Retro Tech
The Handhelds That Didn't Win
Part 8 of the thread Console field guide
- The Lynx and Game Gear had color and backlit screens years before Nintendo, and chewed through six AA batteries doing it.
- The Neo Geo Pocket Color had fantastic fighting games and a great little stick, and SNK's troubles sank it.
- The WonderSwan was designed by the Game Boy's own creator and never left Japan.
- The lesson every one of them learned: battery life and games beat a better screen.
Nintendo won the handheld market so thoroughly and for so long that it's easy to forget how many companies tried. Some of them had better hardware. Several had better screens. Most of them had worse batteries, and none of them had Pokémon.
These are the ones I find most interesting, in order.
The contenders
Microvision (1979)
Milton Bradley's Microvision was the first handheld with swappable cartridges, which is a big deal for a device with a 16 x 16 pixel screen. The cartridge also carried the processor, so each game was more or less its own computer. It didn't last long, and the screens are known to fail, but it got there first.
Atari Lynx (1989)
The first color handheld, with a backlit screen and hardware that could scale and rotate sprites. Technically, it was years ahead of the Game Boy that launched the same year.
It was also big, expensive, and went through six AA batteries in a few hours. It never came close to the Game Boy.
Sega Game Gear (1990)
Sega's answer: color, backlit, and basically a portable Master System, so it had a real library from day one. There was even a TV tuner add-on that turned it into a tiny television.
It also used six AA batteries and got something like three to five hours from them. Against a Game Boy running far longer on four, that mattered more than the screen did. Sega followed it with the Nomad in 1995, a handheld that played actual Genesis cartridges, which is a wonderful and slightly ridiculous thing.
Heads up
Game Gears are known for failing capacitors, which cause dim screens and weak or dead sound. If you're buying one now, assume it'll need recapping, or buy one that's already been done.
Neo Geo Pocket Color (1999)
SNK's handheld had a 160 x 152 color screen, a clicky micro-switch stick that people still rave about, excellent battery life, and some fantastic fighting games and card games. It's a genuinely good handheld.
Then SNK ran into money trouble, pulled out of the Western markets and went bankrupt in 2001. The system never had a chance to find its audience.
WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color (1999, 2000)
Bandai's handheld was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the man behind Game & Watch and the Game Boy, through his own company after he left Nintendo. It was small, cheap and ran for ages on a single AA battery, and it could be held vertically or horizontally.
The Color model got Square on board, with remakes of early Final Fantasy games, which was a real coup at the time. It stayed Japan-only.
Nokia N-Gage (2003)
A phone that wanted to be a Game Boy Advance. It had some decent games, but you had to take the back off to change games in the original model, and you held it sideways against your face to make calls, which the internet named "sidetalking" and never let go. The QD redesign fixed a lot of that, but by then the joke had stuck.
The whole timeline
| Years | What changed | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1979 to 1989 | Single games and the first cartridges | Game & Watch, Microvision |
| 1989 to 1998 | Monochrome versus color | Game Boy, Lynx, Game Gear |
| 1998 to 2004 | Color goes mainstream | Game Boy Color, Neo Geo Pocket Color, WonderSwan Color |
| 2001 to 2006 | 32-bit power, and phones try it | Game Boy Advance, GBA SP, N-Gage |
| 2004 to 2011 | Two screens and touch, or a big widescreen | Nintendo DS, PSP |
| 2011 to 2017 | 3D, OLED and dual sticks | 3DS, PS Vita |
| 2017 on | Home and handheld become one thing | Switch |
| 2022 on | PC chips in your hands | Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go |
The throughline is simple: screens went from LCD segments to monochrome dots to color to OLED and high refresh rates, and battery life went the other way, from a Game Boy's dozens of hours to a few hours on a modern PC handheld.
Note
The Lynx, the Game Gear and the Neo Geo Pocket Color all had a better screen than the Game Boy of their day, and all of them lost on battery life, games or both. It's the most consistent lesson in handheld history.
Playing them now
Most of these emulate well, and a modern emulation handheld plays all of them on one screen. The winners of this story are in Nintendo's handheld lineage and Sony's PSP and Vita.