Living: Those Beeping, Thinking Toys

Clever new playmates can be found in a child’s garden of microchips

Well before noon on Christmas Day, horror-stricken adults will issue forth from every child-equipped house in the nation. They will be dismayed because they have seen the future. The future works, as it turns out, but only if they make a run for more batteries. Not, as in the good old days, a couple of 10¢ Evereadys, but bushels of expensive nine-volts, pecks of Penlites, and Cs and Ds in numbers beyond counting.

This desperate foraging for batteries will symbolize the fact that the era of small, clever (and usually battery-powered) computer— toys has arrived in full beep. But beeps are not the extent of the commotion; in a couple of astonishing cases, the new gadgets will play games with their owners while announcing the moves and commenting on the play in understandable spoken English, or in one of several other languages that the purchaser may choose. Some of the toys are musical, and some are rolling, programmable robot vehicles.

Computers are good games players, and the best games this year are fiendishly addictive challenges to physical dexterity and mental sharpness. Not all of the addicts are children, and this pleases toy manufacturers because it is beginning to be clear that adults can be very self-indulgent in buying expensive computer games for themselves. Indeed, adults usually outnumbered the kids last week in the fast-growing electronic games departments of stores across the nation.

What is even more interesting than prospective riches for the toy companies, however, is the feet that many of the computer gadgets are both toys and teaching machines. As teachers they can form bonds of a sort—friendships?—with their pupils. And though two or more human beings can sometimes play against each other in computer games, it is clear to anyone who has tried the machines that the most fascinating interaction is between one person and one computer. Computer gaming, and learning, are solitary activities that do not seem solitary. The computer toys are starting to teach their owners not only a new kind of thinking, but what may amount to a strange new way of socializing. Says J. Fred Bucy, president of Texas Instruments, the biggest producer of the silicon chips that are the brains of the little monsters, “I think schoolteachers in the next decade are going to see a new kind of animal walking through their doors.”

A look at some of the toys the animals are turning on, and vice versa, this season:

Mkroviskm. “I have a family and a responsible job. I’m supposed to be intelligent. I’m trying to get an important new project started for my company. So this” —the Manhattan communications executive looked in exasperation at the small plastic box he held in one hand—”is crazy. It just doesn’t make any sense that I’ve spent all morning twiddling this knob.” Then his expression changed to a high-voltage gloat: “But look at that score!” The readout on the small, gray, liquid crystal screen said 542, which is middling-titanic for Blockbuster, the best of several mind-destroying games that can be played on the midget console. Blockbuster is a test of reflexes and anticipation; twiddling the machine’s knob moves an electronic paddle back and forth across the bottom of the 1½-in.-square display screen, and the object is to bounce an electronic bullet so that it destroys a wall, block by block. Milton Bradley Co.’s Microvision with Blockbuster, easily the best new electronic game this season, costs about $50. Substituting faceplates, ranging from $16.50 to $18, changes the programming to such games as Pinball, also an agility test, or Connect Four, a good spatial relations puzzle.

Speak & Spell. This cheerful-looking little red box, made by Texas Instruments, signals for attention with a four-note tune when a child (or wondering adult) presses the On button. Then, when the Go button is pressed, the machine says, in a deep, pleasant, male voice, “Spell wash.” The child presses W, and the machine pronounces the name of the letter: “Double-you.” When the speller finishes punching the letter buttons, he presses Enter, and the machine says, “That is correct. Now spell extra.” Or, if the speller has made a mistake, the machine says, “Wrong. Try again.” The sentences are lifelike, and the pitch of the voice rises and falls in a normal way. Two wrong attempts bring the correct spelling, spoken aloud, and a new word to try. After ten words, another little tune plays, and the machine gives the speller’s score, with special congratulations if all ten have been spelled correctly.

There are varying word lists—some repetitions, some new words—at each of four levels of difficulty. In addition, the machine plays word games, and can put messages into code. (It also spells any word aloud, when the proper buttons are pushed, and children discover quickly that when improper buttons are pushed, bad words are spelled. The shock value is considerable when the pleasant mechanical voice pronounces “Eff, You, See …”) Speak & Spell, which sells for $64.95, was dreamed up by a Texas Instruments products engineer named Paul Breedlove, who had worked in voice synthesis and thought that the concept might be used in a small teaching machine. The speller appeared on the market a year ago, and the only limit to sales now is, ironically, TI’s inability to produce chips fast enough.

