The first three decades of digital gaming saw a flurry of concepts, technologies, and products that were groundbreaking in their era and still matter today. And the drawings their inventors used to document them in patent filings are a nostalgic, charming blast. Here are thirty-two of those sketches–including ones for some the most successful games ever and a few which I’m not sure ever made it to market at all.

As with my earlier patent galleries, I couldn’t have done this one without the wondrous research tool known as Google Patents. The filing dates that follow link to the full patent documents there.