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 highly inventive gameplay within very narrow technical constraints, and a beautiful, distinctive and cartoony style of presentation across the entire series. Pocketeers were, in many ways, the iPhone games of their time (indeed, they're almost exactly the same size as an iPhone). And around the same price.

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 cricket would get a baseball revamp 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 other US companies such as MB and Coleco (both under the generic name Pocketfuls), and 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. These pages are focused on the UK Pocketeers range, with occasional nods to the rest if they're especially interesting.

If you want to know more about the broader international ranges, there are two other excellent internet sources for devoted Pocketeer fans, from which many of the original versions of images on this site also originally came.

The Online Guide To Pocketeers
by James Masters

The Tomy Pocketeers Web Page
by Ian Pleasance