For someone with quite the chequered gaming history it can be hard to see what the hell was going on. First, obsessively playing my way through Mega Drive, PS1 and then PS2 before a lull of a few years before firmly jumping on the Xbox bandwagon to this day. Fuck me was the Xbox 360 a brilliant console (bar the red ring of death). I dabbled with the Wii and PS3 but they didn't grab me as much.
The one strand that carries through is my absolute love of handhelds, kicking off with the Game Boy and currently sitting with seven separate handhelds kicking around my flat! Even in the dark years with little gaming I was still playing around with the PSP, with GTA Liberty City Stories, an absolute gem. Obviously I want to talk about handhelds in much more detail going way back before my grey classic Game Boy.
For decades Arcade machines ruled supreme. Though they gobbled up your change, it was a great opportunity to hang out with your friends and have shared experiences. Home consoles were expensive so they were not really viable for most people. When they did get more affordable in the 1980s they became the way to game, no longer tied to opening hours and queuing (well with strangers anyway) to get a go.
The initial aim of home console makers was to try and match the quality and experience of these arcade machines. But all we did was move the arcade machine to the living room. What about a device to play quality games anywhere you wanted? For decades fans were out of luck.
It took until the 90’s for Nintendo to unveil the Game Boy and change the landscape completely. Due to minituartion issues less powerful tech had to be used in comparison to home consoles. This, I feel, has always given handheld gaming something of a poor man’s gaming experience. Titles were often smaller, less graphically adept than their console counterparts. As kids got them more often than adults; they are pretty much stigmatised as a childs toy. Which is unfair in my opinion.
My guess is that the cheaper entry point made these the go to games consoles for most families with the added bonus for parents that they could easily be confiscated due to misbehaviour. With this particular demographic dominating the market it meant developers would pitch even more ‘kiddie’ games. For instance I actually worked on Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice on the 3DS which was very much a shit Sonic game for 12 year olds.
To which I say misses the innovation and glories of handheld gaming that going strong to this day. With that in mind I have written two articles. The second is a look at why handhelds are so well loved by the hardcore and probably underappreiciated by the masses. First a look at how we got to where we are today.
The Beginnings
I am talking a hell of a lot about Nintendo devices in this article and though they are not the be all and end all of handhelds they loom so large over it. They have pretty much defined what it is. This article does not cover every handheld possible, just covers most of the major players and all the ones I have played.
Nintendo wasn't the first. In fact it actually started with Mattel who produced the Mattel Auto Race way back in 1976. It only contained one game, your car was a dash on screen with three lanes and you had to dodge other cars and hazards to win over four ‘laps’. I know I am not the biggest driving game fan but there’s something about these early driving titles I can’t stand. Maybe I am just a spoiled 90’s kid!
Basic start and that was the story for the next 3 years. The major problem is having a single game inbuilt. From a gaming perspective but also financially it’s much better to have multiple games to plug in. The Microvision was released in 1979 (It looks like a brown remote control with a small screen) that first introduced cartridges. They were limited with a connect four title and a handheld mainstay of a pinball game. Only 12 titles were released with the console having numerous issues including sadly screenrot. Delightful.
That might have been the wrong hand held but 1979 was the year where everything changed. Nintendo got involved due to a curious story about a genius at the company. It goes that long term Nintendo employee Gunpei Yokoi was on a bullet train noticed a bored businessman playing with the buttons on a calculator to while away the time for over an hour. It hit him that there must be a way to create a similar device to play games.
His idea was for Nintendo to make a watch that was also a miniature gaming machine as time killer. Hence the invention of the ‘Game & Watch’, a series of gaming machines that would introduce some of the most important gaming characters including Donkey Kong and Mario. I was incredibly lucky to have a go on one over a Christmas when my friend Pepe got one many years ago. It is an amazing little device, sure it only has one game but it is beautiful. And so solid, the battery had run out but a quick change and I was away!
I can see how these took off, the side on clamshell design makes it very well protected for lugging around in your bag. It’s not anywhere near small enough to fit into your pockets but it’s not like it needs a TV! With all the games in the world on a laptop I do not have the attention span to play this for hours and get good but then it was of it’s time. I am sure it was brilliant then.
Technological advances had meant credit card sized calculators had come onto the market which they tried to ape. The biggest addition was the direction pad (D-pad) that also made it onto the NES home console which has now become ever present on any games console controller to this day. This was introduced for more complicated games that they started to produce but this was not a true modern handheld as we know it. That required the next invention, the Game Boy.
1980s
Actually it was not easy to produce a colour back lit LCD handheld as it consumed so much power. Batteries at that time were just not able to power them long enough. The Game Boy was so successful due to its monochrome non backlit screen let players play for far longer. And yes that was with 4 AA batteries. Those bloody batteries were the main bane of my childhood. Four is just fucking excessive. It would become a huge sellar and dominate over the next 10 years before an updated Game Boy Colour broke onto the market.
