Tiger Electronics (Simply known as Tiger and Tiger Toys) was an American toy manufacturer, best known for its handheld LCD games, the Furby, Giga Pets, and the 2-XL robot product, and audio games such as Brain Warp. When Tiger was an independent company, Tiger Electronics Inc., its headquarters was in Vernon Hills, Illinois.
History
Randy Rissman, Gerald Rissman and Arnold Rissman founded the company in 1978. It started with low-tech items like phonographs, but then began developing handheld electronic games and educational toys. Prominent among these was 2-XL Robot in 1992, and "K28, Tiger's Talking Learning Computer", (1984) that was sold worldwide by K-Mart and other chain stores. Tiger also achieved success with many simple handheld electronics games like "Electronic Bowling" and other titles based on licenses, such as "RoboCop", "Terminator", and "Spider-Man". An early 1990s hit was the variable speed portable cassette/microphone combo Talkboy (first seen in the 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York), followed by the Brain Warp and the Brain Shift. It also licensed the "Lazer Tag" brand from its inventors, Shoot the Moon Products, which was born from the remnants of the Worlds of Wonder company.
However, the company's cash cow through much of the 1990s was their line of licensed handheld LCD games. In a 1993 feature on these games, GamePro attributed their success to the following three factors:
- Tiger's effective licensing. Director of marketing Tamara Lebovitz stated that "We read all the magazines and talk to all the studios to keep on the cutting edge of what's hot with kids." In addition, as a fairly small company at the time, Tiger was able to pursue desirable licenses quickly and aggressively. This allowed them to release licensed games while the properties they were licensed from were still at the peak of their popularity.
- The low price per game. Tiger handheld games sold for roughly $20 each. By comparison, most handheld games of the time cost over $30, and would require a separately sold system (an additional $50 or more) to play it on.
- The simplistic, addictive gameplay of the games. While older gamers tended to find Tiger handheld games one-dimensional and boring, for kids aged five to twelve years old their simple and easy-to-learn mechanics were more appealing than other video games of the time, which were often frustratingly difficult and dauntingly complex for younger children.
In Fall 1994, they introduced a specialized line of their handheld LCD games, called Tiger Barcodzz. These were barcode games which would read any barcode and use it to generate stats for the player character. The line was a major success in Japan, where there were even reality shows based around gamers competing to find the best bar codes to defeat other players. Tiger also produced a version of Lights Out around 1995. In 1997 it also produced a quaint fishing game called Fishing Championship, in the shape of a reduced fishing rod. Another 1990s creation was Skip-It.
In 1995, Tiger acquired the Texas Instruments toy division. Tiger agreed to manufacture and market electronic toys for Hasbro and Sega.
Merging with Hasbro
Tiger Electronics has been part of the Hasbro toy company since 1998. In 2000, Tiger was licensed to provide a variety of electronics with the Yahoo! brand name, including digital cameras, webcams, and a "Hits Downloader" that made music from the Internet (mp3s, etc.) accessible through Tiger's assorted "HitClips" players. Tiger also produces the long lasting I-Dog Interactive Music Companion, the ZoomBox - a portable 3-in-1 home entertainment projector that will play DVDs, CDs and connects to most gaming systems, the VideoNow personal video player, the VCamNow digital camcorder, and the ChatNow line of kid-oriented two-way radios. They also released an electronic tabletop version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and also released a British version with voice recordings from host Chris Tarrant. Also, Tiger released an electronic version of The Weakest Link with voice recordings from Anne Robinson.
Products
Standalone handhelds
Tiger is most well known for their low-end handheld gaming systems with LCD screens. Each unit contains a fixed image printed onto the handheld that can be seen through the screen. Static images then light up individually in front of the background that represent characters and objects, similar to that of numbers on a digital clock. In addition to putting out some of its own games, Tiger was able to secure licenses from many of the day's top selling companies to sell their own versions of games such as Street Fighter II, Sonic 3D Blast, and Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Later, Tiger introduced what they called "wrist games". These combined a digital watch with a scaled-down version of a Tiger handheld game.
In 1995, Tiger introduced Super Data Blasters, a line of sports-themed handhelds. Each featured the contemporary statistics for players in a specific sport, the ability to record new sports statistics, a built-in electronic game for the sport, and typical electronic organizer features such as an address book and calculator.
In 1998, Tiger Electronics released 99X Games, a series of handhelds fitted with a dot-matrix screen, allowing a wide variety of backgrounds and different gameplay for a single game. Although running a software program stored in ROM, those systems were dedicated consoles, similarly to the TV games of the 2000s. Two systems running the same game could be linked with the included cable to allow 2 players to challenge each other.
