Hasta La Ideas

In the 1970s and ’80s, handheld electronic games became a thing. This will be difficult for the current generation to understand, but each object contained only a single game; these were not consoles with interchangeable media. (Imagine buying a laptop that could only run one application.)

This entire category of objects was killed in 1989, when the Nintendo Game Boy came out; it was one object that could play multiple games.

Category killer

In the 1990s, Dutch designer Jaro Gielens started collecting those obsolete handheld electronic games. He now has more than 900 of them. In addition to presenting them in a book, Electronic Plastic, he’s left up his early-2000s-style website documenting his collection. It’s a treasure trove of obsolete forms, created by designers wringing everything they could out of injection molding:

It’s remarkable how many of them look like stud finders!

Plenty more to see here.