Before a phone could emulate half the history of videogames, portable gaming meant dedicated plastic machines with one job and, frequently, a speaker capable of annoying an entire car.
Visit the Electronic Handheld Game Museum
Rik Morgan’s Handheld Game Museum catalogs those machines by manufacturer, with sections for Atari, Bandai, Casio, Coleco, Entex, Gakken, Mattel, Milton Bradley, Nintendo, Radio Shack, Tiger, Tomy, VTech, and a long tail of companies most people stopped thinking about decades ago.
The front page alone feels like an inventory sheet that escaped onto the Web.
That is a compliment.
The weird details matter
The site goes beyond photographs of game fronts. It has manuals, repair information, internal photographs under “Game Guts!”, books and magazines, rarities, prototypes, and even a section tracking handheld games that appeared in movies.
The update history reaches back through year-by-year pages to 2000. In 2017, Morgan wrote that he had sold his collection to the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, but the site remained online and continued receiving smaller updates. The homepage records additions as recently as September 2024.
That is a useful preservation story on its own.
A physical collection can change hands while the collector’s accumulated catalog stays public. The photos, model names, manuals, odd variants, and years of notes remain searchable instead of becoming a binder in somebody else’s building.
There is also a fossil from the older social Web sitting right on the homepage: the Handheld Web Ring. The page plainly notes that the ring no longer works and leaves it there “for nostalgia only.”
Correct decision.
For modern researchers, little leftovers like that matter. They show how independent sites used to connect themselves before feeds and recommendation algorithms became the default map of the Internet.
The Handheld Game Museum came from CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web corpus, a list of 1,967 surviving or historically interesting domains for people who would rather explore the Web directly.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
If you remember a strange LCD football game, tabletop arcade, watch game, or electronic toy and cannot remember who made the thing, there is a decent chance somebody documented it here.