Tiger Electronics

Tiger Electronics has been part of the Hasbro toy company since 1998.[8][9] Hasbro paid approximately $335 million for the acquisition.[10] In 2000, Tiger was licensed to provide a variety of electronics with the Yahoo! brand name, including digital cameras, webcams, and a "Hits Downloader" that made music from the Internet (mp3s, etc.) accessible through Tiger's assorted "HitClips" players.[11] Tiger also produces the long-lasting iDog Interactive Music Companion, the ZoomBox—a portable 3-in-1 home entertainment projector that will play DVDs, CDs and connects to most gaming systems—, as well as a line of Now devices, such as the VideoNow personal video player, the VCamNow digital camcorder, the ChatNow line of kid-oriented two-way radios, the PlayItNow line of portable digital music recorders and game consoles with games licensed by Atari, and the TVNow, a personal handheld DVR player. They released an electronic tabletop version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with voice recordings by host Chris Tarrant. Tiger also released an electronic version of The Weakest Link with voice recordings by Anne Robinson.

Tiger is most well known for their low-end handheld electronic game systems with LCD screens. Each unit contains a fixed image printed onto the handheld that can be seen through the screen. Static images then light up individually in front of the background that represent characters and objects, similar to numbers on a calculator or digital clock. In addition to putting out some of its own games, Tiger was able to secure licenses from many of the time's top selling companies to sell their own versions of games such as Capcom's Street Fighter II, Sega's Sonic 3D Blast, and Konami's Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Later, Tiger introduced what they called "wrist games". These combined a digital watch with a scaled-down version of a Tiger handheld game.

In 1995, Tiger introduced Super Data Blasters, a line of sports-themed handhelds. Each featured the contemporary statistics for players in a specific sport, the ability to record new sports statistics, a built-in electronic game for the sport, and typical electronic organizer features such as an address book and calculator.[12]

In 1998, Tiger released 99X Games, a series of handhelds fitted with a dot-matrix screen, allowing a wide variety of backgrounds and different gameplay for a single game. Although running a software program stored in ROM, those systems were dedicated consoles, similarly to the plug-and-play TV games of the 2000s decade. Two systems running the same game could be linked with the included cable to allow two players to challenge each other.[13]

Tiger made three notable cartridge-based systems. The first was the Quiz Wiz, a highly popular interactive quiz game system. Players inserted a cartridge and played using the corresponding quiz book.[4] The second was the R-Zone. It employed red LCD cartridges, much like Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which were projected via backlight onto a reflective screen that covered one of the player's eyes. The third was the Game.com handheld system, which was meant to compete with Nintendo's Game Boy and Game Boy Color, as well as Sega's Game Gear and Genesis Nomad, and boasted such novel features as a touchscreen and limited Internet connectivity. However, the R-Zone and Game.com were commercial failures and garnered a negative reception.

Hasbro, previously shy of high-tech toys, was interested in the development of the Furby. With Hasbro's support, Tiger was able to rush through the development process and get the Furby on the shelves for the 1998 holiday season, during which it was a runaway hit — the "it" toy of the 1998 and 1999 seasons. The continuing development of Furby-type technology led to the release of the FurReal line of toys in 2003, the more modern iteration of the Furby toyline in 2012, and also the high-tech Furby Connect in 2016.

From 1994–1999, Tiger invented the Brain Family, which are a line of electronic handheld audio games. In 1994, Tiger released the Brain Bash. It has four inner purple buttons and four yellow buttons outside the unit. It features five game modes. Game One is called Touch Command, where the electronic voice issues a command like "one touch one" and the corresponding player has to press purple one and yellow one.[14]

In 1996, Tiger released the Brain Warp. This game is a spherical unit that has six colored knobs sticking out. There were three different revisions of the circuit board of Brain Warp resulting in audio changes and pitch differences. Two revisions were made in a blue base. Revision 2.0 has a different hidden sound sampling mode to the first revision. When Hasbro re-released Brain Warp in 2002, they took the programming from Revision 2.0 and placed it on a new circuit board with an enhanced speaker which reduced the loudness of the device. This game is very similar to Bop It. A voice that was recorded for the game says a color or a number, or a sequence of colors or numbers, or both depending on the game selected, and the correct knob must be shown facing upwards. In 1997, a Star Wars version called Death Star Escape was released. The game order is different and comes with six Star Wars characters.[15]

