TechStuff Classic: The History of Handheld Gaming Part One

is gonna be. But don't get ahead. I'm looking at you. Yeah you, yeah, you wait for it. All right, let's let's listen to this classic episode. This is definitely going to be a two parter. But in the interests of not going into exhaustive detail about too many things, we're gonna we're gonna try to keep it snappy. Yeah, and also we've we're not going to mention every single handheld device that's ever been made, certainly not that would be

very boring. It would also take like twenty episodes. Yeah, and we're going to try to do like like a bird's eye view of some of the technology that was involved. But um, but we might branch a little bit of the more in depth information about that kind of stuff off into a different episode in the future, right right. Some of these, like friends instance, the I'm sure you've heard of a little obscure handheld device called the game Boy.

Some of these could be their own episode from start to finish, so easily a two part our episode all on its own. So we are really kind of giving an idea of how the whole how the whole industry developed, how it evolved over time. We'll we'll give some technical specs here and there, but really this is more of

a history lesson than anything else. And also, we're going to go ahead and skip any of the gaming devices out there that were specifically made as unlicensed clones of other gaming devices, right, that I think would make an interesting sub topic, separate topic. But no, we're not going to go into every single thing that has come out

of China illegally past thirty years, right. And we have talked a little bit about these sort of things, like in our our episode about smart watches and digital watches, we mentioned a couple that were able to play games. One of those will pop up in this discussion, so spoiler alert. Yeah, And and if you would like to check out that episode, about digital watches. It was a two parter that we recorded back in July called Time for Smart Watches. You can tell that Jonathan titles these episodes.

I got a lot of time on my hands, so that's what I do. Also, we are going to uh have to address one other fact, which is that in the beginning, these things were primitive, right. I mean, these were not like the kind of advanced graphics you would expect with a handheld gaming device back in the day, which was back in the late seventies. We're talking about a blip that you in control to get around or

fight or otherwise compete against other blips. Absolutely, I mean, this is the digital equivalent of monkeys banging bones on the car. Yeah, it's pretty much like just kind of the you know, everyone has to start somewhere, right, So if you want to be specific and say, well, what was the first handheld game? And keep in mind these games were coming into prominence around the same time as arcades becoming popular and also home video game consoles becoming popular.

But here's the thing about a home video game console, Lauren, It's not easy to carry around with you. No, especially not in that day when miniaturization was not so much a thing yet. Yeah, especially since uh, I mean, you don't want to carry a TV, especially in nineteen seventies TV around with you wherever you go, so you can play this game. So these were these were a good alternative for people who wanted to have something on the go,

especially I'll tell you the best use case. I know, parents who want to get their kids to shut up on long road trips. That's exactly what I was about to say. Yes, so what was the very first handheld electronic game that we know of? Uh? It was actually by Mattel, which is crazy to me. And and it was MATEL Electronics Auto Race yep. And in fact, there are several different games that came out from Mattel. We'll talk about another one in just a second. Uh. And

some people get the order a little mixed up. But if you were to get hold of one of these original handheld devices, and there are still some out there on eBay, and you know, collectors love these things. On the back copyright nine, and it packed a wallop. It had five hundred and twelve bytes of memory. That's a whole half. Yeah, that's that's what it had to work with. If you were to look at a model of these. We'll try and get some pictures together so that we

can share them on social at some point. But this one in particular, er it looks kind of like a big plastic brick that has, you know, some switches and a little slider control on it. And if you were to look at the brick and look at the the say the upper right hand side of the brick, there's a vertical strip that goes down that side. That would

be three quote unquote lanes of traffic. And so you were your job was to drive a car, which in this case was a little red blip, and that car would gradually move up this vertical strip on that right side of the game console um and then these other smaller red blips would be coming down the lanes. Those represented oncoming traffic, and your job was to steer between those blips to try and get to the top of your that little thin strip on the right side, and