Voice Chess Challenger is a gabby and much smarter version of the computer chess player turned out by Fidelity Electronics nearly three years ago. Back then it seemed remarkable that a tiny computer could play chess at all, even though its play was less than brilliant. Now the chess ability of the reprogrammed chip is high enough to make any parlor wood-pusher loosen his collar and roll up his sleeves, and it is the machine’s distinctly machine-like speech that is the dazzling gimmick. Turn the doodad on, and it says, dropping each word like a cinder block, “I— am— Fidelity’s — Chess — Challenger — your —computer — opponent.” The speech is by no means as friendly and natural sounding as Speak & Spell’s, but it is meant to intimidate adults, not encourage children. The voice has no great utility, except as a signal that the machine has finished cogitating and is ready to play.

At “tournament practice,” the sixth of ten levels, the Challenger is supposed to average three minutes of thought for each move, but in dodgy situations it will brood for 15 minutes or so, and the human player may well choose to spend his time worming the dog or writing a threatening letter to the telephone company. The machine itself does not yet have a dog or a typewriter, and it becomes impatient within a couple of minutes when its opponent is thinking. Then it says, gruffly, “Enter—your—move.” There is a useful voice turn-off button for such moments. Except for this bit of coffee-housing, Challenger has no small talk and no emotion, and after the human player has forced a perilous and gallant end-game win at level 6, it is a real disappointment to hear it say, uncaring and without expression: “I —lose.” Voice Chess Challenger costs a pricey $325, but you can pay that to have a couple of teeth filled and get conversation no better. The cost seems justified for a machine that knows and can teach some 40 book openings, can play itself, do problems, and at its “infinite search” level, can ponder one move for weeks or more. No batteries are needed; Challenger runs on house current.

Big Irak is a six-wheeled tank that is quite endearing, as war machines go. Milton Bradley’s big computer action toy chirps merrily as it sets out on its rounds, plays a little tune when it is finished, and then yips five times like an anxious puppy when it is left turned on and unattended. Twenty-four glorious buttons on its carapace accomplish the programming. An eight-year-old achieves something impressive when he plans a complicated route under the dining room table to attack the cat and then translates his intentions into an orderly series of commands for the versatile machine.

Big Trak costs about $43, and a dump trailer available separately costs $13. For pacifists who disapprove of Big Trak’s flashing cannon, Fundimensions of Mount Clemens, Mich., makes a similar programmable beach buggy for $39.95.

Space Laser Fight, Boxing and Football, all designed by a Japanese firm called Bambino, have the cleverest electronic displays on the market this year. In the football game, two teams, their lighted figures clearly seen as if from above, pass, kick and evade tacklers on a field that measures about 1 in. by 3 in. In Space Laser Fight, as in Boxing, two tiny figures —moving pictographs about ¾ in. high that can crouch, jump and do battle—face each other and fight. The miniaturization is astonishing. Sound effects are imaginative and frequent; when a spaceman gets zapped (a pictograph showing smashed robot parts flashes on the screen), a descending scale of cheerful beeps is heard. The trouble with Bambino’s products is that while the gadgetry is brilliant, the games themselves are not very interesting. The problem is not restricted to Bambino; an observer suspects that in many cases (Microvision and Speak & Spell are notable exceptions), the engineers who made the toys have had more fun than will the kids who get them.

Superstar 3000 is a not-so-cheap ($39.95) toy electric guitar with a sound synthesizer instead of strings and the ability to remember and play back tunes. The player presses touch-sensitive colored panels instead of frets; pressure at the top of the guitar neck produces a wah-wah or vibrato effect. But Superstar 3000 looks and feels like junk, and doesn’t sound like much. Toy musical instruments have always been disappointing, and computer chips haven’t changed things.

Vegas 21 is a pocket calculator that will add up your check stubs, or if that seems dreary, deal hands of blackjack. Punch in your stake—why be cheap? Try $50,000—and start betting. The odds, as in real life, favor the house, and two robots in camel’s-hair overcoats come around to break your legs if you don’t pay up.

Rom is a spaceman doll whose computer memory gives it a disappointingly narrow range of behavior. It breathes heavily (one of its better effects), buzzes, twitters and flashes its lighted eyes, and sounds ominous gongs, one for good and two for evil. The trouble with this Parker Bros, homunculus is that it looks as if it should be able to use its arms and legs like a true robot, and it can’t. Rom will end up among the dust balls under the playroom sofa.

When hand-held computer toys and games first appeared on the market two years ago, retail sales climbed briskly to between $35 million and $40 million. This year’s retail sales should be ten times greater (against total toy sales of about $5.5 billion). The great beep forward came when Milton Bradley noticed that adults were buying its innovative Simon —for themselves, and not just in the weeks before Christmas. The highly seasonal nature of toy buying has always been an industry bugaboo; after Christmas, retailers can get stuck with toys that won’t sell.

