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The Entex Select-A-Game arrived in 1981 as one of the more unusual entries in the second generation of home consoles, a period crowded with handhelds attempting to capitalize on the public appetite for portable play. While the era is most remembered for handheld LCD and LED devices, the Select-A-Game stood apart by embracing vacuum fluorescent display technology, an unusual choice that gave it a distinctive look and feel.
Released by Entex Industries, the Select-A-Game placed its bets on a cartridge-based library and a design philosophy that pushed much of the computational work into each individual game. That made it less a single, unified console and more a hub for swapping self-contained game modules, a setup that gave every cartridge its own personality while also limiting the system’s overall library.
Quick Facts
| Specification | Detail |
|---|---|
| Maker | Entex Industries |
| Type | Handheld |
| Generation | 2 |
| Released | 1981 |
| Media | Cartridge |
| CPU | Cartridge-based (each game contained its own microprocessor) |
History
The Entex Select-A-Game launched in 1981 during one of the most competitive stretches in handheld gaming history. Entex Industries positioned the device as a premium alternative to the LCD and LED handhelds that dominated store shelves, and the company backed that positioning with an unusual piece of hardware: a 7-by-16 vacuum fluorescent display capable of rendering graphics in both red and blue. To translate those colors into something resembling recognizable imagery, the system relied on game-specific overlays, plastic sheets placed over the screen that turned abstract dot patterns into tanks, basketball courts, and pinball tables.
Beneath that overlay sat a design choice that set the Select-A-Game apart from most of its contemporaries. Rather than housing a central processor that handled every cartridge’s logic, Entex put a dedicated microprocessor inside each game cartridge itself. Each module effectively functioned as its own tiny computer, plugged into the Select-A-Game shell for power and display access. The approach echoed the design of Milton Bradley’s Microvision, the pioneering cartridge-based handheld that had arrived a few years earlier, and it traded some of the polish of a unified system for flexibility and a lower per-cartridge engineering burden.
The system enjoyed only a brief life on the market. By 1982, Entex had shifted its attention to its next gaming platform, the Entex Adventure Vision, and discontinued the Select-A-Game to focus its resources on that successor.
The Game Library
The Entex Select-A-Game’s library reflected the era’s tastes, leaning heavily on arcade-style reinterpretations and simple sports simulations. Released titles included Space Invader 2, a riff on Taito’s arcade classic; Basketball 3; Football 4; Baseball 4; Pinball; and Pacman 2. Each cartridge arrived as a complete, self-contained gaming experience, with its own microprocessor and its own custom display overlay.
Pacman 2 stands out as the most historically significant entry in the lineup. The cartridge was pulled from retail release after a copyright infringement lawsuit from Coleco, which held licensing arrangements around the Pac-Man name at the time. That legal intervention transformed the game into one of the rarest Select-A-Game titles on the collector market, since very few cartridges appear to have reached store shelves before the pull.
The sports titles, with their numbered names like Basketball 3 and Football 4, hint at the kind of iterative franchise thinking that Entex may have planned had the platform survived longer. Instead, the entire library was frozen in place when the company discontinued the system in 1982, leaving collectors with a small but distinctive catalog.
Legacy
The Select-A-Game occupies a peculiar niche in second-generation gaming history. Its reliance on vacuum fluorescent display technology gave it a visual aesthetic that no other mainstream handheld of the period could match, and the red and blue dot patterns, once filtered through the right overlay, created an experience that felt closer to an arcade machine than to the LCD novelties crowding toy aisles.
The system’s decentralized architecture also left a mark. Embedding a microprocessor inside every cartridge was an unusual engineering choice, and one that drew obvious comparisons to Milton Bradley’s Microvision. The two systems competed directly during the second generation of home consoles, and together they demonstrated that cartridge-based handhelds were a viable, if commercially narrow, alternative to fixed-game LCD units.
The most enduring curiosity around the Select-A-Game remains the legal saga of Pacman 2. Its forced withdrawal from sale, prompted by Coleco’s infringement action, cemented the cartridge as the system’s most famous outlier, a game more collectors have read about than have actually played.
Entex itself moved on quickly, redirecting its engineering resources toward the Entex Adventure Vision, a tabletop console that picked up some of the visual ideas pioneered by the Select-A-Game while abandoning the cartridge-borne processor approach.
Collecting It Today
Collectors approaching the Entex Select-A-Game today are working with a small and unusually constrained market. Because Entex only sold the system for roughly a year before discontinuing it in 1982, the installed base was never large, and complete-in-box examples surface infrequently. Buyers should expect to look carefully at condition: vacuum fluorescent displays from this era can dim unevenly or develop dead segments over time, and replacement parts are essentially nonexistent, so the screen’s working state matters more than cosmetic wear.
Game cartridges merit their own scrutiny. The library is short, but the legal status of Pacman 2 means authentic copies are scarce, and reproductions or modified cartridges occasionally circulate. Anyone considering that particular title should expect to do substantial research and to weigh the title’s notorious history against the practical realities of verifying an original. The sports titles and Pinball are generally easier to locate, though the matching overlays for each game are often sold separately and are easy to lose.
For anyone exploring the broader world of second-generation consoles and their descendants, the Entex Select-A-Game offers a snapshot of an offbeat branch of gaming hardware that prioritized unusual display technology and modular architecture over the conventions of its era. For more on the wider landscape of consoles from this and other generations, browse the full consoles directory. Entex’s follow-up system, the Entex Adventure Vision, picked up several of these threads and is also worth exploring for collectors tracing the company’s short but fascinating gaming history.