VFD games

Vacuum fluorescent display, or "VFD" games come from an experimental period in the 1980s where video game manufacturers wanted to bring their titles to the home. They can be a seen as an evolution of the LCD games pioneered by Nintendo's wikipedia:Game & Watch series. VFD games are built in a similar way, but have the ability to omit light, giving more contrast and colour to the image. However, they were also more expensive to produce and were not always suitable for batteries of the day, so VFD games were usually confined to tabletops as novelty items or toys as opposed to handheld gadgets for use on the go.

There are a few VFD games carrying Sega licenses, most of which were handled by third parties such as Coleco or Bandai. By the mid-1980s VFD games were considerably more rare, and the focus instead shifted to dedicated video game consoles and computers, which by this point were often priced low enough to be competitive.