Blip: The Digital Game!

Do you remember Blip: The Digital Game? It’s a mechanical game, manufactured by Tomy in the 1970s and 80s, with a little LED light that ping-pongs back and forth across the screen. Your job is to serve the “ball” to the other player and the other player’s job is to correctly guess whether the ball is going to land in position 1, 2, or 3. If they guess correctly, the LED light volleys back to your side and you have to press the button for where you think it’s going to land, and so on and so forth until someone guesses wrong or until the timer runs out. The ball behaves unpredictably, which is what made the game so fun.

My brothers and I played the hell out of this in the 1980s, and I have hung on to it all these years for nostalgia purposes. It’s been buried in the back of a closet for years and I recently rediscovered it.

Sadly, it doesn’t work anymore. I opened it up to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. Here’s what it looks like inside. Check out those beautiful mechanics!

I cleaned all the contacts and checked the wires, and it looks like the wires are all intact and connected properly. All the parts seem to be in place… but the LED light doesn’t work and the timer switch seems to be broken in a way where the spring doesn’t coil properly, and thus the gears that run the whole game don’t work. My brother Bob suggested it might be a bad capacitor, but does this thing even HAVE capacitors? I don’t think it does. At this point I’m out of my depth.

So I’m going to see if anyone at VCFSW (the vintage computer show we are participating in this weekend) wants to take a crack at repairing it. Unfortunately these little guys aren’t worth much on eBay so I think I’ll just see if anyone at the show wants it for $5 or $10.