TRONICA LCD ELECTRONIC SUPER GOALKEEPER 1983

Hello retro fans. Today we are looking at the iconic Tronica game Super Goalkeeper, the follow up to the original Tronica Goalkeeper.

Super Goalkeeper takes all the elements that made the original a great game and improves on them. Instead of two buttons and moving from left to right to stop three potential targets or footballs. In Super Goalkeeper you have four diagonal movement buttons, and now have to stop balls coming from above , below, and the four corners. So you have to stop four or six targets depending on the game level.

Like its earlier brother game Super Goalkeeper is an electronic LCD game, much in the same shape, and style of the very popular Nintendo Game and Watch series. And it capitalises on many of these elements of these games. Indeed many of the Tronica games could quite easily have been released as Nintendo games as they would have fitted in well in the series.

Tronica electronics were based in Hong Kong. But were very popular in places like Russia. They produced a variety of popular games in the 1980s, including titles like “Space Revenger” and "Shuttle Voyage"21.

Tronica’s games were part of the broader trend of handheld electronic gaming that included other brands like Nintendo’s Game & Watch series. Many of their games were literally knock offs of Nintendo's popular titles. Goalkeeper is a case in point. The actual gameplay, and LCD mechanics were identical to the early Game and Watch title Vermin, which had been released under the Time Out and Mego brand in America. In Game and Watches Vermin moles would appear up the screen and you would have to hit them with a hammer when they appeared. Tronica's Goalkeeper uses the exact LCD graphics and sound but footballs appear instead of moles, and the character who used to move left and right to stop the moles has been replaced by a goalkeeper graphic. It is a very interesting example of how companies would get around copyright issues.

These games typically had LCD screens and were powered by small batteries, making them portable and convenient for on-the-go entertainment.

Even though Tronica is no longer in production, their games remain a nostalgic piece of gaming history and are still sought after by collectors today.