Epoch Adventure Zone
What do you do when the $4 LCD game you picked up at a thrift store ends up being the rarest video game you own by a long shot? And I don't mean it's rare in the sense that it's highly sought after, it's rare in the sense that barely anyone heard of it because of how rare it is. When units do appear on eBay, they tend to be priced around $90-$100, but there's so few listings that I genuinely have to wonder where that price even comes from.
(The moment I found it)
That's the situation I found myself in when I picked up this handheld from Goodwill. The unit itself is red rectangle of plastic with an old-school LCD screen and some art evocative of pulp scifi that features an astronaut facing off against an angry, fuzzy, two-limbed monster. The title above the screen bore the name “Adventure Zone” with the name of the company “Epoch” below it. The handheld is surprisingly large, being a bit bigger than an original GBA, although thinner.
It took me some days to find batteries for the thing (on the back it says it takes LR44s, not something you’d typically find at the local grocery store) and so in the meantime I was searching for information and I quickly discovered that there is very little on the English speaking internet. I was able to find pictures of the unit and a box with Japanese text, alongside a 1984 Japanese flier that advertised the game alongside 5 other games, 3 of which are in the same form factor as the Adventure Zone unit, titled “Space Dragon” “Mystery Mansion”, “BMX Super Champion” and “Dynamic Baseball”.
(Images courtesy handheldmuseum.com)
The back of the unit itself says ©1984 Epoch Co. Ltd. Made in Japan Pat. P. (Patent Pending). So that pretty safely puts the release of this thing sometime in 1984. My initial assumption was that the game only released in Japan, but after checking for videos on Youtube, I spotted in this video a box with only English text and in this video, a Chinese(?) variant with a yellow shell and unique artwork. Of course, none of that confirms that it was released in America, where I found my unit, but it at least had an English language release somewhere around the world.
Once I finally got batteries for this thing, I was able to get into the game and confirm, it's really cool! Adventure Zone is a 3rd person dungeon crawler that takes place I assume on some sort of space station or colony on Mars or whatever. The map is static, however, items appear in random locations each time. When you boot up the game, some sectors of the map flash, indicating the position of the laser sword, as well as three oxygen pickups. Once the game starts, a sector of the map remains flashing, which indicates the position of the monster (that two armed hairball thing depicted in the artwork on the left side).
The goal is to find the laser sword, use it to kill the monster, and then escape before running out of oxygen. There is a little action game that appears in the bottom right corner when you encounter the monster, though if you don't have the laser sword when you do, you automatically die. Finding the sword and killing the monster are the easy part, I was able to figure that out after a few tries, but escaping is difficult, because there are no unique graphics to show where the exit is. In fact, I haven't even successfully done it myself, I only found out about it because it's in this short video. I spent quite a while being unsure if there even was an end state to the game or if wandering around until you lose oxygen was it. Maybe the exit is in the same place every time, but, still.
I'm not particularly familiar with LCD games, but there's no doubt that this is advanced compared to how they usually are, a full pseudo-3D dungeon created with such simple technology is an impressive feat. Of course, the limitations come through when you're trying to escape because you're limited in how many graphics you can depict on the screen at once. Each element requires a section of the screen that can either be toggled on or off, with no overlapping. It seems like maybe there is a little room on the ceiling where a sign might have fit, but it'd be pretty tight. There are also only two types of items to be found in the maze, despite it's size. That's not to say the game necessarily needs more, it is exactly as complicated as it needed to be, and likely adding more things could make it frustrating and bloated like a Tiger Electronics game.
Epoch is not widely known in the retro game community these days, but they're still around, here is their current website. It seems they pretty much only make toys nowadays, but you might be surprised (or unsurprised, giving what we're talking about here today) that they also made consoles through the 70s and 80s, starting with a pong clone called TV Tennis Electrotennis (1975), which is apparently "the first Japanese-made video game" according to Epoch's website. After that, they put out several other simplistic consoles in a similar vein, before releasing the Cassette Vision in 1981, Super Cassette Vision (1984), Epoch Game Pocket Computer (1984), and finally Barcode Battler (1991). You might think that none of these were particularly successful, but the Cassette Vision was the best-selling console in Japan prior to the Famicom, having sold over 400,000 units. They made their mark on video game history in the early days before fading into obscurity.
(The first Japanese home console. Image courtesy retrogameguy.net)
According to Handheld Museum, Epoch is responsible for roughly 119 LCD games (likely more than what's listed, I imagine), none of which seem particularly recognizable outside of sometimes featuring licensed properties such as Galaga, Doraemon, Lupin III, and Mickey Mouse. That's unfortunate, because if any of them are quite as cool as the Adventure Zone handheld that I found, they're worth at least as much attention as the Game & Watch series, and certainly moreso than the infamous Tiger Electronics.
I never personally set out to be the definitive English language resource on any video game, but this article might end up being that for Adventure Zone, simply due to how few people have talked about this game online. However, I don't want it to be like that forever. Normally, I would not ever outright offer people to buy something from my collection publicly, but in the interest of game preservation, if you are someone who works with documenting, reverse engineering, or otherwise preserving LCD handheld games/games in general, and want to have the Epoch Adventure Zone handheld, please reach out to me. I'd be more than happy to work something out with you.