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remember when it seemed like dedicated handheld gaming consoles were everywhere

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like who didn't have a game boy me actually i had a game gear but the

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point is now our choices for mobile gaming seem to be either

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playing on your smartphone or buying a nintendo switch which honestly is more

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of a hybrid console than a true handheld anyway so how did we get to this

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paradoxical situation where mobile gaming is more popular than ever before

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and yet we're super limited in our choice of platform it helps to look at

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some relevant history which is actually mostly the story of how nintendo pushed

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its rivals more or less completely out of the market

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nintendo initially recognized that there was a real market for mobile gaming not

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long after the success of early handheld games from companies like mattel

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these took the form of single game handheld toys that weren't true consoles

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instead you had to buy a new unit for each game you wanted to play nintendo's

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first foray into gaming on the go was with a lineup of toys called game and

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watch which creator gunpei yokoi thought up while watching a board businessman

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playing with a calculator on the train the game watch series was wildly popular

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and helped the market for handheld games surge not to mention that it helped

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establish nintendo as a handheld gaming brand in the minds of consumers ahead of

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the launch of the original game boy in 1989.

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now the game boy wasn't even the first console with interchangeable cartridges

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that title went to milton bradley's micro vision that had actually come out

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10 years prior even though it was actually a dumb terminal with all the

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processing handled inside the cartridge itself but unlike the microvision 16x16

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resolution display the gameboy could handle detailed 160 by 102 pixel images

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and perhaps even more importantly it was accessible you see there were actually

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some cool portable contraptions that came out before the game boy the vtec

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game mate from 1983 actually had 3d

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complete with binocular-like eye cups but the game boy had long battery life

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and was relatively affordable these characteristics along with a solid

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library of games helped the game boy fend off technologically superior rivals

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like the sega game gear for instance it had a color screen and even an

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optional tv tuner which you might think would help justify its higher price of

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150 dollars compared to the gameboy's 90

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but the battery life was terrible and that was a big deal before built-in

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rechargeable batteries became common there also just weren't many killer apps

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partly because nintendo got the lockdown on third-party game developers early on

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you see nintendo often made third party devs sign agreements not to release the

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same game for a competing platform for some period of time so the game gear

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ended up just porting over lots of games from the master system the home console

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that preceded the genesis which wasn't enough to make the game gear a serious

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threat to nintendo's dominance other systems like the atari lynx and turbo

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express faced similar issues and were even more expensive than the game gear

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then other competitors cut costs but were based around unappealing gimmicks

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for example tigersgame.com from 1997 was cheap and

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touted internet capability but this was limited to a text-based service over a

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14 4 kilobit connection that no games

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even used aside from those issues bad timing also doomed other would-be

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nintendo rivals in 1995 sega tried

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releasing a portable genesis called the nomad but with more interesting home

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consoles around the corner including sega's own saturn people weren't

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terribly interested in a rehash of an aging platform i guess it just hadn't

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been enough time yet then there was the neo geopocket color

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from 1998 which was released at the height of pokemon mania between that and

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the fact that the game boy advance was on its way in 2001 nintendo already had

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the market cornered the company brought us the innovative ds in 2004 and it was

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around this time that sony tried to become a major competitor with its

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playstation portable or psp which actually became a relative success due

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to its powerful internals lovely screen and solid lineup of games but a big

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reason for the psp's ultimate undoing was that it was trying to replicate the

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full playstation experience rather than building something completely with

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mobile gaming in mind the nintendo ds's dual screen design for example

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would be awkward on a home console looking at you wii u but made a ton of

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sense in a handheld form factor the psp's successor the ps vita ended up

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making the same mistakes but unfortunately with an even worse game

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library as sony was far more concerned with its upcoming playstation 4 meaning

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that the 3ds became the dominant handheld until the switch was released

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in 2017. then when you consider how powerful

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smartphones were getting all that time opening up more possibilities for gaming

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on what was already a do it all platform that you had in your pocket anyway it's

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not surprising that dedicated gaming gadgets from companies not named

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nintendo have mostly been squeezed out of the market to the point where we

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might not even be able to place snake on our graphing calculators anymore

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