Tiger Electronics is known for electronic based toys like the Furby, Gigi Pets, Talkboy, and the handheld games. The company was founded by Arnold, Gerald, and Randy Rissman in 1978, which started by creating phonographs, educational toys, and handheld electronic games. They had early successes with the 2-XL Robot that came out the year they established the company. In the ‘80s, they released the K28 Talking Learning Computer and started moving into their handheld games that started with Electronic Bowling.

It was then that Tiger Electronics started licensing characters for games with Spider-Man, the Terminator, and RoboCop. Next, they created the Talkboy portable recorder (featured in Home Alone 2), and the Brain Bash, Brain Shift, and Brain Warp games.

This led to their biggest successes with the licensed handheld LCD electronic games. Each one played a single game and the front of the unit had eye catching graphics for the game. They have an electronic screen in the center where the action takes place with buttons underneath to turn the game on and off, pause it or control the sound, and a speaker located below. They usually have plus sign shaped directional buttons on one side of the speaker were two action buttons on the other.

Tiger licensed Disney films like Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King, and there were superhero games with Batman and the X-Men. They licensed animated shows, such as The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead, and even other video games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter. They had a basketball game featuring Michael Jordan, and their own sports game creations for football and skeet shooting.

Part of Tiger Electronics’ success came in aggressively pursing licenses that would attract fans of animation, superheroes, and sports. The games were more basic than other handhelds, so Tiger marketed them toward kids in the 5 to 12-year-old range by staying on top of the most popular titles in entertainment for that age range. They were also cheaper than the handheld game devices that switched out cartridges.

The handheld games were popular throughout much of the ‘90s, but lost steam compared to more sophisticated handheld games. Hasbro acquired Tiger Electronics in the late 1990s, moving on to other electronic toys. In 2020, Hasbro celebrated the legacy of Tiger’s handheld LCD games by releasing a new wave of the single game toys.