Electronic Dream Phone, I'm sad to report, is not actually a dating teleservice for Freddy Kreuger, but instead another game catered primarily to teenage girls, who's only interests, according to marketing "experts" are malls and telephones. The game, released in 1991, is yet another that straddles the line between convoluted toy and proper board game, because while, yes, it does contain a board, the board isn't exactly your main focus here.
Designed by Michael Gray (who, coincidentally enough, also designed Electronic Mall Madness) and published most famously by Hasbro, Dream Phone actually comes with a handful of alternate names, most of them foreign, and some funny enough to include right here. These include Boyfriend Phone, Téléphone Secret, and Droomtelefoon, which is just fun to say. The runtime for this game is apparently 20 minutes, which seems about right, considering the basis behind the game, as it were, is described by Board Game Geek as such:
One of 24 incredible boys really likes you. Now you just have to find out who he is by calling his friends for clues! Play a boy's photo card and call his number on the electronic touch-tone phone! Listen to a clue about his clothes, sports, foods, or special hangouts. Then search the gameboard to identify who he is and who he isn't. Calls are private unless someone plays a Speakerphone card - then everyone hears that clue! If it's a Share a Secret card, just you and one friend listen together! To guess who your secret admirer is, make a special call to him. If you hear him say, "You're right! I really like you!", you win the game! The game changes every time you play. Boys give different clues and your secret admirer changes too!
First of all, and I hate to be the one who has to say this, but there's not 24 incredible boys. At max, there's maybe 5. I'm sorry to break your illusion, but teenage boys are often not "incredible", especially when it comes to matters of romance. But moreso than that, this game seems entirely focused on not just obsessing over someone, but violating their personal space to the point where they'll finally openly admit how they feel about you, even if they weren't ready to. That's just rude. Though, I have to admit, I like the idea of the secret admirer, that really adds a little nuance to an otherwise dull gameplay cycle. Now, granted, I'm not the kind of girl who played this. I'm the kind of girl who played Seaman on the Dreamcast. I'm also the kind of girl who crushed on other girls, so that kind of changes things substantially as well.
According to Michael Gray, a former manager at Milton Bradley who designed Dream Phone, his team was tasked with creating an electronic game centered around a phone—but no one could think of a concrete idea. “It got down to the wire; it was a Thursday and we had to present something on Tuesday, and they didn’t have anything,” Gray, who also designed the popular game Mall Madness, tells HelloGiggles. “So I called them in my office and I said, ‘All right, listen, this is what we’re going to do.’” From there, Gray suggested the game’s players would have to wade through clues in order to determine who liked them. “We’ll have a bunch of boys with their names and maybe their pictures all the way around the board,” Gray recalls suggesting, adding that his team then created a grid to assign features to each of the different boys. “One might have a skateboard, one might have a basketball, one might be wearing a hat… That way, you could have a score pad and you could keep track of all these things. Eventually, you could narrow it down.”
It's always fascinating to get a look into how something is designed and figured out, and Gray seems like he understands how these types of things work. And, perhaps even more fascinating, is how, when asked about making the game today, in the world of excess inclusivity, they stated:
Gray agrees that a 2019 Dream Phone would likely need to be more inclusive. “We don’t want to make anybody feel bad,” he tells HelloGiggles. “[If] a girl who played it was like, ‘Well geez, I like girls and it’s some boy who likes me, and that’s not for me,’ …we wouldn’t want to ever do that.”
So that's pretty cool to see the person who created it recognize that the heteronormativey of the time wouldn't translate well to today, and as a queer woman, I for one sincerely appreciate this. This definitely bumps Gray up the list of my favorite designers, which, to be fair, is a pretty short list not consisting of many people to begin with considering how rarely the people who actually design these things get properly credited. Overall, beside it's sister game "Electronic Mall Madness", it's safe to say that Electronic Dream Phone definitely made its mark in the market, and while it's certainly sad to see games marketed towards girls be so...cliche, I also don't think, at the time, anyone knew what else to do besides that, especially if they had teenage daughters and saw the interests firsthand.
However, romance is impossible enough as it is without having to be goddamn Sherlock Holmes about it. If I have to go CSI on some poor girl to figure out if she likes me or not, I think I'd prefer to just be alone. But I'm a hermit, so.
Maybe I'm not the best example.
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