I was doing a few Google searches and came across this:

This was my very first handheld electonic game.  I played the crap out of this one until the red led lights started going haywire on the screen.  I last remembered seeing it in an old toy box when I was still a kid at my parents'.  i threw it back in because I knew it didn't work anymore.  Ironically, I learned very little about football playing that game, and I'm not a sports fan.  But I loved it when I had it.

My first handheld games. I collected quite a few Radio Shack handheld games, as well as a Nintendo Game & Watch (Balloon Fight). I stopped collecting them once the Game Boy came out, but I still kind of want a Coleco tabletop arcade game. :)

OP: That game looks a lot like Mattel's electronic football game. Is it from the same era?

I just did a search, and very much YES!

When I was 12, my Christmas gift was a handheld color TV set, the Realistic Pocketvision 22. I loved that thing. That was the year after I got my launch era Game Boy (1990).

Here's mine:

So simple, and yet I played a ton of this little game.

The "crown jewel" of my handheld LCD game collection. I bought this because I loved Balloon Fight on NES. This cost me the princely sum of $20 (which was a lot of chores and birthday money) and required two watch batteries to operate. I played the heck out of this.

Now I can download the NES Balloon Fight onto my 3DS....

I was born in 1998, so when I got my first handheld, the Game Boy Color in around 2004/5, the Game Boy Advance was already out for several years. I ended up buying it from someone at my school for around 6 dollars, and it came with R-Type DX. I still don't know what happened to it: I cannot find it in my house and I never got rid of it.

I also had one of these:

My dad got it for me for my birthday, but i didn't have it for long because I left it in a department store dressing room.

This was mine.

Played it to death, had the timing down so good I was swamping the other team on the most ridiculous difficulty (where everything moves so fast you can barely see the ball).