We know that apps sell consoles and boy did Nintendo have some killer ones. How can we not talk about Tetris then?! Alexey Pajitnov’s all time classic title was bundled with the Game Boy in North America and Europe to huge acclaim. It was ported from the console version but now is seen as maybe the definitive version. I think humans naturally love a puzzle, just look at how popular crosswords and sudoku still are. Tetris taps into that but it also tied very nicely into the high score chasing arcade era that was only just ending. In hindsight it’s very obvious that it was going to be huge due to these two factors.
1990s
So what were the other companies doing? Sega released it’s Game Gear in 1990, seen as the more technologically advanced handheld console of the era. Having major titles, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, was a great selling point but it could not match the Game Boy sales which were ten times as many. It didn’t help that Sega overstretched itself by working on multiple home console variations which became the priority. Interestingly the Atari Lynx was also released in 1989 and matched the Game Gear for its more comfortable design, with the buttons and D-Pad either side of the screen rather than the cramped Game Boy below. It only sold 3 million units.
It seems like the console wars were not confined to the living room and although all three released at around about the same time Nintendo absolutely romped home this time. They continued to support the Game Boy for 9 years before bringing out the Colour. A steady stable of quality titles whilst bringing over the heavy hitters from its home console really helped.
Lets fast forward through the 1990’s and past the Neo Geo Pocket, Sega Nomad and Wonderswan handheld releases which I assume people have not heard off. I certainly hadn't. The Neo Geo Pocket rocked the more comfortable horizontal set up and honestly looks like a DS console with the top screen cut off. A lack of a killer game saw this flop with only 10 games released. Sega’s nomad had all of the buttons a player could want but it looks so ugly. So much for the 90’s.
2000s
It was in the 2000’s where things got more interesting. Nintendo brought out the Game Boy Advance, with a bigger screen, more powerful chip and addition of shoulder buttons with the horizontal switch for a more comfortable playing style. One touch that I really like is the console has backwards compatibility, allowing players to keep playing classic Mario and Pokemon games.
Next up?
A mere three years later Nintendo would release their own majorly overhauled Nintendo DS system. It was a huge breakaway from the Game Boy series, introducing a second screen that was touch sensitive so players could use the included stylus. It allowed game designers to play around much more with how gamers could play. A bone of contention is the much smaller cartridges which is great for storage and carrying around with you but it meant after the initial DS with its GBA slot none of the later consoles could play all the older games.
The DS was genuinely ground breaking and would be ahead of the mobile games market by some way. I will speak about that at length in the next article. First let’s talk about the only other real player in the handheld market. Sony. By this point they had vast experience of the games market after releasing two home consoles and decided to jump in with the brilliant PlayStation Portable (PSP) in late 2004.
The PSP’s main aim was to try and ape the serious hardcore gaming exeperince of home consoles. With it they stuck to disks over cartridges which had to be housed in their own plastic case. The UMD disks could hold a lot of data and transfer it very quickly but as anyone who had a walkman knows any movements or bumps caused the disk to skip which is terrible when playing a game. The housing helped but it’s one of the few handhelds with disks, all others use cartridges to get around this issue. To be honest, playing GTA on the go was amazing and I loved this little console on my commute (to Stevenage of all places).
By now the scene is set with only really two players on the market, Sony and Nintendo. With the consoles selling so well they both wanted to build on their success with 80 million and 154 million units shipped. Sadly neither would match up to the older model. The Nintendo 3DS kept the clamshell design and added glasses free 3D gaming. The gimmick caused a lot of issues for players and was never really supported by developers. It was quietly dropped in later models.
Sony’s PS Vita ditched the disks for cartridges and added a second analogue stick. Twin stick gaming is necessary for most modern games. Annoyingly they created their own SD cards which were very expensive and couldn’t be used in anything else. It was a solid console and for me the definitive way to play Super Meat Boy and Spelunky. Sadly third party studio support dried up as did first party games meaning the console died a slow death. As we know consoles live or die by their games.
How to solve all these issues? Well Nintendo has almost nailed it with the Switch, a twin stick handheld that can be plugged into the TV. It’s support for indie titles and for ports of games that span the last thirty years means it has a huge and varied library to appeal to everyone. The Joy Con drifting issues is very fucking annoying but I love it. Only making one console means Nintendo doesn’t have to split up the home console and handheld studios any more, which should mean more regular releases. I can only hope that they keep the hybrid nature going into the next console in 5 years time!
We are on the cusp of the new console generation and it seems like Microsoft is gunning for the handheld market. Well actually the gaming on the go market with its Xbox Play Anywhere initiative. Sony is looking at something similar while Stadia has had an extremely rocky start. It will be interesting to see if any bother with a little handheld in your pocket.
Looking back it seems like the early 2000’s were the real heyday of handhelds. With the introduction of the iPhone and all modern smartphones I would expect mass produced purely handheld devices to not really exist any more. Nintendo has adapted well and combing both consoles, which has seemed to hit on an idea that could run and run over the next few years. I look forward to seeing what they can come up with the ‘Switch 2’ in the next few years.
I mean why spend £200 on a games console when you can just buy an iPad and do so much more? Touch screens and great internet allow these devices to surpass handhelds in the eyes of the public. That all being said there is something about having entire game worlds in your hands and being able to take them anywhere. This is what we will be exploring next week.
Next week - Handheld Gaming: Underrated Brilliance
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