In 1998, Tiger released Brain Shift. This game has six colored LED lights. It is known for its distinctive low pitched "Orange!" voice which is heard on the last color of a pattern in Stick Shift and in Memory Shift and Who Shifts It? The player has to use the stick shift to follow the voice commands. There is a memory game, and both Brain Shift and Brain Warp have a code buster game where the player has to find a certain number of colors in sixty seconds.[16] Some Brain Shift game units had a bad chip in the game which causes the game to mess up the audio on low batteries, and in rare cases, the voice in the game will start counting, going through a list of numbers and skipping a few.[17]

The company became one of the most prominent producers of electronic toys based on a wide variety of licenses, including Star Trek, Star Wars, Barney & Friends, Arthur, Teletubbies, Winnie the Pooh, Franklin, Neopets, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, Weakest Link, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Batman Returns, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Sonic the Hedgehog.

In 1996, Tiger produced replicas of the Turbo Man doll, which was featured in the 1996 holiday comedy Jingle All the Way. It retained most of the features of the film version, including the disk shooter, boomerang accessory, light and sound jetpack, and a voice box. Despite being advertised as having five phrases in the movie, the actual toy only possessed four.

In 1999, Tiger Electronics released an electronic LED light game called Boogey Ball. There were 2 versions of the game released. The first version was buggy and it had issues playing several games (games 2, 3, and 5). In games 2 and 3, the player failed automatically sometime after 20 seconds due to the speed of the red light being impossible to stay away from. In game 5, the light patterns went in different directions and it was harder to play. Also, the game had a loud voice but quiet background music. In version 2.0, all the issues were fixed in the audio and game modes. The gameplay is similar to Pac-Man, in that the player maneuvers a green LED light through a maze of 30 LED lights and has to either avoid (ditch) the red light or catch (snag) the yellow light. The game was known for its Austin Powers and Melle Mel style voices; the electronic voice would often say "baby". When the game was first turned on, it said "Oh you turned me on baby, let's boogey!" When the player failed, the game said "Oh drat!".[18] This game was also published by Hasbro.[19] The game also suffered from a glitch: it would become stuck, playing every sound from the game, and pressing the power button would not turn the game off. The loud crackling over the top of the rapidfire used to scare people. The cause for this glitch is unknown but it might be trying to go through an automatic test mode.

In 2001, Tiger Electronics released a memory game called the Harry Potter Magic Spell Challenge, simply known as the 'Challenge Wand', on which the game sees the player up against an Evil Wizard as he casts a spell on the wand unit which the player must memorize in order. The first game in the unit is called 'Compete Against an Evil Wizard'. In this game, the Evil Wizard says "Try and stop this!" (or me - the word 'this' is being interpret for 'me') and starts to cast a spell on the wand. The game has 4 auditory command sounds and 2 vocal commands "Wingardium" which requires the player to tilt the wand down 90 degrees, and "Leviosa!" which requires the player to tilt it up 90 degrees. The game has 8 levels and each level the patterns get longer and longer. On the last pattern on level 8, the pattern is so long that only the masters at Hogwarts can finish the game! If the player makes a mistake trying to memorize the pattern, the Evil Wiard will say something like "Now the pain begins!" or "No match for me!" and if the player makes 3 mistakes in a round, the game is over and the Evil Wizard will say "Your powers are now mine!". The announcer will announce how many rounds the player has completed. The game also includes a Simon like game called '2 Wizards are Better Than One' which involves sticking with one pattern and adding an extra command on it each time. Game 3 has different music to the other 2 games on which requires 2 wands. One player makes a pattern and sends it to the other wand and then the other player has to repeat it back.[20]