Retro is at an all time high in gaming sales, examples of this are the NES devastating sales and that others came back too, such as the PlayStation Classic. Hasbro sems to know what to do, and that's why the has decided to bring back a 90's classic: one of the Tiger consoles.
This is a monochrome graphic video game console on a colored background and a design that evokes that decade directly. The particularity of these consoles is that they come with a single game, and according to Hasbro it has been designed while keeping the original product in mind.
There is going to be four different models, depending on the game that they have, including 'The Little Mermaid', 'X-Men Project', 'Transformers' and of course: 'Sonic The Hedgehog 3'. The fabricant says that each game is inspired in the original 90's version, using monochrome graphics and with controls simple to use.
Besides the great games, one of the selling points of this consoles at the time were their prices. This is something that Hasbro has decided to maintain, thus the price of the new Tigers is $14,99.
The consoles work with 2 AA batteries -not included-. They will be in sales in a few months, predicting pre-sales to come 'maybe' in August.
Why are this consoles great for kids today
Parents today are the 90's kids, and we know how good and safe those games were, we tohught our kids would not know the fantastic world of 90's games, we wished so, but the reality is that games today have way better graphics and kids today might not be interested in old stuff. We were wrong, sometimes less is more and fewer games detail makes it for a better experience for kids.
Kids nowadays tend to watch a lot of youtube and navigate the internet 'sometimes' without parent supervision, this means they could get exposed to not so friendly content at a too early age. Tablets and phrones are powerful devices, gateways to access all the knowledge of humankind, but all the foolishness too, we don't want to expose our kids to that.
This is why sometimes less is more, a $14,99 console with only access to one game not only allows your children to share your nostalgia, but also limits their access to things they should not be allowed until certain age.
Some of you might be thinking "I'm not buying this console for my kids, I'm buying it for me", trust me I thought about that when the NES Classic came out, but then I remembered that I still have my functioning Nintendo 64, and my kids will play in it for sure. This can be done thanks to the kind of graphics old consoles had, they scale well into higher resolution.
About the Tiger console, at the moment no more features are known nor is there any tease for us to see how it is played in this version. In the original the simplicity of the graphics could get us bored in a few minutes (not me though), so we will see if the experience is similar or there are changes.