Binatone Research

Found a little background information on the original Binatone consoles this morning in Jack Railton's 'The A-Z of Cool Computer Games':

"Consoles such as the Videomaster Home TV Games and the Lasonic 2000 TV Game offered European video gamers an opportunity to play electronic tennis, squash or football, (all of which were, essentially, much like Pong). For many of us in the UK though, our first console came courtesy of Binatone.

A British based company, Binatone certainly made hay whilst the silicon sun shone. They released loads of consoles in the mid- to late Seventies, with the first being the TV Game Unit in 1976. For under £25 you got a nice cream coloured machine with funny little knobs and a spinning number dial that had to be manually adjust to keep score. So far so good; however, the downside was that the TV Game Unit could only play the Binatone version of Pong. Indeed none of the Binatone consoles supported any form of game cartridges, and as a consequence players were stuck with whatever came hard coded in the system.

Later Binatones offered more variety with the TV Master 4 Plus 2 featuring not just the obligatory tennis, but squash and football too. Even more exciting though were two shooting games that could be played with a light gun rather than the customary joysticks (or paddles as they were called)...However, as repetitive play would make all too apparent, all of these games were simply a variation on a theme. As if to compensate for this, the consoles proudly boasted of 'on-screen' scoring and larger size bats for rubbish players."

Railton, J. (2005) The A-Z of Cool Computer Games. London: Allison & Busby Limited.