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 & 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 microvision
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 16 by 16 resolution display,
the Game Boy 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 compared to the Game Boy'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 dev 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, Tiger's Game.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 Geo Pocket 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 play snake on our graphing calculators anymore.
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