Simon, an appealing plate-shaped puzzle that flashes sequences of colored lights and accompanying musical notes, challenges players to repeat the sequences and gives losers the raspberry, began to change that. Adults, suffering from what one industry thinker called “play deprivation,” have not only bought Simon and the competing computer toys like this year’s play-alike Computer Perfection, but also are more or less cheerfully paying $40 to $50 for them. That shattered forever the $15 to $20 level the industry had considered its average. Now more than 100 different hand-held computer toys crowd store shelves.

The toy industry has always been secretive and hysterical, and the advent of memory chips and voice synthesizers has not calmed things down. The designers of Simon, Marvin Glass & Associates of Chicago, refuse categorically to deal with the press. At the design department of Mattel, in California, “you knock on the door and they look at you through a little hole,” according to one industry executive who has visited there. Inside, “these guys are all sitting around, and they’ve got little computers, and’they’re writing down figures and leafing through little books, and they scratch their heads, and then they say, ‘Unh-unh, that’s not right.’ ”

Bernie De Koven, 38, is the game designer for Ideal Toys, makers of last year’s big-selling Electronic Detective—similar to Stop Thief, this year’s Parker Bros, entry. His office is cluttered—a creative mulch of dolls’ heads, car wheels, batteries, record-player motors, computer entrails, synthesizers and oscilloscopes—but he knows where the action is. “Try an experiment,” says De Koven. “Bring in 30 of your most beautiful mechanical games and two cruddy electronic games to a group of kids, and see what happens.”

De Koven, who used to invent and teach “socially interactive” games to educators and underprivileged children, thinks that electronic games are having an enormous impact on the ways in which children perceive themselves and their social realities. “You might almost say that childhood is tending toward a kind of autism and that children are seeking a way to stimulate themselves. With electronic games, they have it. You can play by your self. It’s real exciting. You can carry the games anywhere. They look neat. They cause envy. They’re expensive possessions so consequently there’s a whole status relationship. ‘I don’t need anybody, I got my game.’ “

Presumably the computer children will retain some links with society. In any case, if the silicon-chip industry can gear up its production to meet the insatiable demands of the toymakers, the computer-synthesized siren songs heard by flesh-and-blood members of the population are sure to become even more beguiling.

The visual qualities of the games will improve quickly. Bambino has a two-color display system in the works that would allow one football team to wear blue uniforms and one to wear red, for instance. TV games, overshadowed this year, should attract more interest when Mattel Electronics introduces Intellivision, a game system with realistic, multicolored graphic displays. Learning capability can be built into small computers. The costs will be higher, but if customers will pay $40 this year, they may pay $75 next year.

What is not likely to change is that the games that succeed will work because they use their memory chips and lighted readouts to create melodrama. The best example now in production is a brilliant quarter-arcade game called Space Invaders. It is a reaction-time contest: shoot down the massed, marching aliens shown on the big TV screen before they shoot you. The refinements are satanic. The player has four blockhouses behind which to hide his man, but as the blockhouses catch fire under attack, they crumble. As the sound effects become more ominous, the aliens begin to shoot faster and more accurately. Blast them all —whew!—and another phalanx appears, nearer and more menacing. The action is jitteringly fast, and the tension is worsened by a sense of foreboding: as in life itself, there can be only one end to the struggle. At last the heroic player dies, overwhelmed. He is limp, drained, defeated, and his only satisfaction is the knowledge that he has offed a lot of aliens. Current hard-to-believe heroic high scores: by a Chicago player, 187,520, and a 257,000 claimed by a Pennsylvania college student. Midway Mfg. Co. of Illinois has sold 40,000 of the machines in a year, and, yes, you can buy one for your rec room for $2,000 to $2,500.

The powerful element of fantasy in Space Invaders is the focus at which the computer technicians, the toy manufacturers and the games theorists seem likeliest to meet. Computer boffins at Manhattan’s Rockefeller University play a game called Hunt the Wumpus, in which the Ph.D. devouring Wumpus is hunted through the perils of a 20-room cave. Computer language is flat and unresonant, and Hunt the Wumpus lacks a certain dash. But a toymaker may say, “Give me a way to display a Wumpus! Make him buzz and light up!” and next Christmas everyone may be going into debt to buy an expensive, electronic Wumpus Wars. By then, civilization as we have already started to forget it will have disappeared beneath a pile of spent alkaline cells.

— John Skow