Mattel Auto Race

Mattel Electronics' Auto Race from 1976 is where the all-electronic handheld game begins: no moving parts, just a column of red LED blips, with your car at the bottom steering around the traffic coming down the road. The software came from Mark Lesser, a Rockwell engineer who squeezed the whole game into 512 bytes on a calculator chip. The gear lever on the left is the clever touch: shifting up makes you faster and the crashes come sooner.