The world is full of traps for the unwary. There’s a whole genre of movie, mockbusters, that exists purely to try to catch people who are only vaguely familiar with some media property, and they make enough money that by cutting their costs extremely thin they can be profitable. Mobile app stores are full of games that try to trick people in a similar way, making themselves look as closely to some popular game as they can get without becoming legally actionable.
A similar kind of trap was the Game.com, Tiger Electronics’ bid to compete with the Game Boy. It made a kind of sense, sure. Nintendo got into portable gaming with the Game & Watch series, from there spreading into a more flexible system with replaceable cartridges. Tiger made Game & Watch-style LCD games too, so why couldn’t they do the same thing?
Thing is, Tiger was doing this through most of the 1990s! They kept their costs and prices down and managed to make them profitable by just putting out the most barest games possible, Game & Watch-like LCD games in the era of the Sony Playstation. (Ernie Smith at the excellent blog Tedium wondered at their success too.)
Tiger released their Game Boy competitor, Game.com, in September 1997. It was absurdly cheap at $30, but at that time a Game Boy Pocket was only a little more expensive at $55. I think it’s safe to say the only people who were buying up Game.com devices were extremely low information buyers. But they found 300,000 such buyers. I expect a majority of them were grandparents.
So, what were those lucky enough to get a Game.com in for? The system got a total of 21 games. One of its games was Sonic Jam. The website Bad Game Hall of Fame had a look at it, and it was quite the thing. I call it a thing because it barely qualifies as a game.
It was named after a Saturn release of the Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog games, and claimed to have Sonics 2, 3 and “and Knuckles,” but not only were all the games strained through the Game.com’s small monochrome screen, they all were drastically cut down. Each has only one level! And it’s barely playable at that!
Bad Game Hall of Fame did a general retrospective on the Game.com. I personally love terrible janky systems like this, but it’s not because I think they’re secretly good, it’s because, like the mockbuster output of The Asylum, I think they’re hilarious. But I’m not laughing at the kids who were expecting a Game Boy but ended up with this instead.
These days Tiger Electronics exists, as many other game companies from past decades like Milton-Bradley, Parker Brothers, Avalon Hill and Wizards of the Coast, as merely one organ out of the many that comprise the grotesque Frankenstein’s Monster of Hasbro, Inc. Hasbro paid $335 million dollars for them, possibly because they saw something in their then-new Furby product. Nowadays I don’t think Tiger’s name is being applied to any current products, and that’s probably for the best.