then you would reappear at the bottom. And you had to do this four times. If you could get all the way to the top four times, you made four quote unquote laps, and your score was how many seconds it took you to get there. So a lower score was better, and in fact it had some other sophisticated controls. It hadn't start and reset, but it was really on and off. And then I had a gear switch, which was gears one through four, which really just meant that's

how fast the oncoming blips would come at you. You know, the higher the gear, the faster they would approach. And I actually watched the video of a guy saying, here's the strategy to this game. You position your thumb so that you do an upward motion that hits on and then immediately switches the gears from one to four because you couldn't just start in four, you had to start in one. So if you could do it at one smooth motion, then you would immediately be in that fourth

gear going as fast as you possibly can. And that's how you would cut down on your on your time. And they were making like times of thirty five or forty seconds and saying, I'm really bad at this game. And I'm thinking, you know, it's a simple premise, but I don't think I don't have the reflexes. Oh sure, sure that sounds like like my horror version of Frogger. Um uh, this the entire display was just red led um. And if you're thinking that this sounds like, well, that's

only one game. How is this a a portable gaming system? A lot of these early ones were a single game per system. Yeah. Yeah. And just like the earliest game consoles for your home television set, like the Odyssey that was essentially Pong. Might it might be like ten different versions of Pong, but they're all ultimately Pong. Yeah. And it was just hard coded directly onto the computer system. So and that was all it would ever do. Now nine marks the debut of a second game from Mattel Electronics.

And this is one that I've actually played. I don't know if I owned it or not, because you're talking about a time in my childhood when I was quite young and Lauren didn't exist yet I did not. So this is Mattel Electronics Football, one of the really popular games.

Effects so popular that they made a sequel called wait for it, Football Too, and uh it had six control buttons and again you would control a little red dot that represented a football player and you had to try and work your way across the yardage the massive amount of yardage by that, I mean nine yards to try and score against the other team, and um it was interesting because there was a great interview with one of the guys who was behind the building of these things

that I ran across, and he was talking about why the football players like little bitty red dashes. Everything in that day looked like little bitty red dashes. It's because they were using calculator microprocessors, and in fact, those processors are designed to show things like little digital numbers, right, So so those dots were like the segment of a number. Yeah,

specifically the number eight. So yes, you were actually playing as a segment of the number eight and you were going up against other segments of the number eight, and uh yeah. Eventually, uh Tell would end up contracting with a company called National Semiconductor, which have you've been listening to tech stuff for a long time, you've heard us talk about that company, and it was to get sea

moss chips rather than old calculator chips. And then they contracted with another company called Rockwell International to do the actual hard coding programming onto those chips. So that's where they started to uh kind of make more advanced versions of these early games. Now these games were not exactly um well, they had some trouble early on. See the agreement here was between Mattel and the department store Sears, right, and Sears completely doubted that they were going to be

popular and therefore halted production at only a hundred thousand units. Yep. But it turned out that Sears had grossly underestimated the demand for home you know, portable electronic games, and they were so popular. Series immediately realized they had made the wrongest vision. So by mid January of nineteen seventy eight, Now keep in mind Football came out in ninety seven, so these things have been on the market for a couple of years. Yeah, yeah, just kind of stagnating exactly.

And it wasn't really It's one of those things where no one was really sure how to market them, and but now they were taking off. So by mid January night Sears said they wanted two hundred thousand units per week, not not a hundred thousand total, two hundred thousand every week. And then by February they said, you know, we were wrong, five hundred thousand per week. So Mattel said, huh, I

think we know how to make money now. Yeah, that's when they started producing a whole bunch of different games. That's sequel football to UM and also like Armor Attack, Subchase, Missile Attack. UM. I think there was a Dungeons and Dragons game there was. I took a look at it. It was um, you know, again, fairly primitive. Now now, at this point they were starting to work not just with l E ED displays, but also l c D displays,

