Touch screen technology is such a dominant part of our lives that the vast majority of people will spend a considerable amount of time in a day tapping on a device.
One reason why people use their touch screen fingertips is to play games that use the touch screen capabilities of smart devices to add innovative functionality, but the first game to feature a touch screen is older than many people think.
The first handheld console to use a touch screen as a core part of its design is Tiger’s Game.Com in 1997, but that was not the first video game to use a touch screen at all.
That hallmark is shared by two games, one an art tool and the other an arcade game, which both use largely the same resistive touch screen design to allow a player to draw objects on the screen.
The first was Terebi Oekaki (TV Draw), a game and peripheral also known as the Sega Graphic Board that allowed players to use a rudimentary drawing tool to make and paint pictures.
The other major implementation of this technology was in the electromagnetic arcade game World Derby, which featured positional sensor technology as part of its horse racing and betting gameplay.
This technology, despite being used in relatively obscure games would actually have a very long internal shelf life at Sega.
The touch screen would be used as part of game development to help draw sprites. Whilst it was used for several games, it is known that Golden Axe II on the Sega Mega Drive was a game that had graphics drawn using their in-house touch screen technology.
It finally saw use as the main input device for the Sega Pico educational game console, which was a hybrid between an e-book reader, a graphics tablet and a games console.
