Milton Bradley | Code Like It's 198x

In BYTE’s April 1979 issue, the electronics writer Steve Ciarcia described going from shop to shop in search of a toy. It was a plastic saucer with four coloured buttons that played a tune and asked you to copy it, and nobody had one in stock. When a salesman finally found the last one, a girl behind Ciarcia in the queue explained that everybody at her school had one and that they held contests to see who could remember the longest tune. He let her have it. The toy was Simon, and its maker was Milton Bradley, a Massachusetts board game company then more than a century old.

Over the next five years Milton Bradley became one of the busiest electronic games companies in America. It sold a programmable toy tank, the first handheld games machine with interchangeable cartridges, a speech add-on for a home computer and, for eighteen months, the Vectrex. Then the American video game market collapsed, and in 1984 Milton Bradley itself was sold.

Fast facts

Founded: 1860, by Milton Bradley, in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Address in the 1980s: 443 Shaker Road, East Longmeadow, Massachusetts.
Electronic toys: Simon (1978), Big Trak (1979).
Handheld: Microvision (1979), designed by Jay Smith’s Smith Engineering.
Console: the Vectrex, developed by GCE, which Milton Bradley bought in 1982; production stopped in 1984.
Computer add-on: the MBX speech and voice-recognition unit for the TI-99/4A (1983).
Later publishing: NES and Game Boy games, including Marble Madness and California Games.
Sold: to Hasbro, 1984.

A board game company

Milton Bradley was a lithographer in Springfield. In 1860 he set up his company there and published The Checkered Game of Life, a board game played with a spinning top instead of dice, which sold 40,000 copies in its first year. The company grew into one of America’s biggest game makers. By the early 1980s its catalogue ran from The Game of Life and Battleship to board games of arcade hits: in 1983 it followed a Pac-Man board game with Ms. Pac-Man, Turbo, Zaxxon and Donkey Kong.

Simon and Big Trak

Simon came from outside the company. Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison designed it around a Texas Instruments TMS1000 microcontroller, and Milton Bradley launched it in 1978. Ciarcia, who wrote the Circuit Cellar column in BYTE, answered the shortage the way his readers would: the same article showed them how to build their own musical memory game, run by a home computer.

Big Trak followed in 1979. BYTE described it that November as a toy vehicle “programmed to follow whatever course has been set”. A keypad on its back stored up to 16 commands, each moving it up to 99 units, “each unit being the measure of its own 13-inch length”. Owners could send it round the furniture, turn it, and fire its “photon cannon”. In February 1981 Ciarcia took one apart. Inside was another TI TMS1000-series 4-bit processor, and he added a radio receiver so that a home computer could drive the tank from up to 200 yards away. “Playing with Big Trak is a tease,” he wrote. “It is not a robot, nor can it be converted into one.”

In Britain, where it was sold as Bigtrak, Computer and Video Games called it in December 1982 “the best known of all electronic vehicles, having appeared on many television programmes”, at between £27 and £40. Primary teachers used it too: Acorn User suggested in 1983 that children use Bigtrak before starting on the programming language Logo.

Microvision

The Microvision was the first handheld games machine to take interchangeable cartridges. Jay Smith, an engineer who had worked on electronic toys at Mattel and ran his own firm, Smith Engineering, designed it, and Milton Bradley picked it up for distribution in 1979. BYTE’s new-products page that November listed it at $51.25, with Block Buster included and six more cartridges, among them Bowling, Pinball, Connect 4 and Star Trek Phaser Strike, at $16.50 to $18 each.

The design was unusual. The handheld itself was little more than a 16-by-16-dot liquid-crystal screen, batteries and a case. Each cartridge carried its own processor as well as its program, and its front formed the keypad, so the number of buttons changed from game to game. Retro Gamer counted 11 releases in America and seven in Europe before Milton Bradley stopped supporting it after about two years.

The Vectrex

Smith’s next idea was a small vector-screen console, which he first called the Mini Arcade. He licensed it to General Consumer Electronics, a company started by Ed Krakauer after he left Mattel’s Intellivision business, and GCE launched it as the Vectrex in the autumn of 1982 at about $200. In December 1982 BYTE already described GCE as “a subsidiary of the Milton Bradley Company”. Electronic Games dated the purchase to 1982. In Smith’s recollection, Milton Bradley “bought the whole product line” and put it out in force for 1983, with television advertising that took on Atari and the Intellivision directly.

Milton Bradley added what GCE could not: distribution. It sold the Vectrex through its own operation in Europe and licensed it to Bandai in Japan. It also added peripherals, a light pen and a 3-D Imager, and planned more. In October 1983 Computer and Video Games reported a keyboard add-on that would turn the console into a programmable home computer; Big K repeated the plan in April 1984, and the Italian Computer Games reported the same month that the machine was ready for voice synthesis too. Mike Cartabiano, who worked on the Vectrex at Milton Bradley, later recalled a full keyboard, a music device and a voice-recognition module built as prototypes.

None of it reached the shops. American console prices were falling, and Electronic Games reported that Milton Bradley cut the Vectrex from $200 to $150 and then $100, but could not go lower because of the cost of its built-in screen. After losses of more than $31.6 million, it stopped production in 1984. In June 1984 Big K reported that Milton Bradley was “dumping redundant stock at low prices” in America. Its British operation would say little: Vectrex sales manager John Garner “would only confirm” that the machine had been discontinued in the US, adding, “We’re reviewing our marketing strategy.” John Arundel, whose shop had been one of the first Vectrex stockists, told the magazine it “came in at too high a price (around £149)”.

