Merlin: Many delicate electronic parts

The first glorious wave of handheld electronic games kicked off in 1977 and 1978. With Electronic Football from Mattel, you dodged the little red dashes to move downfield and score. With Simon, you had to memorize and repeat the lighting sequence by pushing huge buttons. And right at the same time came Merlin from Parker Brothers.

It was six games in one! It was amazing! Actually, it was pretty cool. Tic Tac Toe seemed a bit pointless, but Magic Square and Mindbender were good games. With Music Machine, you could even write beepy songs.

These games formed an entirely new type of product. As with each new generation of technology, people need to learn how to use them.

For example, look at the buttons. Where buttons were usually hard plastic bits that popped out of the device, these were sunken flexible buttons, similar to those found on microwaves. Combining an unfamiliar product with unfamilar buttons forced Parker Brothers to include the following section on Proper Care in the game’s instruction manual.

Merlin is delicate. Don’t take it apart. And please, touch the buttons lightly, and only with your fingers. Be nice to Merlin!

These instructions reveal a level of innocence in those years. They weren’t phrased by lawyers in order to protect the company. They were phrased as advice. We were being introduced to a new way to interact with technology, a game in our hands. The pocket calculator had been around for about five years. The Sony Walkman was still a year away. We were taking baby steps toward all electronics, all the time.

These images came from my pal Tom at work. He’s had this Merlin and the instruction set since he was a kid. In fact, we sometimes use Merlin as an age litmus test. Generally, if you’re over 30, you know it’s Merlin. If you’re under 30, you guess that it’s a weird cell phone.