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History
Entex Industries, Inc. was founded in 1970 by G.A. “Tony” Clowes, Nicholas Carlozzi and Nick Underhill. It was based at 303 West Artesia Blvd in Compton, California. The name came from the initials of Nicholas and Tony plus an “X” at the end, forming NTX, which sounds like “Entex” when spoken. Nick Underhill’s initial was not included because he joined the company after the name had already been chosen, but before it opened for business.
Entex originally made model kits, toys and construction blocks called Loc Blocs, a direct competitor to Lego. The company’s turn to electronics came in the second half of the 1970s. In 1976, Entex released the Gameroom Tele-Pong, a dedicated home video game console. Then came the handheld boom. In 1977, Mattel’s handheld video games were selling like hot cakes, and all toy makers were looking at creating their own. Entex became a big competitor to Mattel and Coleco, making head-to-head sports games similar to theirs, and it quickly moved into making very good-quality vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) handhelds based on arcade games that competed directly with Coleco’s mini-arcade line. Entex games tended to retail at higher price points than the competition, but the company advertised them as “high end” for “the discriminating player” to compensate.
In 1980, Entex released a handheld version of Space Invaders. The handheld was an incredible success and sold more than 1.3 million units. Midway took legal action, but the judge declared that it was unclear whether the copyright on a coin-operated arcade game could be infringed by a handheld toy. This gray zone allowed Entex to keep selling the Space Invaders handheld without paying any royalties to Midway. In 1980, Entex achieved worldwide sales of $100 million, in part thanks to its electronic games based on sports and arcade games.
With the popularity of the Space Invaders handheld, Entex released a number of handheld units, including many that would later become Select-A-Game game like Basketball 3, Football 4, Space Invaders 2, etc.
Release
n 1981, Entex decided to release its Select-A-Game handheld, which would turn out to be only the second cartridge-based handheld in the world after the Microvision. At a suggested retail price of $54.99, the console came packed with Space Invaders 2, and five other games were available to purchase.
Following the victory over Midway for Space Invaders, Entex decided to publish two other Midway games: Galaxian and Pac-Man. Galaxian was released as a stand-alone handheld game, while Pac-Man II was released as both a stand-alone handheld and a Select-A-Game cartridge.
Demise
Midway sued Entex again, but this time the verdict was different. Since Midway had already sold the rights to both Galaxian and Pac-Man to Coleco, the judge issued an injunction to stop Entex from producing both games. The problem was that Entex had already invested tens of millions of dollars in production, so, to avoid a financial nightmare, Entex reached a deal with Coleco. Entex would be allowed to sell both Galaxian and Pac-Man until December 31, 1981, but all profits would need to be turned over to Coleco. After this date, all remaining inventory would need to be pulled from the shelves, and Coleco would release its own version of the games as the well-known mini-arcade.
After this fiasco and the lack of enthusiasm for the Select-A-Game, Entex discontinued the product and moved on to other things.
Games
Only 6 games were released for the system, all of which were games released in other form by Entex. The games were sold at a suggested retail price of $17.99.
- Space Invader 2 (Pack-In)
- Baseball 3 – The game was originally licensed from Gakken. The 3rd version was an improve version from Tony Clowes. The handheld version sold around 120,000 units.
- Football 4 – Was the first Vacuum fluorescent display game released by Entex and was the basis for the Select-A-Game display. Only 20,000 units of the original handheld were sold.
- Pinball
- Baseball 4
- Pac-Man 2
- Battleship (not released)
- Turtles (not released)
FAQ
You can put any game in demo mode by holding down button #5 while turning the unit on. It will run through a display test with a few beeps, and then play a demo of the game in the system.