Teens React to ’90s Handhelds Games from Tiger Electronics

Tiger Handheld Electronics- those portable, plastic bits of gaming you could haul to the playground without worrying too much about getting destroyed. They were all the rage when many of us were kids, but were they actually any fun? The Fine Bros. enlisted some teens to get their reactions to these relics from a gaming era gone by.

"I don't know what's... happening." Yep, these teens are definitely playing Tiger Handhelds. The Fine Bros. hand this group of teens three different Tiger games, with Bo Jackson Football/Baseball (or B.O. Jackson as several of the teens call him), the appropriately gameified Jurassic Park, and the why-the-eff-is-this-a-game Full House, which involves running Michelle through a somewhat vacant house and high-fiving people. With each of these games the teens struggle, initially, since they don't explain anything that's going on, but they ultimately catch on to the simple, score-based mechanics.

Their reactions? Some saw the fun of them, drawing comparisons between the modern score attack games we play on our phones, and other thought they were stupid and random, though they all could see why they were so popular at the time. One teen summarized it best by saying, "Today we think we're really slick with all of our games and phones, but ten years from now, I swear, we're gonna say, 'What kind of elementary crap was that?'"

This video hits a special place in my heart since I grew up playing a Batman Tiger Electronic based on the 1989 movie. I played that game for years, constantly assaulting my ears with its tinny boops and beeps, and to this day I couldn't tell you how the hell to play it.