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Designing an electronic toy — Wildfire Pinball
Adventures in Toy Design: Part 2
In 1979, when this story began, I had not yet completed college and I had never written a computer program. The closest I had come to writing a real program was fooling around with my TI-58 programmable calculator. Here’s a sample of what a program on that device looked like.¹ Not exactly OOP,² huh?
This is the wild and crazy story of the first computer program I ever wrote.
Part 1 of this series (Adventures in Toy Design) discussed my involvement in an effort to create a voice scrambling/descrambling helmet to be marketed as an electronic toy. You can read that story here. This story goes a little further back in time, to the very beginnings of my days in the electronic toy business.
As I discussed in that earlier series entry, Mattel had had great market success with the Mattel Football handheld electronic game (1977), motivating our engineering consulting company to try to break into the electronic toy business. As a four-person company with a tiny office over Glen Rock Liquors in Glen Rock, New Jersey, it was a long shot, but hey, what the heck.
The toy industry was incredibly competitive and breaking into the space as a toy inventor was not easy. In fact, just getting a meeting with a toy company was next to impossible. That said, we persisted. When I say “we,” I don’t mean me, as I was the peon in the back lab soldering boards, picking up lunch and maintaining a sufficient inventory of M&Ms and Coca Cola (the staples of any engineering lab worth its salt).
In this context, “we” meant Steve, our resident electronics genius and my older brother, and Jim, a brilliant industrial designer and our respectable businessman. Steve and Jim were partners in our burgeoning engineering firm, a company with great potential, brilliant engineers and lousy cash flow. I long ago lost count of how many times I had heard “here’s your paycheck…