liquid crystal displays. So this is what a lot of you if you've ever had one of those um little handheld games, maybe it was licensed after an existing arcade game or a cartoon or movie or something you're probably familiar with. These are also the ones that you would see on watches a lot of times. Uh, super cheap to produce, very limited in their animation, very limited in what they could actually display, but still compared to a little blip on an l e ED screen, just a

little dot, incredibly sophisticated and much less eye bleedy. LED displays tend to give me terrible headache. Yeah I can't at that rate. I also just have nightmares. Remember remembering the sound effects from football and football too, and yeah, they're they're they're not all pleasant memories. But yeah, ninety nine, that's when we see the first like Mate looks. I was amazed to learn that this particular technology goes all the way back to nine, right, and we're talking now

about rom cartridges. Yeah, so keep in mind those games we just talked about, like Laurence said, they were hard coded. You could not change those games out. What you bought was what you bought. But that was not the way of the future. Milton Bradley Company, Yeah, one of the one of the competitors of Mattel, especially at the time and in the gaming or not gaming but well board industry, right,

produced this thing called the Microvision. Right, So they decided we're gonna do something similar to what some of the home video game consoles were starting to do, like the Atari system was was doing this creating a system that could play cartridges, so you could switch out what game you were playing. So now you weren't buying a single game, you were buying a platform upon which to play games, which is the way most of us are familiar with

games today, right. I mean, when I go out and buy a game system, I expect I'm going to play more than just one game, more than just the Xbox at any rate. So this Microvision had a monoch from l c D, which was a a screaming big sixteen by sixteen pixel yeah resolution. Yeah, I mean at that resolution, you just you could pick out every single detail on

that block that was yeah. Um. Also it had a pad on it that had nine sections of interactivity on it, which was which you didn't you didn't actually just use the naked pad. That's not how this game worked, right, That the cartridges that snapped in and out of the game would include their own buttons to overlay on top of that path exactly. So you can think of the cartridges as being half cartridge half case, and then you would pop the case open and put a new case

on it in order to play a new game. That would also include overlays, which were a big thing back in the seventies and eighties, which would increase the playability by giving you would have a different, um superficial layer on top of the game. So it's permanent because it's an overlay, it's doesn't change at all, but it gives the games a certain uh personality. Yeah, and also would cut down on the work that the processor would have

to do. You know, you give you more space to to play with your little blips and blobs exactly, and the system itself did have a little built in analog control knobs so that you could have some some basic functionality without using the other buttons, or in addition to the other buttons that any particular game would come with. We have more to say about handheld gaming systems in just a moment, but first let's take a quick right.

I love the site this this Little this Little caveat about how it had serious electronics problems, including a lack of proper Faraday installation, which means that aesthetic charge could render your microvision inoperable, basically useless, or or at least permanently damaged in a way that it would never come

back from. Same same sort of idea that when you're putting together a computer, you want to make sure that you discharge you yeah, yeah, the same, which makes sense because when you took the cartridge off, then you have a naked Yeah, so that would be um, yeah, good good tip, thanks Lauren. Yeah, And that's that is probably one of the reasons why even though the system where it was moderately popular, Milton Bradley did stop producing it

only two or three years later. One furthermore, only thirteen games were ever produced for the Microvision. Wait a minute, I only could find twelve games that my oht one was only available in European markets, correct, which is a pretty common weird wiggie thing that happens, especially in these early days, although although still modernly like like, different games and different systems will only be available in Europe, or

in the US or in Japan. Really frequently only in Japan. Yeah, yeah, you'll get You'll get entire systems that are available only in a single region. But even within the ones that span multiple regions. There are some titles. Sometimes game publishers say this title is never going to do well in ex country for why reasons, right, and until basically these days, the Internet proves the wrong and someone actually spends the money to port it over, yeah, or pirate it more

likely that right. So by by now we're getting right into the very beginning of the eighties, and that's when we start seeing l c D technology becoming so cheap that uh that LED displays become kind of a thing in the past. So you know, company has already been kind of experimenting with it, but now it was something that they could do without having to charge huge amounts of money for relatively limited devices. So we start seeing better displays and fewer of those little blip ones, which,