Computers and cartridges

Milton Bradley also tried the home computer market. Its MBX Expansion System for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A combined speech, voice recognition and a keypad with a headset microphone. Compute! saw it in 1983 running a children’s game, I’m Hiding, in which the child named an object on screen and the computer answered “with a remarkably human-like voice”. It was due at $129 with ten cartridges from Milton Bradley and TI, and TI marketed it.

For the Atari 2600 it sold two games packaged with their own controllers in 1983. Electronic Fun reviewed Spitfire Attack, which came only with the Flight Commander, a yoke-shaped controller that vibrated and lit up. The reviewer found the controller more fun than the game, and noted that the cartridge played just as well with a standard joystick.

After the crash Milton Bradley returned to video games as a publisher. For the NES it released Marble Madness, programmed by Rare, and Epyx’s California Games and World Games, among others, and in 1990 Nintendo Power announced Game Boy versions of its board games Mouse Trap and Scrabble.

Hasbro

In December 1984 Electronic Games reported that Milton Bradley had merged into Hasbro Industries, and that the combined company would be called Hasbro Bradley, Inc. The name lasted longer than the independence. In 2000 Classic Gamer Magazine described Milton Bradley as a division of Hasbro that still owned the rights to the Microvision; the Vectrex rights, it noted, had gone back to their original developers, and Smith later made the Vectrex software available for non-commercial use. According to public histories, Hasbro combined Milton Bradley with Parker Brothers as Hasbro Games in 1998, and in 2009 stopped using the Milton Bradley name on its boxes in favour of its own.

Sources

Steve Ciarcia, “The Toy Store Begins at Home”, BYTE, vol. 4 no. 4, April 1979, pp. 10–14: the Simon shortage, the girl in the shop, and building a musical memory game in BASIC.
BYTE, vol. 4 no. 11, November 1979, p. 251 (Big Trak: 16 steps, 99 units, the 13-inch unit, the Transport) and p. 254 (the Microvision at $51.25, Block Buster and six cartridges at $16.50 to $18; Milton Bradley Co, Springfield MA).
Steve Ciarcia, “A Computer-Controlled Tank”, BYTE, vol. 6 no. 2, February 1981, pp. 44–47: Big Trak’s TMS1000-series processor and command set; the radio link; “Playing with Big Trak is a tease”.
Computer and Video Games, issue 14, December 1982, p. 85: Bigtrak as “the best known of all electronic vehicles”, prices of Bigtrak and Simon.
Acorn User, issue 8, March 1983, p. 48: using Bigtrak before Logo in primary schools.
Video Games, vol. 1 no. 8, May 1983, pp. 37–41: Milton Bradley’s arcade board games and its East Longmeadow address; the TI-99/4A voice unit.
Compute!, issue 39, August 1983, p. 40: the MBX Expansion System, I’m Hiding, $129. Family Computing, vol. 1 no. 2, October 1983, p. 88: “MBX Expansion System. Manufacturer: Milton Bradley; marketed by Texas Instruments”.
Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, vol. 2 no. 5, March 1984, p. 67: Spitfire Attack and the Flight Commander controller.
BYTE, vol. 7 no. 12, December 1982: GCE as “a subsidiary of the Milton Bradley Company” (see Vectrex).
Computer and Video Games, issue 24, October 1983, p. 36: the Vectrex light pen and a keyboard add-on to make it a home computer.
Big K, issue 1, April 1984, p. 21: the light pen, and plans for “full computer status”. Issue 3, June 1984, p. 8: stock dumped in America, John Garner and John Arundel.
Computer Games (Italy), vol. 1 no. 1, April 1984, p. 55: Milton Bradley’s planned home computer module and voice synthesis for the Vectrex.
Electronic Games, vol. 2 no. 13, July 1984, p. 10: “Milton Bradley drops Vectrex”, the purchase of GCE in 1982 and the $100 price. Vol. 2 no. 14, September 1984, p. 84: the price cuts and the $31.6 million loss. Vol. 2 no. 17, December 1984, p. 15: the merger with Hasbro.
Retro Gamer, issue 35, 2007, pp. 18–23, Mat Allen, “Retroinspection: Vectrex”: Jay Smith and the Microvision (its screen, cartridges and releases); the Mini Arcade, GCE and Ed Krakauer; Milton Bradley’s purchase, European sales and the Bandai licence; Mike Cartabiano’s prototypes; the rights returning to Smith.
Retro Gamer: Videogames Hardware Handbook, volume 2, 2010, p. 201: the Microvision, Smith Engineering/Western Technologies, and the processor in each cartridge.
Digital Press Collector’s Guide (2003), Milton Bradley profile and release list: the Microvision as “the first programmable cartridge-based handheld”, the 2600 controllers and games, and the NES titles.
Electronic Gaming Monthly, issue 1, January 1989, p. 29: Milton Bradley’s planned NES games. Nintendo Power, issue 14, July 1990, p. 64: Mouse Trap and Scrabble for Game Boy.
Classic Gamer Magazine, vol. 1 no. 4, Summer 2000, pp. 16–17: Milton Bradley as a Hasbro division owning the Microvision; the Vectrex rights reverting to its developers.
National Inventors Hall of Fame, “Milton Bradley” (web, secondary): the 1860 founding, the Checkered Game of Life and its first-year sales, and Hasbro’s 1984 purchase. https://www.invent.org/inductees/milton-bradley
Wikipedia, “Milton Bradley Company” (web, secondary): Hasbro Games in 1998 and the end of the brand name in 2009. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Bradley_Company