remember when it seemed like dedicated handheld gaming consoles were everywhere
like who didn't have a game boy me actually i had a game gear but the
point is now our choices for mobile gaming seem to be either
playing on your smartphone or buying a nintendo switch which honestly is more
of a hybrid console than a true handheld anyway so how did we get to this
paradoxical situation where mobile gaming is more popular than ever before
and yet we're super limited in our choice of platform it helps to look at
some relevant history which is actually mostly the story of how nintendo pushed
its rivals more or less completely out of the market
nintendo initially recognized that there was a real market for mobile gaming not
long after the success of early handheld games from companies like mattel
these took the form of single game handheld toys that weren't true consoles
instead you had to buy a new unit for each game you wanted to play nintendo's
first foray into gaming on the go was with a lineup of toys called game and
watch which creator gunpei yokoi thought up while watching a board businessman
playing with a calculator on the train the game watch series was wildly popular
and helped the market for handheld games surge not to mention that it helped
establish nintendo as a handheld gaming brand in the minds of consumers ahead of
the launch of the original game boy in 1989.
now the game boy wasn't even the first console with interchangeable cartridges
that title went to milton bradley's micro vision that had actually come out
10 years prior even though it was actually a dumb terminal with all the
processing handled inside the cartridge itself but unlike the microvision 16x16
resolution display the gameboy could handle detailed 160 by 102 pixel images
and perhaps even more importantly it was accessible you see there were actually
some cool portable contraptions that came out before the game boy the vtec
game mate from 1983 actually had 3d
complete with binocular-like eye cups but the game boy had long battery life
and was relatively affordable these characteristics along with a solid
library of games helped the game boy fend off technologically superior rivals
like the sega game gear for instance it had a color screen and even an
optional tv tuner which you might think would help justify its higher price of
150 dollars compared to the gameboy's 90
but the battery life was terrible and that was a big deal before built-in
rechargeable batteries became common there also just weren't many killer apps
partly because nintendo got the lockdown on third-party game developers early on
you see nintendo often made third party devs sign agreements not to release the
same game for a competing platform for some period of time so the game gear
ended up just porting over lots of games from the master system the home console
that preceded the genesis which wasn't enough to make the game gear a serious
threat to nintendo's dominance other systems like the atari lynx and turbo
express faced similar issues and were even more expensive than the game gear
then other competitors cut costs but were based around unappealing gimmicks
for example tigersgame.com from 1997 was cheap and
touted internet capability but this was limited to a text-based service over a
14 4 kilobit connection that no games
even used aside from those issues bad timing also doomed other would-be
nintendo rivals in 1995 sega tried
releasing a portable genesis called the nomad but with more interesting home
consoles around the corner including sega's own saturn people weren't
terribly interested in a rehash of an aging platform i guess it just hadn't
been enough time yet then there was the neo geopocket color
from 1998 which was released at the height of pokemon mania between that and
the fact that the game boy advance was on its way in 2001 nintendo already had
the market cornered the company brought us the innovative ds in 2004 and it was
around this time that sony tried to become a major competitor with its
playstation portable or psp which actually became a relative success due
to its powerful internals lovely screen and solid lineup of games but a big
reason for the psp's ultimate undoing was that it was trying to replicate the
full playstation experience rather than building something completely with
mobile gaming in mind the nintendo ds's dual screen design for example
would be awkward on a home console looking at you wii u but made a ton of
sense in a handheld form factor the psp's successor the ps vita ended up
making the same mistakes but unfortunately with an even worse game
library as sony was far more concerned with its upcoming playstation 4 meaning
that the 3ds became the dominant handheld until the switch was released
in 2017. then when you consider how powerful
smartphones were getting all that time opening up more possibilities for gaming
on what was already a do it all platform that you had in your pocket anyway it's
not surprising that dedicated gaming gadgets from companies not named
nintendo have mostly been squeezed out of the market to the point where we
might not even be able to place snake on our graphing calculators anymore
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