by the way, we're still treasured by collectors. Absolutely, miniaturization was also reaching the point that we were seeing, I mean, it was a lot cheaper to produce things, and uh yeah, and and it also meant that we can make smaller and smaller things, so you no longer had this giant, bulky brick for everything, at least not anything that was basic. And it even led to one of the things we're gonna talk about in just a second, the the infamous

digital watch games. So something that you've got to keep in mind is that this is the this is the era where everybody got into this. Mattel had shown they had struck gold with this idea. Also, consoles, home consoles were very popular at times, so so it was a huge industry. Everyone was saying, we got to get in on this. So here's just a quick list and not even an exhaustive list, but a quick list of some some game companies that got really famous for the handheld

devices they produced. And you're probably gonna recognize some of these names. Acclaim, Atari, Bondai, Cassio, Colico, Galube, Kinner, Konami, Namco, Parker Brothers, Tandy, Texas Instruments, Tiger, and many many more. I like that was alphabetized. Yeah, well I took it from an alphabetized list, and I was too wazy to mix them up. Uh. In nineteen eighty, that's when we get the Casio game ten, which was one of the watches we mentioned I believe in our Digital Watch smart

Watch episodes. Yeah, it was the first video game watch. It had a version of space invaders, yes, and it was like three lines of dashes that you could shoot with your little dot. But again you use buttons on the side of the watch to control your your little your little ship and fight off against these space invaders, which again were just sort of dashes. Oh and also very important it also told the time. Yes, important side

note about this watch. Um. Also in Nintendo started releasing this entire series of hard coded handheld video games called called Game and Watch, and the very first one was Ball Yeah really fancy. Yeah. You played as a juggler, which I appreciate being a juggler myself. Um. And the object, of course was to keep multiple objects in the air and not let any of them drop. And you had

two controls which essentially controlled the juggler arms arms. Okay, and that's one other thing I was going to mention also was that these hard coded games. You may wonder how did they stick around long after we started getting these cartridge based systems. One of the ways they stuck around is that they could have specific controls for that game that are unique, you know, not just your little

direction pad and buttons. Sure you and you don't have to recode the buttons for it every time that you want to play a different game or learn a new controller schematic. It's just that thing specialized. So it's very specific. Yeah. So that way it ended up filling a niche that your generic, you know, cartridge based systems couldn't because the game control is always going to be the same unless you build buy some sort of crazy peripheral that can

also plug into it. Anyway, the Game and Watch series was incredibly popular. They produced sixty different games under that brand. Only one of those was one you could not buy. It was actually a prize. You had to win it in a in a contest type thing, uh and um. And they would release several different models of the over

the years. Eventually, starting in nine two, they started releasing games that had two screens set up in this clamshell kind of thing that looks bloody exactly like the Nintendo DS. It really does. And you know, you look at this and you're like, huh. All the way back in two they had this idea and uh, and it was you know, it was one of those that ended up really paying off down the line. So they had a lot of

different models, a lot of different designs. Um they also they're under different names, like you have the Silver, uh, you have the Gold, Uh, you had the multi screen, et cetera. And then he had tabletop and the tabletop. They introduced those in three. They look like teeny tiny arcade machines. So I had a friend who had Pac Man. I think it was either pac Man or Donkey Kong, one of the two. But it looks like a little mature arcade. It's probably Donkey Kong now I think about

because it's a Nintendo. So yeah, a little like tiny little arcade machines. So it's really a tabletop, not so much a handheld, but you could have held it in your hands. You just wouldn't be able to control both the joystick and the buttons very easily. But um but it was you know again one of those they only produced four, So Donkey Kong Jr. That's the one I was because they didn't do Pacman. It was Donkey Kong Jr. Snoopy, Mario's Cement Factory, and Popeye. So um yeah, mostly notable

