My parents were notoriously anti-video games while I was growing up, so I never had an NES or Genesis or other home console. However, they saw fit to placate my desire for video games with something else that was incredibly popular in the 1980s and 1990s: handheld LCD games.
Believe it or not, I never owned any of the famed Nintendo Game & Watch series; my cousin had Balloon Fight, but playing that was about as far as I got. The LCD games I owned were all made by Tiger Electronics. I started with generic fare like Baseball and Bowling before moving into adaptations of popular console games, but I played the hell out of ‘em all the same. A few of my friends in elementary school had LCD games, too, so we’d often play them during lunch or recess, passing the games around so everyone could try them. The games were tough as nails, and more focused on pattern memorization than any real gameplay. While the other kids laughed at me and went home to play Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest on their NES, at least I had the LCD version to amuse me.
I owned a few others: Double Dragon, Gauntlet, and Karate King come to mind. Moving beyond the Tiger sphere, my brother had a few Acclaim and Konami LCD games, like NARC, Gradius, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Basketball (yeah, you read that right). But of course, my favorite LCD game should come as no surprise:

(photo from The Mechanical Maniacs)
And look, it even features the same crappy US boxart from the NES game! Sure, it sucked in comparison to the original Mega Man 2, but it was the only way at the time I could get my Mega Man fix whenever I wanted. Surprisingly enough, I never had the Mega Man 3 LCD game back then, which is a shame since the NES original remains my favorite video game of all time.
By the late 1990s, LCD games had dropped in popularity like a stone, since the Game Boy was cheap and games for it were plentiful. LCD games are still around, but most of them are far worse than you could imagine. They’re little more than shitty cash grabs found in the impulse buy sections of big-box retailers. The big exception to this rule, however, is in the board and puzzle game genres. Games like chess or sudoku are very hard to screw up, as the rules really haven’t changed; program them in, and you’re good to go.
I lost my collection of LCD games long ago, much to my annoyance. I poke around on eBay from time to time trying to find a deal on some of my old favorites, and I’ve managed to score worn copies of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, Mega Man 2, and (finally) Mega Man 3. They’re often missing the battery door, but that’s an easy fix: I just bought some non-licensed Tiger games for a few bucks, and Frankensteined ‘em for spare parts.
In the early 2000s, I did manage to find a few of Nelsonic‘s old Nintendo wristwatch LCD games, like Zelda and Super Mario Bros. Surprisingly enough, they were rather cheap, and still in the boxes! (No, they weren’t knockoffs. I checked.) Their appeal didn’t last long, but they were still a cool novelty. I ended up trading them away for some other game, I’m sure. They just didn’t grab me the way the Tiger games did, despite the awesome Nintendo characters. (The tiny controls on a wristwatch didn’t help, either.)
With the underground popularity of “demakes” like Halo 2600 and Super Smash Land, I think the time is ripe for LCD adaptations of more popular games. C’mon, who wouldn’t want to play an LCD Portal or Uncharted?