These are old ("vintage") electronic games.
It's missing the battery cover and instructions, but it works!
I have two of these, but one is missing the battery cover.
The late 1970s was a period of experimentation in merging electronics
with traditional games. The release of games like Code Name:
Sector coincided with the growing popularity of early video games
such as Pong and Space Invaders, as well as the first home
computers. Parker Brothers capitalized on this interest in
technology by creating a game that felt futuristic and engaging.
Code Name: Sector is a vintage electronic board game released by Parker
Brothers in 1977. It was one of the first games to incorporate
an electronic device as a core gameplay mechanic, combining traditional
board game elements with computer-like functionality. This made it a
groundbreaking example of early electronic entertainment.
The electronic unit was simple by today's standards but innovative for
its time. It used a basic algorithm to track and simulate the enemy
submarine's movements, providing a degree of unpredictability. Players
interacted with the device by entering coordinates, and it responded with
clues to help players deduce the enemy's position.
The following exerpt is taken from Electronic Games: Design,
Programming & Troubleshooting, McGraw-Hill, 1979:
The game is described in U.S. patent 4,171,135.
Click on the image below for an advertisement that
ran in Popular Science magazine in the late 1970s.
From Consumer Reports magazine, November 1980:
The game starts with four destroyers at one corner of the ocean, all bent on
being the first to find and destroy the enemy sub. Meanwhile, the game sets
the invisible sub on a random straight-line course. Each commander can use
the buttons to move a destroyer varing distances in varying compass directions,
keeping track of the ship's course on the playing area with a colored crayon.
A press on the panel's RANGE button discloses the ship-to-sub distance,
but not the direction, on the display.
As each destroyer moves, the exact track of the sub becomes clearer; the
problem is then to maneuver into firing range and drop a depth charge.
But take care - if you miss, the sub will fire at you and your evasive action
will take you far off course.
The toy's display serves up the location of all four destroyers, on request.
An EVASIVE SUB button lets the sub change course. If the game has
baffled you, a SUB FINDER button will disclose the enemy's position
and heading. The game can be set to allow a single player to command either
the entire fleet or any fraction of it. A TEACH MODE button takes
beginners through the strategy and tactics of an entire mock battle.
Consumer Report's panelists found Code Name: Sector a time-consuming
but highly enjoyable thinking game for teens and adults. Criticisms are minor:
the course-marking procedure was untidy, particularly when the crayons became
blunt. And the crayons broke.
From Time magazine, December 26, 1977:
Wonderous as they are, the new games are not without their flaws. Code Name: Sector,
the submarine chase game, has a dandy digital readout, for instance, but the courses
of the sub and the pursuing warships must be drawn on a chart with a wax crayon - which,
as all twelve-year-olds will recognize, is not exactly state-of-the-art technology.
Technical Description
Code Name: Sector contains a single integrated circuit. This is a
custom-make IC which Texas Instruments has designed specifically
for Parker Brothers. Based on the TI family of TMS-1000 microprocessors,
this IC includes a RAM which can store 64 four-bit words and a ROM
which stores 1000 eight-bit words. Also included in the iC are all
of the LED drivers. Eleven controls can be reached by pressing a
small, recessed button with a ball-point pen. One control adds
complexity to the regular program of evasive tactics of the hidden
submarine. The other displays the submarine's location and heading.
In Code Name: Sector, your mission, should you choose to accept it,
is again to seek and destroy a submarine. Unpack this tabletop game and
you're faced with a multicolored playing area about one foot square that
looks like a topographic map of a piece of ocean floor, complete with grid lines.
A control panel consisting of compass rosette, illuminated display, and
various push buttons rises at one end of the playing area.
A couple of years ago an extraordinary little group managed to get a shoe
in Parker Brother's door: a Cambridge astronomer named Robert Doyle, his
wife Holly, an astrophysicist who taught at Harvard, and her brother Wendl Thomis,
a New York computer software expert. They had given themselves a name,
MicroCosmos, like a rock group, and what was more interesting, they had an idea: the
use of computers in games. Invited back, they brought a working model of the
gadget that became Code Name: Sector. Doyle wants to make a million dollars so he
can afford to write books on astronomy and invent on the side.
Click here for the home page.
Click here for the wanted page.
Last updated June 10, 2016