because they had this very evocative form factor. Unfortunately, ine that that was also the year that the video game console industry crashed. Yeah, we all know the story. You know. The market was flooded with with game games and game systems that ranged in quality from pretty good to abysmal. And unfortunately, there were a lot of the abysmal category, uh, including the infamous pac Man Atari Port and the e T the Extraterrestrial Game. So it ended up crashing that

that whole industry. However, handheld games fared better than the video game cons did one because they're less expensive and too they fulfill a different need than the home video game console. So very interesting. And then we also saw at this time some experimentation with cartridge based systems similar

to what Microvision had tried. They included game systems like the Intexts select a game, which I think only had five or six game titles ever come out, the v Tech Variety, Palm Text, super Micro, and the Epoch game pocket Computer. And if you haven't heard of any of these, I guess that kind of indicates what happened. Yeah, that's

that's pretty indicative. Yeah. So still they knew that this was going to be a thing, like people were going to want to have a system where they could play multiple games, not just a single game hardcoded onto it. But no one had cracked that code yet. Guys, have gotta hand it to you. This classic episodes pretty awesome. We're gonna take a quick break, Okay, So, Lauren, I had hinted that the next system we're going to talk about really cracks the whole problem of building a cartridge

based system that that resonates. What was I talking about? You were probably talking about Nintendo's game Boy. Whole boy. What you know, if you want to talk about cracking the code, game Boy remains one of the top selling consoles of all time period, doesn't matter if you're talking handheld. I mean, if you're talking handheld, it is, but I mean in just video game consoles, it's still one of the Top. Oh yeah, yeah, and this came out, So

we're skipping ahead a few years. There wasn't much development on the scene. Yeah, a lot of more of those hard coded games. We had talked about um and it was developed by gun Pay. Yes, and gun Pay. We talked about him in an episode when I when I did an episode about the history of Nintendo, we talked about gun pay okoy because he was very, very influential at Nintendo, both for some things that were incredibly popular and and one thing in particular that was a notable flop.

So among the popular ones, where the game Boy, which again one of the most popular game consoles of all time, also Metroid of one of the most successful video game franchises, and then hey, the Virtual Boy, which totally not successful. A Virtual Boy technically kind of falls into the handheld category, depending upon whom you ask. I didn't add it into our notes because I was like, I don't really think that there's a handheld. I mean, I think that was

definitely a desktop. Anything where you're wearing it and it's blocking your vision. I can't imagine that being, you know, handheld. Plus that thing would make you sick when you're just sitting still. Can you imagine how you would feel after five minutes of playing one of those in the back of a car. I would certainly not want to wear it around like I kind of want to wear the Oculus Rift around everywhere. I would be acting like crazy, y'all.

So anyway, the Nintendo game Boy ended up using four double A batteries, and it was actually a pretty good about not gobbling them up immediately, right. I think that that like, like colloquially, most people got about twenty hours and can play out of it. Nintendo claimed that you could go up to thirty five. I'm not sure that I ever did that personal right, well, but part of the reason why it was so efficient was that it was a monochromatic screen and it was not back lit.

So in other words, if you were in a dark room and you turned your game Boy on, you wouldn't though you have to turn the light on. In fact, there were there were accessories that were sold where it was that little is like a book light exactly. Yeah. So uh, but that meant that you didn't have to spend extra power to keep a light lit, so that helped conserve battery life. Sure, despite that, the resolution was

pretty good. It was one way better than that sixteen by sixteen panel we talked about from a few years back. All right, for the time it was it was pretty shiny, yeah, and it had four different shades of gray. Well by bye gray, you mean like green to black, but yeah, they called it gray, but yes, it really was green to black gray. And you could actually have the reports where you could link game boys together. That was, I

mean incredibly forward thinking at the time. You're talking about allowing multiple play, and it's not just I'm going to take a turn. Oh my turn is over. Now I hand this device to you and you take a turn. That's the way the old systems were. So to have something like this as a dense is this where you could potentially linked together two different systems and play the same game, was pretty phenomenal. Now, the original game Boy today,

