Toys and Games
Steve Beck has invented, co-invented and developed a number of electronic high-tech toys and video games over 30 years. These are mass edition multiple editions offered to kids of all ages for fun, stimulation, and enjoyment.
Bird Songs Book (2006)
Steve Beck implemented custom audio styling design and engineering with special audio data compression to fit 250 bird songs from Cornell into a tiny digital audio player embedded in this book using only 2 MB of memory. Published by Becker & Mayer, Bellevue, WA in association with Chronicle Books, San Francisco. Many more Bird Songs books are coming out this year.
Over 10 million variations on the original Bird Songs book have been sold since 2005 when it first appeared. The Bird Songs book was on the Amazon Best Seller List #15 in 2005 with hundreds of five star reviews…..now published by Quarto Books of France with US and Canadian subsidiaries.
Mattel Juice Box (2004)
Steve Beck lead an international engineering team in San Francisco, New York and China to develop this iPod like portable personal media player for kids. It played up to 45 minutes of video, cartoons and movies all from a 32 MB solid state plug in memory card. MP3 music and JPEG photos could also be downloaded from a PC. In collaboration with 4Kids Entertainment and Original San Francisco Toy Company. Custom video and audio compression technology was developed for this product. Published by Mattel.
Talking Wrinkles (1986)
Wrinkles was an artificial intelligence talking dog and puppet with seven sensors and a vocabulary of over 2,500 sentences, laughs, barks and moans. Created in collaboration with Eddy Goldfarb it uses an 80C31 8 bit microprocessor with only 32 Kbytes of memory. Published by Coleco.
This video shows Wrinkles talking and is narrated by a man who had one as a child – later in the video he opens up the inside and shows the electronic circuits boards with some good explanations, though a few things he guesses at are incorrect but he did get the microprocessor identification correct – it is an Intel 80C31 CMOS 8 bit processor and I/O all on one chip.
There is also a report in The New York times from December 1986 showing diagrams of the toy and interview with Steve Beck = PS the video is slightly incorrect in that Talking Wrinkles was manufactured and sold by Coleco Toys of Connecticut (RIP defunct bankruptcy in the 1990s….after having Cabbage Patch Kids.
Additionally the video man does NOT know about turning Wrinkles off – putting him into sleep mode – just be pressing and holding the belly button Tickle button for 5 seconds – then Wrinkles says Bye Bye- he did NOT have to remove the batteries to make Wrinkles go to sleep….
Save The Whales Video Game (1982)
Beck created and programmed this video game for the Atari 2600 video game system. It can be found among collectors these days.
Strobe (1980)
Steve Beck collaborated with legendary toy inventor Eddy Goldfarb to create this first generation electronic toy, an electronic ping pong game using light and sound. Published by Lakeside Games.
Star Wars Electronic Battle Game (1979)
This was the first electronic toy which Beck developed in collaboration with legendary toy inventor Eddy Goldfarb of Los Angeles, California. Beck had seen the first Star Wars movie and was able to program a four bit TMS1000 microprocessor to play the Star Wars theme song and to sound like R2D2. This toy is really a reaction game played with light and sound. It can also be completely played by only the sound or the light, for sight and hearing impaired persons.