STU'S EXCELLENT WORLD OF
Last updated: 17 December 2000 - added basketball game to Cup Final page WHAT ARE POCKETEERS? Pocketeers is the generic name for a series of hand-held non-electronic games brought out in the UK by Palitoy during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Typically retailing around the £1.50 mark (around $2.30), they were characterised by extremely inventive gameplay within very narrow technical constraints, and a beautiful, distinctive, cartoony style of presentation common to the entire series. Pocketeers were, in many ways, the Game Boy games of their time (indeed, they're almost exactly the same size as a GB Pocket). Only a lot cheaper. The games were also released in the USA by Tomy as Tomy Pocket Games, with mostly identical gameplay but usually with different names and very different themes and graphics (for example, a UK title based around cricket would get a makeover as a baseball game for the US market), and without the benefit of the common design style. The US versions tended to utilise darker colours and less abstract themes than the UK games. Later, some of the US-version games were also released in the UK under the Tomy Pocket Games banner. The games were also licenced to various other companies, such as MB and Coleco (both under the generic name Pocketfuls), and additionally in Japan and the Far East, where many variations of the same titles (including often three or four different versions of the same game) were released as Tomy Pocketmates. Information on the Japanese versions is hard to come by, and these pages concentrate mostly on the Northern Hemisphere versions. WHAT'S ON THIS SITE? Here you'll find a near-definitive and near-complete list of all the Pocketeers and related games from the UK and US. There are also individual pages for each game, with pictures, gameplay details and information about the title's various different incarnations, and a page devoted to the cartoon stars who accompanied the UK versions. You can also download the entire site for offline reading if you want, but beware, it's a 5MB Zip file. WANT TO KNOW MORE? If you want to start your own collection, the best places to start looking are car boots, charity shops and flea markets. Tomy Pocket Games crop up fairly regularly on eBay, or there are a few places on the Web where you can buy some. Alternatively, you could always try trading with other Pocketeer fans - I always have a few spares and duplicates available for swaps, as do the other collectors mentioned in the Credits section below. CREDITS These pages wouldn't have been possible without the assistance of, and the previous research done by, Ian Pleasance and James Masters, both of whom have excellent Pocketeers sites of their own. Most of the pictures and scans here come from those two fine chaps, so visit their pages too if you have any interest in these great little games. All other editorial, pictorial and design content on this site is copyright me, and may not be used elsewhere without prior permission. Though goodness knows why you might want to do such a thing anyway. |
