In part one of our brief history of handheld gaming (operative word: “brief”) we looked back at how the Nintendo Game Boy climbed it’s way to the top with a combination of AAA titles, ingenious marketing and perfect timing.
In part two, we take a brief look at how Nintendo continued it’s dominance through the late 1990s and into the new millennium.
And before you ask — no, we’re not going into great detail about the Nintendo DS, PSP or iPhone. We don’t consider time frames like “a few months ago” to be historically relevant. Yet.
Gunpei Yokoi decided against making the original Game Boy with a colored screen because, he felt, the inflated costs of both buying the device (due to increased production costs) and playing the machine (extra battery costs) would drive customers away. That was in 1989. By 1998, technology had improved to the point where a colored platform wasn’t just feasible, but affordable. However, Nintendo didn’t immediately feel the need to create a new handheld. After all, the Game Boy was doing extremely well, vastly outselling more technologically advanced systems by an average of 5-1.
So what ultimately drove Nintendo to begin work on a colored unit? Game developers who felt the Game Boy’s tech was insufficient for what they wanted to do. In 1995 Nintendo began work on a new handheld that would include a 32-bit ARM RISC processor. Unfortunately the graphical performance never lived up to Nintendo’s standards and the project was scrapped and started over from scratch.
Nintendo had an interesting dilemma on their hands: How do they keep the developers happy while also not risking the alienation of their userbase? The answer lied with, of all people, Atari.
The Atari 7800 was the first home video game console to include backwards compatibility. While it didn’t do much of anything to help the 7800 catch on, the idea of being able to play your old games on your new system was pretty sound.
Taking that idea, Nintendo also worked to improve the internal hardware. A 8MHz processor and 32KB system RAM were vast improvements over the original Game Boy. Additionally, the new system could handle much more ROM than before, allowing games to be up to eight times larger than they would be on the Game Boy.
On October 21st, 1998 Nintendo released the Game Boy Color in the Japanese market. However, while you would expect a company to celebrate when a system is launched, the Game Boy Color’s launch was bittersweet at best.
Gunpei Yokoi, the man who created the Game Boy and is widely considered to be the Godfather of handheld gaming, was killed. Yokoi, along with Nintendo employee Etsuo Kiso, was inspecting their vehicle after a minor collission with a truck when another car sideswiped them both. Kiso suffered several broken bones and severe whiplash. Yokoi, mortally wounded, died shortly after the accident.
While Yokoi was gone, his influence was still felt in the gaming world for years afterwards. Yokoi’s last handheld, which he worked on after his departure from Nintendo in 1996, would be released on March 4th, 1999 and was made to compete directly with Nintendo’s Game Boy and SNK’s Neo Geo Pocket. There were several things that made the WonderSwan stand out from the crowd. For starters, the device was designed to play both horizontally and vertically, depending on the developer’s preference. The Nintendo DS allows for similar flexibility with games like Hotel Dusk: Room 215.
The WonderSwan may not have ever received global recognition, but in Japan the device still has a loyal following of homebrew developers. This is because of the WonderWitch, which included a rewritable 128Mb WonderSwab cartridge that people could write their own games onto by using the Windows software that was also included. This provided people a legal alternative to creating illegal flash copies of games, which is evident by the low number of fake carts (compared to the Neo Geo Pocket).
A few months prior to the launch of the WonderSwan, SNK launched the Neo Geo Pocket. Much like the WonderSwan, the system was designed to compete with the Game Boy in Japan, though it was also released in Hong Kong. It’s interesting to note that the Neo Geo Pocket was launched and discontinued in less than a year, with SNK immediately halting production of the Neo Geo Pocket when they released the Neo Geo Pocket Color on March 16th, 1999 — twelve days after the WonderSwan.
The Neo Geo Pocket Color has a bit of an odd story to it. While the original Neo Geo Pocket was released solely in Japan and Hong Kong, the Pocket Color was released in both North American and European markets by August of 1999, where it found minor success. However, in June of 2000 SNK’s new owners, pachinko manufacturer Aruze, decided to abandon the North American and European markets and focus solely on the Japan.
