Tiger replicated the left punch/right punch animation of the arcade/NES.

Later on, you start using weapons, though I wasn’t sure at first if the game was just giving them to me or if I was accidentally picking them up and not realizing it; I think it’s an automatic thing on the game’s part. I’m not sure there’s an appreciable difference in the number of hits it takes to dispatch a thug, but it’s a nice touch nevertheless.

Originally, Double Dragon was three-dimensional-esque in that you could move between the foreground and background of a stage, as in most beat-’em-ups. On an LCD handheld with severely limited frames of animation, this wasn’t exactly feasible, though they did approximate it. What you’re seeing above is Billy Lee “moving backward,” kind of into the background. You do this as a dodging maneuver, particularly when a dynamite thrower shows up. (That’s what you’re seeing above, as well.) I say this is better than keeping the game strictly single-plane the whole way through.

In most of these Tiger handhelds, there’d be a pre-printed background in which the LCD sprites would be laid overtop throughout. Double Dragon foregoes this somewhat; there’s a plane in the background and there’s some light coloring, as you can see, but there’s no real permanent background graphic like usual. Instead, there are actual specific sprites used per stage to mimic the locations of the source material. I like this a whole bunch. It feels so much cooler, and truer to the game it’s trying to be. In the first stage, you’ve got a loose city skyline in the background, for example. Above is the third stage’s forest, and stage four is a cave, complete with falling stalactites – something unmistakably taken from the NES version. (There’s actually little to see in the second stage, I think some groundwork kinda sorta representing the industrial area it’s supposed to be, but visually it’s the least impressive level in the game.)

There’s not much sound-wise, mainly a series of beeps; this was par for the course with these Tigers though. Don’t go in expecting anything even remotely resembling the classic original soundtrack, okay?

You know, when all is said and done, I really like Tiger’s LCD adaptation of Double Dragon. Is it the greatest, most addictive LCD handheld ever? Well, no. BUT, it kept me occupied, and it looked about as much like Double Dragon as you could reasonably expect from a late-80s product. While I didn’t play it for hours on end, I did like seeing how far I could make it, and it was reasonably fun throwing down against gang members. I’m not sure you can ask for a whole lot more than that. At a time when the Double Dragon series was at its height of popularity and was burning up the arcade, console and computer fronts, Tiger gave kids a credible handheld to take to school, on car trips, etc. It did the job it was intended to do, it’s fairly fun, and as a late-80s gaming artifact, as far as I’m concerned, it’s irresistible.

All that said, it’s now over 30 (!!) years old, and while this example works fine, I still oughta keep it nice an’ collectible. But what if I still wanna get my cheesy LCD fightin’ fix, something just to goof around with when I’m bored? I used my bean there, too…

Yep, I picked up the sequel as well! Honestly, it’s not terribly different from the first installment, though they did include the back kick. Dig the pre-printed background; a scrolling ground gives the impression of progression. Unlike the first game, it’s pretty much single-plane and straightforward, though there’s a platform-y broken bridge you have to jump over gaps in late in the game. I prefer the first game, though from a gameplay-standpoint it’s pretty much a draw. More importantly, this is my ‘playing’ one, the one I’ll take with me when I’m trying to look hip in public. Complete with jean jacket and sunglasses, I’ll be totally rad to the max! (Just ignore the fact it’s no longer 1990 and I’ll be 37 years old in less than a month as of this writing.)