Cartridge based handhelds
Tiger has made three notable cartridge based systems. The first was Quiz Wiz, a highly popular interactive quiz game system. Players would insert a cartridge and play using the corresponding quiz book. The second was the R-Zone. It employed red LCD cartridges, much like Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which were projected via backlight onto a reflective screen that covered one of the player's eyes. The third was the Game.com handheld system, which was meant to compete with Nintendo's Game Boy and boasted such novel features as a touchscreen and limited Internet connectivity. It was a commercial failure.
Furby
Hasbro, previously shy of high-tech toys, was very interested in the development of the cuddly "Furby". With Hasbro's support, Tiger was able to rush through the development process and get the Furby on the shelves for the 1998 holiday season, during which it was a runaway hitâ€"the "it" toy of the 1998 and 1999 seasons. The continuing development of Furby-type technology has led to the release of the "FurReal" line of toys in 2003 and the Furby line of toys in 2012.
Brain Family
See Main Article: Brain Warp
From 1994â€"1999, Tiger invented the Brain Family, which are a line of electronic handheld audio games. In 1994, Tiger released the Brain Bash. The Brain Bash has four inner purple buttons and four yellow buttons outside of the unit. This unit features five game modes and Game One is called Touch Command where the electronic voice issues a command like "One touch one" and the corresponding player has to press purple one and yellow one.
In 1996, Tiger released the Brain Warp. This game is a spherical unit that has six colored knobs sticking out. Three versions of the game's software was made. Two of them were made in a blue base and the third version was made in the black base. The second edition has a different test mode to the other two versions. This game is very similar to Bop It. A voice recording in the game says a color or a number, or a sequence of colors or numbers, or both depending on the game selected, and the correct knob must be shown facing upwards. In 1997, Star Wars version called Death Star Escape was released. The game order is different and comes with six Star Wars characters.
In 1998, Tiger released Brain Shift. This game has six colored LED lights which are red, green, yellow, blue, orange and white. The game is known for its distinctive low pitched "Orange!" voice which is heard on the last color of a pattern in Stick Shift and in Memory Shift and Who Shift's It?. The player has to use the stick shift to follow the voice commands. There is a memory game and both Brain Shift and Brain Warp have a code buster game where the player has to find a certain amount of colors in sixty seconds.
Others
Making Toys and Games for Other Brands
The company has since become one of the most prominent producers of electronic toys, chosen to produce toys based on a wide variety of licenses, including Star Trek, Star Wars, Barney, Arthur, Winnie the Pooh, Franklin the Turtle, Neopets, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, Weakest Link, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Batman Returns, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Sonic the Hedgehog, among many others.
In 1996, Tiger produced replicas of the Turbo Man doll which was featured in the 1996 holiday comedy Jingle All the Way. It retained most of the features that the film version had, including the disk shooter, boomerang accessory, light and sound jetpack, and a voice box. Despite as being advertised to have 5 phrases in the movie, the physical toy only possessed 4.
Boogey Ball
In 1999, Tiger Electronics released an electronic LED game called Boogey Ball. The gameplay is similar to Pac Man where the player travels a green LED light through a maze of 30 LED lights and either has to avoid the red or catch the yellow light. The game was known for its Austin Powers type voice when the electronic voice would often say "baby". The game has a innuendo when you turn it on and he says "Oh you turn me on baby, let's boogey!" This game was also published by Hasbro. The game also suffers from a glitch where it would become stuck on playing every sound from the game and the button can't be pressed to turn the game off. The cause for this gltich is unknown but it happens when the player turns the game off as a point is added to their score.
A remake of the game is being released by a fan of the original game named Boogie Lightz for mobile devices and is due to be scheduled for an early 2017 release. The mobile version is due to have online multiplayer functionality and three different voices to choose from for the announcer.
Testing during Manufacture
Tiger Electronics and Hasbro are known to be inserting hidden test mode inside all their electronic games. These test modes signal either a sine wave or a square wave as a way of testing the speaker and then plays through a set of sounds from the device. Games like Brain Warp, Brain Shift and Boogey Ball have these test modes and also some game show tabletop games have them too. Many different revisions of their games were sold. Some of them were prototypes and some of the built-in games to the electronic device wouldn't play as well as the updated version.
See also
References
External links
- Wired article
- Tiger Handhelds at the Electronic Handheld Game Museum