Hand-held electronics are marvels of miniaturization. The ones that existed before I was born, even more so. Anyone who played Blip might be interested to know two things. First, despite being titled “The Digital Game”, it was in fact 100% mechanically driven. Second, the game was, as you may have claimed many times, actually impossible to beat.

The good folks over at Evil Mad Scientist Labs opened the Blip up to let us take a look at the gears inside. The game itself is played much like Pong. A red LED bounces across the screen, and it is up to you, the valiant player, to stop it. Interestingly, rather than having an LED screen, Blip operated with a single LED on a mechanical arm that would swing back and forth. The three buttons you would use the stop the “ball” would actually physically stop the arm from moving. In fact, the only electronics in this device at all are the circuits for the LED.

When in single player mode, the device effectively holds down all three buttons for the other player at once. Meaning there is no way it will ever miss the ball. How preposterous.

After the jump, you’ll find a much more detailed breakdown, the original TV commercial, the original patent, and a video of the deconstruction.

[Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories] via [Retro Thing]

I asked Sony’s John Koller, Director of Hardware Marketing for Sony, what the company planned to do for their most loyal fanbase—those who’d amassed a large collection of UMDs but who’d also like to play these games on the Go. His response:

We’re in the midst of putting together a good will program. We’ll be unveiling that soon [because] we actually think there’s a significant group that will be upgrading from the 1000…In the past, we’ve seen a 20-25% trade-up factor, and I assume that’s going to be the case here. We’ve modeled that. So we’re looking at a good-will program—a short term good-will program that would continue for years afterward.”

Short-term for years afterward? In other words, the program itself will last for years, but these digital game copies will be tied to either when you bought the UMD or the PSP Go—such specifics were not made clear.

Speaking more regarding the technical aspects of the good will program, Koller explained while the distribution model was still in the planning stages, the user’s experience would be similar to Portable Copy—a way in which Blu-ray movies can be ripped and converted from the PS3 to the PSP. However, Koller assured me that users would not be ripping their UMDs. Instead, it sounds like Sony will use a PSN-based digital distribution model will “encourage” users to sign up for the service.

But the neatest thing about Koller’s Portable Copy comparison? Portable Copy is free. So we’re doubting that Sony will charge for the service—though we have no confirmation. Unfortunately, Koller also slipped in that Sony’s “looking at what kind of games will be offered.” In other words, Sony’s good-will program will probably not apply to every title in the PSP’s library, but given that there are only a few that matter anyway, maybe this limitation isn’t such a big deal.

All this leakage stems from the June issue of Qore, which is a bit of a slip-up on Sony’s part. The Go looks to keep the single analog joystick, though the overall design is quite a bit more playful and, well, circular than previous iterations of the PSP. Notice we didn’t say “attractive”: the circle section that houses the start and select buttons especially has kind of a late-90s feel to it, but we’ll have to see how it looks in the hand. It should be packing Bluetooth and a memory card slot (probably MemoryStick, grah) in addition to the 16GB of internal memory.

Also lining up with the previous rumors is that the new PSP Go will not replace the PSP 3000, but instead try to live peacefully with the older device on store shelves. And that hefty 16GB of storage space makes sense considering what we’ve heard about possible digital game rentals and a music store. [Gaming Console Network (site currently down) via PlayStation Forums via Engadget]