a lot of players call it the brick. It was pretty large, yeah, and it the way it was laid out, if you have never seen an original game Boy, imagined a rectangle and at the top of the rectangle is kind of a squarish screen, and below the screen is where you would find the directional pad and the two years to be and the A and so there was there were some problems with people playing for a long time in game their hands kind of cramped up because

the controls were right there below the screen and not to either side the way we're used to now. But still very innovative. And I think I think it was the perfect storm in that there was a game paired with game Boy that together it was an unstoppable force. Do do do do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do do do do do do do do do do. Yeah, Jonathan of course is talking about Tetris or singing about Tetris the case maybe singing is very generous. I think you for it. But yes, Tetris one of the most

popular titles in video game history. And uh, I mean, we should do a podcast just about Tetris. At some point I talked about that you have not already? Yeah, well we could never fitted in. Oh no, at any rate. Uh I even looked off like what would have been off camera for that? That's how bad that pun was.

Um At any rate, the fact that Tetris was so popular and that the Game Boy was such a great form factor in the sense you could take it anywhere you have this incredibly addictive puzzle game, this incredibly portable platform. It was a perfect match. I mean when I think game Boy, that's the first game I think of. You know, I also think of some of the Mario games, because those were really popular too, but but Tetris is the one.

I mean, anyone I knew who had a game Boy that was in heavy rotation, no matter what other games they owned, so incredibly forward thinking on that part too. It was also relatively inexpensive. It retailed for a D nine dollars, so you know, not not chump change. But still we're going to talk about some game systems that came out, you know, either around this time or shortly thereafter that. We're much more expensive and not nearly as popular for multiple reasons, but one of them is that

you know, they cost more. So uh yeah, game Boy ends up being a huge hit. It's it's, you know, compared to today's systems, not the most powerful one, but uh, you know, they made some great decisions. They they went with the cartridge based game systems, which load instantly so you don't have to worry about you know, if you're used to an optical drive and you have to wait for a game to load spin up. Yeah, that's one thing, but if you're used to cartridge based systems, you don't

even know what load time means. So it was really really fast, and um yeah, it got a couple of updates, actually, probably half a dozen or so updates before we get to the next true version of the game Boy. Right. Over the next several years, there would be a slimmer version that had a true gray scale screen called the game Boy Pocket, and in Japan there was a version called the game Boy Light that had a backlit screen. Yeah, so its l I g h T not l I

T right, but yeah, we um. We wouldn't see a color screen update to the game Boy for almost a decade, which gave a bunch of its competitors a really good into the market. Yeah, or at least appeared that way for some of them. They did a pretty good job. Others, like the one we're about to talk about, had a

rougher start. So that same year that the Game Boy comes out for Nintendo, Atari releases their first handheld gaming system, their first like handheld cartridge based gaming system, the links Ye L Y n X, And so it's the first color handheld portable video games system, and it also had multiplayer functionality. Now, this thing, if you looked at it was very wide, the screen was in the center, the

controls were off to either side. Um. It was originally actually called the Handy or sometimes called the Handy Boy, depending upon who you ask, were the Handy Pack. That's because it was developed by this other company called Epics. Yeah, and Epics started shopping it around. They went to ce S way back in nine and started to uh to meet with other companies and say, look, we've developed this hardware. Are you interested. Nintendo said, you know, we've got our

own thing. We're gonna pass. But Atari said, you know, we really wanted it back into this market, and this is this looks like it's a great way of doing it. So they partnered together and they launched this. Now they were billing it as being much more powerful than the Game Boy. It had had that color screen, so that alone made it appear, at least on the surface, to be a better system. But there were a couple of things against it. Yeah, it was it was heavier, it

