A first memory of home gaming.
My earliest memory of home computer gaming is not really a computer at all.
It was a Binatone Superstar.
I am guessing this would have been around 1980, give or take a year or two. Memory is a slightly unreliable thing at that distance, especially when the source material is basically “small child looked at a square”, but the feeling of it is still clear. A box connected to the television. Simple controls. Bright blocks moving across the screen. The strange magic of pressing something in your hand and seeing the television respond.
And it really was the television. No HDMI, no menus, no input button, no helpful little icon saying “game mode”. The game appeared on channel 36, the same way anything else appeared on screen back then: you tuned the TV until the picture stopped looking like a blizzard and suddenly there it was.
That was the spark.
Before Games Had Worlds
Looking back now, it is easy to underestimate machines like the Binatone Superstar. Compared with what came later, it was incredibly simple. These were first-era home TV games, the sort of systems built around variations of bat-and-ball games, tennis, squash, football, shooting games, and other Pong-style ideas.
The only cartridge we owned was a sports-themed one with ten games on it, although “ten games” is doing a heroic amount of work there. They were all variants of Pong in one way or another: different arrangements, different names, slightly different rules, but always that same basic idea of bats, angles, timing, and a square ball bouncing across the screen.
There were no characters to get attached to. No maps. No stories. No save files. No achievements. No day-one update that required everyone to go and make a cup of tea. Just shapes, movement, sound, and reaction.
But at the time, that was enough.
More than enough, actually.
The television had always been something you watched. Suddenly it was something you could play with. That sounds ordinary now, but back then it felt like the future had quietly appeared in the living room.
The Binatone Superstar
The Binatone Superstar belonged to that late-1970s wave of dedicated home video game machines. Binatone produced a number of TV game systems during that period, and the Superstar sits firmly in that early home-gaming era.
It was not a games console in the modern sense. There were no sprawling libraries of boxed games lined up on a shelf. Instead, the games were simple, immediate, and built around the hardware itself. The cartridge changed the set of games available, but not in the later sense of loading a whole new world. It was part of a much earlier, stranger stage of the technology.
That is part of the charm.
Everything about it felt physical. The switches. The dials. The wires. The batteries inside the console, quietly daring you to own enough spares. The way it had to be tuned into the television. Even starting a game felt like operating a piece of equipment rather than launching software.
And then the screen came alive.
Why It Stayed With Me
I cannot honestly say I remember every detail of playing it. I do not remember all the modes, or how good I was, or whether anyone else in the house was pretending to let me win.
I also have no screenshots, no box photos, no handwritten notes, no contemporary review, and absolutely no recorded footage from this period. Not surprisingly. Nobody in 1980 was thinking, “I had better document this Pong variant for the website I might start in 46 years.” We were too busy trying to keep the picture tuned in.
What I remember is the sensation.
The idea that a game could live in the television. That I could control it. That the screen was not just showing me something, but waiting for me to do something.
That was the beginning of everything that followed.
Every console, every home computer, every arcade machine, every late night spent trying one more level or one more race traces back, in some small way, to that first moment of control.
A Small Box, A Big Beginning
The Binatone Superstar is not a machine that gets talked about in the same breath as the Atari 2600, the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, or the later consoles that shaped gaming history more loudly.
But personal history does not always follow the official timeline.
For me, this was the start.
Not because it was the most advanced machine. Not because it had the best games. Not because it changed the industry on its own.
Because it changed my idea of what a television could be.
It turned the screen into a place where I could take part.
And once that idea landed, it never really left.
So this feels like the right place to begin the Gizmo Games timeline. Before the home computers, before the cartridges, before the joysticks became familiar, before gaming became something huge.
Just a Binatone Superstar, a television, and the first little spark of a lifelong hobby, and quite possibly the beginning of my interest in computers, which led me to my current career!
Of course, this was only the beginning. Waiting just up the road was the games console that arguably changed the home landscape more than any other, then almost helped bring the whole thing crashing down a few years later: the Atari 2600.
Feel free to share your first computer gaming memories in the comments!, Im always interested to hear about peoples journeys.
Let’s press start.
Image credit: “Binatone Superstar” by Marcin Wichary, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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