Every frame was drawn before you bought it

A climber on a ladder, drawn in solid black shapes. Objects falling above. A small numeral in the corner: 813. And faintly, in the grey field, the outlines of shapes that aren't switched on.

Those ghosts are the whole story. Every position the character could ever be in was printed into the glass at the factory.

How did these games work?

Nothing moved. Shapes turned on and off.

A segment LCD has no pixels. Each element — a leg here, an arm there, a falling object in one specific spot — is a physically etched region that can be made opaque or transparent. The game is a sequence of which ones are lit.

So the animation was designed before manufacture, permanently, and the machine could never show anything else. It's closer to a pop-up book than to a computer.

Why are the ghost segments the good part?

Because they show you the whole game at once.

In the right light you can see every unlit position faintly in the panel — all the places the character could go, all the hazards that could appear, sitting there simultaneously. The game's entire possibility space is visible on the surface at all times.

That's a genuinely strange and beautiful thing, and no other medium does it. Printing the ghosts is what separates this from a generic pixel design.

What does the constraint do to the drawing?

It forces bold, deliberate shapes.

Each segment costs money to etch, so there were very few, and each had to read instantly at thumbnail size in bad light. The result is a graphic language of solid black silhouettes with no detail, no shading and no in-between states — closer to a road sign than to an illustration.

Which is exactly what survives being printed on cloth. This style needs no adaptation whatsoever.

Can I copy a real handheld game?

The segment artwork is a manufacturer's design and those handhelds are actively revived.

The famous ones have been reissued, collected and merchandised by the companies that made them, and the segment layouts are part of the product design. Licensable, as with everything else here, but not assumable.

Designing your own segment layout is the enjoyable bit, and it's a real design exercise: what are the fewest fixed shapes that can tell a story?

What should the scene be?

Something repetitive with escalating danger.

The genre is fixed by its own limits: catch things, avoid things, climb, cross, juggle. Pointing that at a real routine works well — a commute, a shift, a school run — because the format's inherent message is the same thing, faster, until you fail.

The score in the corner should be a real number. 813 is a specific afternoon; a round number is a design choice.

Why is the background that colour?

Because that's what an unlit LCD looks like.

Grey-green, slightly yellow, never white — the polariser and the reflector give the panel a distinctive dull cast that's instantly recognisable to anybody who owned one. Getting that colour right does more work than the drawing does.

It's the rare case where the garment colour is the reference, not the backdrop for it.

Does it print well?

About as well as anything in this bucket.

Solid black shapes on a flat field, no gradients, no fine lines, high contrast by design. The only subtlety is the ghost segments, which need to be a genuinely faint tint of the ink rather than a grey — too dark and they read as a mistake, too light and they vanish.

Sage grey, olive grey and pale khaki grounds. One ink plus a tint.

How do I get one made?

Describe the game at JustOG — what's being caught or avoided, how many positions, and what the score is. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Every move it could ever make was already in the glass when you unwrapped it.