Play-against, handheld, six-in-one electronic games machine

The forerunner of every mobile phone’s basic “game” package, Palitoy’s Merlin was slightly late into the market to be a serious competitor for the more-colourful Simon but did have the distinct advantage of having more than one game in its arsenal.

Looking not unlike those early “brick”-style cellphones, aside from its distinctive indestructible red Bakelite-like casing, and boasting “lights” (LED-backlit touch-sensitive buttons), “a powerful computer brain” (translation: a basic ROM chip), “and a vocabulary of 20 different sounds” (twelve of which were wasted from the get-go on an ascending chromatic scale for the music composer), Merlin could “challenge you to beat him at six fascinating games of strategy, memory and skill” (and, yes, this is just us regurgitating the blurb on the box).

The six “games”? Tic Tac Toe, as the Americans would have us refer to it; Music Machine (an incipient rendering of the Nokia Composer); Echo or Follow Me (that’s yer Simon game, right there); Blackjack (the best one, though really just a version of 21 based on a top score of, erm, 13); Magic Square (pressing an LED inverts the “on/off” status of all the adjoining buttons, until the pattern is found to leave all eight outside LEDs in “on” mode, like a sort of binary Rubik’s Cube); and Secret Number (an electronic version of Mastermind, with a combination or number sequence to crack).

Where Merlin also scores above Simon is in its personality - for a start it didn’t keep telling you what to do. In the aftermath of ‘70s sci-fi mania it’s not so surprising to consider that a combination of 20 different farts and bleeps could convey an impression that this really was an electronic “buddy”. The downside? The required six AA batteries wouldn’t last you more than a week. And it didn’t send text messages.