Radio Shack Electronic TV Scoreboard

[Veepa]

I found this thing at a thrift store for 2 bucks.. I thought that was a pretty good deal so I picked it up. I guess you can classify it as a "plug n play" type thing.. it has 6 games as follows,..

1. Tennis (Just a pong clone)
2. Hockey (An edited pong in which you control the goalie and a player at one time and the goal is smaller.
3. Squash (Pong squash style)
4. Practice (Single player squash)
5. Skeet (Some sort of shooting game)
6. Target (Some other shooting game)
5 and 6 required the gun which initially came with the unit, but was not included when I bought it.
I made a scan of the front of the box(which was included) because i don't have a camera..
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v700/Veepa/radioshack.jpg
I was wondering what you people could tell me about this? Are these things common? What year is it from?(there are no years on the box).. It takes 6 AA batteries or you can use a special AC adaptor which was sold seperately.. I used the AA batteries, and everything seems to be working fine.

[rbudrick]

I think I've found 3 of them over time. One or two were boxed, I think. I had two grays and a blue, iirc. One gray I gave to a buddy of mine. My guess it was a pretty common "built-into-the-controller" pong system.

-Rob

[The-Bavis]

Pretty common? Those kids aren't commonly excited!

Man, they're having fun.

[vulcanjedi]

Hmm

There were more pong variations in the late 70's than there were game systems in the 80's.

By 1981 the only selling point for a pong was it only cost $20 compared to $180 for an atari or intellivision.

There is a website I can't remember that has a pretty good history of pong units. I'm sure someone has to collect them.

VJ

[googlefest1]

ive seen people post about thrift stores

are those - salvation army stores - antique stores ?

i have never seen anything called a thrift store

the is a real question im not making fun

[vulcanjedi]

ive seen people post about thrift stores

are those - salvation army stores - antique stores ?

i have never seen anything called a thrift store

the is a real question im not making fun

Yes the salvation army is one example of a thrift store. Or a goodwill. Basically any not for profit place that takes donations and resells the items and gets to keep what they make.

VJ

[Darth Sensei]

I believe I have a couple of those in 2 different colors both made by radio shack. They're in storage.

[Neil Koch]

Thrift store is like Salvation Army/Goodwill... people donate/sell their old stuff and the store re-sells it.

Those types of systems were really common, there were a ton of Pong knock-offs in the late 70s-early 80s.