was more clunky. Um, it was almost twice as expensive. Yeah, that was a big one. And also they had a real hard time getting developers to make games for it that really took advantage of the Links's abilities, which is a story we've heard time and time again with various systems. Oh sure, I mean, you know, the specs on this thing were pretty spectacular. It was on par with some of the consoles that were coming out at the time,

but without the developers to make the games. Yeah, then eventually they would end up offering a basic links system, which meant they didn't include all the connection cables you could have UM and that is about ARS. But that was too little, too late because the game Boy had

had such a trounced it. Yeah, they had already had such a big initial push, they were ahead of the game, and literally they would try one more time with the with the links to UM which which was more compact, but but still didn't really ever make any headway and would eventually fade out of production over the next couple of years. Uh. Now, this was one of my favorite systems, just for what it could do. I didn't own one, I had a friend who owned one. I had a

lot of friends who owned games. I got a lot of vicurious joy out of the friends who lived in my neighborhood. But this one was the ANYC Turbo Express. So if you've ever heard of the video game called Soul, called the Turbo Graphics sixteen, this thing was a handheld gaming device that could play those games. Like you could get the Turbo Graphics sixteen cartridge plug it into this thing, which I guess you can make imagine. Was that was a little clunky, you know, and also drained batteries like

nothing comments. Yeah, okay, so batteries were expensive back then. They're still not cheap, so it would drain batteries really fast. But but but at least the Turbo Express itself was modestly priced at a oh two dollars never mind, I don't know where I was going with that. Yeah, speaking of expensive, but but but it did have a color display, um, it had a similar to the Nintendo model, the directional pad,

and two very very much the standard game control. And also, for an additional price, if you wanted to spend more than the two dollars plus the hundred dollars or so in batteries to keep it going, you could get a optional television tuner and turn it into a portable TV. So I mean it was it was interesting to me, and that this was the first attempt to build a handheld video game system that could play video game consoles like a television console games and and not a port.

I mean, I'm talking about the exact same game that to me was really phenomenal. Was also the year that the first serious competitor to the Game Boy came out. And by serious competitor, I mean they did a decent job. They didn't it wasn't the game Boy was in danger. But they didn't just appear and then disappear, certainly not. This is the Sega Game Gear, and at the time, the second Genesis was the leading console, so so it

had some serious firepower behind it. Now, originally it was it was when it was top secret, it was still in development. It was not called the game Gear. I know, it was called the Project Mercury. Yeah. At the time, Sega was naming all of its different projects after planets, which shouldn't come as a surprise if you owned a Sega Saturn. Oh right, yeah, so at a lot of Yeah, yeah, it's kind of cool. I mean it's I love finding out like Apple calls all their stuff after cats. But okay,

so this one cost less than the Turbo Express. It was not trying to They were trying really hard to kind of be competitive in that same space as the as the Game Boy. It was more expensive than a game Boy because it was at a d when it launched. But but that's but that's not as as much. Hundred dollars less than the Turbo Express. Yeah, it had that color screen, it was cartridge based. It came with a single game kind of replicant of of Tetris columns if

you remember that it was. It was a puzzle based game. So it was clear they they saw a game Boy and its success with Tetris and said, let's make sure we pair this with a puzzle game so we can get all those casual gamers hooked and then we'll be we have a license to print money. Uh. And actually it did, like I said, pretty well. They ended up producing more than two hundred fifty games over the lifetime of the Game Gear, which was up until now just

like the Game Boy. We didn't mention this, but the game Boy and the Game Gear both could produce stereo sound, but only if you plugged in headphones because had a single single so very similar in some ways to the game Boy, and it was a good competitor against the Game Boy. However, the game Boy eventually just wins out over the fact that it had an incredible library of games that just grew year over year, and just again that price point seemed to be a magic spot that

wraps up this classic episode. Obviously, next week we are going to listen to part two of this series to learn more about handheld gaming systems. This is one that I could clearly do a an update on since this episode originally published, So if you would be interested in that, or perhaps there's some other topic you would like me to cover, reach out on Twitter. The handle is text stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y.

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