Tiger Electronics

Tiger Electronics is an American toy manufacturer, best known for its handheld LCD games, the Furby, Giga Pets, and the 2-XL robot product, and electronic games such as Brain Warp. When Tiger was an independent company, Tiger Electronics Inc., its headquarters were in Vernon Hills, Illinois.

History
Randy Rissman, Gerald Rissman and Arnold Rissman founded the company in 1978. It started with low-tech items like phonographs, but then began developing handheld electronic games and teaching toys. Prominent among these was 2-XL Robot in 1992, and "K28, Tiger's Talking Learning Computer", (1984) that was sold worldwide by K-Mart and other chain stores. Tiger also achieved success with many simple handheld electronics games like "Electronic Bowling" and other titles based on licenses, such as "RoboCop", "Terminator", and "Spider-Man". An early 1990s hit was the variable speed portable cassette/microphone combo Talkboy (first seen in the 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York), followed by the Brain Warp and the Brain Shift. It also licensed the "Lazer Tag" brand from its inventors, Shoot the Moon Products, which was born from the remnants of the Worlds of Wonder company.

However, the company's cash cow through much of the 1990s was their line of licensed handheld LCD games. In a 1993 feature on these games, GamePro attributed their success to the following three factors:
 * Tiger's effective licensing. Director of marketing Tamara Lebovitz stated that "We read all the magazines and talk to all the studios to keep on the cutting edge of what's hot with kids." In addition, as a fairly small company at the time, Tiger was able to pursue desirable licenses quickly and aggressively. This allowed them to release licensed games while the properties they were licensed from were still at the peak of their popularity.
 * The low price per game. Tiger handheld games sold for roughly $20 each. By comparison, most handheld games of the time cost over $30, and would require a separately sold system (an additional $50 or more) to play it on.
 * The simplistic, addictive gameplay of the games. While older gamers tended to find Tiger handheld games one-dimensional and boring, for kids aged five to twelve years old their simple and easy-to-learn mechanics were more appealing than other video games of the time, which were often frustratingly difficult and dauntingly complex for younger children.

In Fall 1994 they introduced a specialized line of their handheld LCD games, called Tiger Barcodzz. These were barcode games which would read any barcode and use it to generate stats for the player character. The line was a major success in Japan, where there were even reality shows based around gamers competing to find the best bar codes to defeat other players. Tiger also produced a version of Lights Out around 1995. In 1997 it also produced a quaint fishing game called Fishing Championship, in the shape of a reduced fishing rod. Another 1990s creation was Skip-It.

In 1995 Tiger acquired the Texas Instruments toy division. Tiger agreed to manufacture and market electronic toys for Hasbro and Sega.

Standalone handhelds
Tiger is most well known for their handheld gaming systems with LCD screens. Each unit contains a fixed image printed onto the handheld that can be seen through the screen. Static images then light up individually in front of the background that represent characters and objects, similar to that of numbers on a digital clock. Tiger also created wrist games. These portable wrist games were essentially smaller versions of their handheld LCD games, placed on a wristwatch-like device. Tiger's wrist games also functioned as normal watches as well as alarm clocks.

In 1998 Tiger Electronics released 99X Games, a series of handhelds fitted with a dot-matrix screen, allowing a wide variety of backgrounds and different gameplay for a single game. Although running a software program stored in ROM, those systems were dedicated consoles, similarly to the TV games of the 2000s. Two systems running the same game could be linked with the included cable to allow 2 players to challenge each others.

Cartridge based handhelds
Tiger has made three cartridge based systems. The first was Quiz Wiz, a highly popular interactive quiz game system. Players would insert a cartridge and play using the corresponding quiz book. The second was the R-Zone. It employed red LCD cartridges, which were projected via backlight onto a reflective screen that covered one of the player's eyes. The third was the Game.com handheld system, which was meant to compete with Nintendo's Game Boy and boasted such novel features as a touchscreen and limited Internet connectivity. It was a commercial failure.

Furby
Tiger Electronics has been part of the Hasbro toy company since 1998. Hasbro, previously shy of high-tech toys, was very interested in the development of the cuddly "Furby". With Hasbro's support, Tiger was able to rush through the development process and get the Furby on the shelves for the 1998 holiday season, during which it was a runaway hit—the "it" toy of the 1998 and 1999 seasons. The continuing development of Furby-type technology has led to the release of the "FurReal" line of toys in 2003 & the Furby line of toys in 2012.

Others
During the 1990s, Tiger manufactured some electronic games that were similar to the reflex game Bop It. They are called: Brain Bash, Brain Warp, Bird Brain, Brain Shift and Boogey Ball.

Tiger also created the Giga Pets line of handheld electronic "pets" to compete with the popular Japanese Tamagotchi.

The company has since become one of the most prominent producers of electronic toys, chosen to produce toys based on a wide variety of licenses, including Star Trek, Star Wars, Barney, Arthur, Winnie the Pooh, Franklin the Turtle, Neopets, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, Weakest Link, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Batman Returns, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Sonic the Hedgehog, among many others.

In 1996, Tiger produced replicas of the Turbo Man doll which was featured in the 1996 holiday comedy Jingle All The Way. It retained most of the features that the film version had, including the disk shooter, boomerang accessory, light and sound jetpack, and a voice box. Despite as being advertised to have 5 phrases in the movie, the physical toy only possessed 4.

In 2000, Tiger was licensed to provide a variety of electronics with the Yahoo! brand name, including digital cameras, webcams, and a "Hits Downloader" that made music from the Internet (mp3s, etc.) accessible through Tiger's assorted "HitClips" players. Tiger also produces the long lasting I-Dog Interactive Music Companion, the ZoomBox - a portable 3-in-1 home entertainment projector that will play DVDs, CDs and connects to most gaming systems, the VideoNow personal video player, the VCamNow digital camcorder, and the ChatNow line of kid-oriented two-way radios.