The Neo Geo Pocket Color was the most successful non-Nintendo handheld since the Game Gear, but never realized it’s full potential because of poor marketing, absolutely zero communication between SNK and third-party developers, and general mismanagement.
Oh, and gamers were awaiting the release of the Game Boy Advance.
The Game Boy Advance was released in Japan on March 21st, 2001 and North America on June 11th, 2001. Rumors of a 32-bit Game Boy had been swirling around since the mid 1990s with “Project Atlantis”, however it’s still unclear whether “Project Atlantis” was the GBA or the scrapped 32-bit handheld that was revealed at 2009′s Game Developer’s Conference.
Other than a minor redesign of the WonderSwan Color that Bandai marketed as “Swan Crystal”, 2001 and 2002 were more or less quiet years for handheld hardware.
In 2003, Nintendo released the redesigned GBA, dubbed the Game Boy Advance SP. The SP stands for “Special”. Almost identical to the GBA in terms of internal specifications, the GBA SP did feature two major physical upgrades that have become standard on all Nintendo handhelds: A backlit screen and rechargable lithium ion that would never need to be replaced (unless you’re still rockin’ the GBA SP in 2020 or something).
The Game Boy Advance would see another redesign a couple of years later with the Game Boy Micro, a version of the Game Boy that could fit in the palm of your hand.
2003 saw what would become a precursor for what portable gaming would become with the Nokia N-Gage.
The N-Gage really was a no-brainer on the surface. For years people had carried around both their Game Boy and their cell phone. Nokia saw an opportunity to combine the two and the result was the N-Gage, a device that was a just a few years ahead of its time.
The N-Gage was the first handheld to do many things that now seem commonplace: wireless internet, bluetooth, mp3 support and, oh yeah, it was a cell phone. However, none of this helped and the N-Gage wound up being the biggest gaming disaster since the Virtual Boy.
The N-Gage was a poorly designed device. The D-Pad felt unresponsive and uncomfortable, and the number pad doubling as the game buttons just made everything look confusing. Additionally, owners had to pop the back panel off the device to swap out games, which was a tedious task to say the least. Furthermore Nokia vastly overestimated the demand for a gaming device that could also make phone calls. When it was released on October 7th, 2003, it carried a price of $299 — a price that didn’t stick for very long as both GameStop and EB Games began to offer $100 rebates by Halloween of that year. Ultimately the phone only “sold” (shipped) a couple of million units before being discontinued.
The N-Gage is widely considered to be a joke by gamers, and for good reason. Howver it’s important to note that the N-Gage, for all it’s failings, was a huge step for handheld gaming.
On November 13th, 2003 Nintendo announced that they were working on a new handheld gaming platform that would be released in 2004 and would not be the successor to the Game Boy. While not revealing much (in typical Nintendo fashion), Nintendo did allow for information to slowly trickle out before it’s big unveiling at E3 2004.
Also unveiled at E3 2004 was the PSP from Sony. While Sony officially announced that they were working on a portable system just before E3 2003, the system wasn’t unveiled until a year later, where Sony touted strong developer support by releasing a list of 99 companies that had agreed to develop for the platform.
And… well, that’s about where we’re at. The DS has had a couple of redesigns, including the Nintendo DSi which features a camera and music support, and the PSP has gotten progressively slimmer through the years, but for the most part this is where we’re at.
In part three of our brief history of handheld gaming, we’ll be going back to 1979 and looking at the first ever handheld gaming device, Milton Bradley’s Microvision. That’s right — the Microvision is getting it’s own piece. And be sure to check back later this summer for our Comprehensive Look at the History of Handheld Gaming — a much more detailed look back at the history of handheld gaming, broken down year-by-year and promising to talk about just about every handheld device ever released.
Might as well have skipped *a brief history* & just incorporate it into the *comprehensive look* considering how much of portable gaming has been skipped!!
That’s the beautiful thing about doing a “brief” history — I only have to talk about the systems that mattered.