Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
There is no screen in that thing. None at all. What those two are hunched over is a row of red LEDs, and their entire football field is a handful of lights blinking across a strip of plastic. Coleco put Head to Head Football out in 1980, model 2140, running off a single nine volt battery, and it flew off shelves.
The pitch was simple and genuinely new. Mattel had started the whole craze in late 1977 with a single player football game where you steered one blip past a dim defense. Coleco answered in 1978 with Electronic Quarterback, which beat Mattel on features by giving you two blockers and letting the quarterback actually throw a forward pass. Then Head to Head put controls on both ends of the same unit so two people could sit facing each other, one running offense and one running defense, at the same time.
The machine handled the rest. It tracked downs and yardage, called interceptions, and swapped the controls between players whenever possession changed. If you had nobody to play against, it would take the other side itself. Sears licensed the whole thing and sold it under their own name as Team Play Football, which is how plenty of households ended up with one that had no Coleco logo on the box.
Here is where it gets properly interesting. Pull up the patent. US Patent 4,249,734 lists the inventor as Eric Bromley. That is the same Eric Bromley who ran hardware at Coleco and led the ColecoVision project, the man who flew to Japan to license Nintendo properties and, by his own account, only stumbled across Donkey Kong while he was already over there. The person behind this plastic football toy is the reason that console exists.
And toys like this are literally what paid for it. Coleco had already taken a twenty two million dollar hit on its Telstar consoles in the seventies. It was the handheld electronic games and tabletop arcade machines that kept the company breathing and funded the return to home consoles. When the handheld market collapsed in 1981 and Coleco's earnings fell from thirteen million to under eight, that is exactly what pushed the family to gamble everything on the ColecoVision instead. Did you own one of these, and more to the point, did you ever actually beat anyone with it?
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#coleco #headtohead #handheldgames #ledgames #electronicfootball #retrogaming #retrogames #80sgaming #vintagetoys #vintagegaming #gaminghistory #colecovision #videogamecommercial #1980 #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
There is no screen in that thing. None at all. What those two are hunched over is a row of red LEDs, and their entire football field is a handful of lights blinking across a strip of plastic. Coleco put Head to Head Football out in 1980, model 2140, running off a single nine volt battery, and it flew off shelves.
The pitch was simple and genuinely new. Mattel had started the whole craze in late 1977 with a single player football game where you steered one blip past a dim defense. Coleco answered in 1978 with Electronic Quarterback, which beat Mattel on features by giving you two blockers and letting the quarterback actually throw a forward pass. Then Head to Head put controls on both ends of the same unit so two people could sit facing each other, one running offense and one running defense, at the same time.
The machine handled the rest. It tracked downs and yardage, called interceptions, and swapped the controls between players whenever possession changed. If you had nobody to play against, it would take the other side itself. Sears licensed the whole thing and sold it under their own name as Team Play Football, which is how plenty of households ended up with one that had no Coleco logo on the box.
Here is where it gets properly interesting. Pull up the patent. US Patent 4,249,734 lists the inventor as Eric Bromley. That is the same Eric Bromley who ran hardware at Coleco and led the ColecoVision project, the man who flew to Japan to license Nintendo properties and, by his own account, only stumbled across Donkey Kong while he was already over there. The person behind this plastic football toy is the reason that console exists.
And toys like this are literally what paid for it. Coleco had already taken a twenty two million dollar hit on its Telstar consoles in the seventies. It was the handheld electronic games and tabletop arcade machines that kept the company breathing and funded the return to home consoles. When the handheld market collapsed in 1981 and Coleco's earnings fell from thirteen million to under eight, that is exactly what pushed the family to gamble everything on the ColecoVision instead. Did you own one of these, and more to the point, did you ever actually beat anyone with it?
Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#coleco #headtohead #handheldgames #ledgames #electronicfootball #retrogaming #retrogames #80sgaming #vintagetoys #vintagegaming #gaminghistory #colecovision #videogamecommercial #1980 #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
