TechStuff Classic: The History of Handheld Gaming Part Two

because that is surprise, surprise, hard one. So let's listen in on this classic episode. The two video game systems that were about to talk about, because they were essentially the same thing but branded under two different names, they did not make the same impact on the market that the game gear did. They did get some popularity in Europe and South America, not in North America as far as I can tell. But these two systems, which again we're pretty much the same thing, we're branded the Mega

Duck and Cougar Boy. It does sound like the worst superheroes ever, Mega Duck and Cougar Boy fighting crimes. It's yeah. Again, they're they're cartridge based handheld video game systems. Nothing nothing particularly notable about the mother than the fact that I thought their names were a door. Yeah. Yeah. If if you haven't heard of them, um, you're in pretty good company, especially here in North America. I don't think they ever came to this market. They were mostly in um, Europe

and South America. Actually Brazil actually produced some thus Cougar Boy. But yeah, so Mega Duck apparently very popular in the Netherlands and Germany. By the way, if any of you own any of the game systems, clearly the more obscure ones that we're talking about, I welcome you to share a picture of holding the handheld game system and share it on our Facebook wall, and we will totally comment on those. Yeah, or or if you if you give

us permission to, we will. We will push it along to our to our other yeah, like the tumb twitters and things. Yeah, because you know, I I have owned a couple of handheld gaming systems back in the day, but I never got my hands on a Mega Duck or a Cougar Boy. I I never owned a handheld huh wow. Learning something new about Lauren here. Actually the only one besides the the you know, I mentioned that I had a a football or a football to from MATEL Electronics. At least I think I did. I know

I played one. I assumed that I owned it. It was back when I was a little kid. Uh, the only one that I can remember owning, and it wasn't that long ago when I got it. It It was a game Boy Advance and we'll talk about that in this episode. A little bit later. Moving on, that is when Sega

released the Nomad, which was a handheld version of the Genesis. Right. So, the fact that it could actually play Genesis games meant that it had a big leg up over the competition because it already had an established live are to pull from. Oh sure, However, the form factor those game cartridges meant that this thing was pretty huge. Yeah, it was really

really bulky. Not easy for it, Like it was called a handheld but sort of in the same way that early laptops were called laptop computers, but if you were to actually put it on your lap, you might crush your legs kind of similar to that. Also, um, from why I understand, you could only play for a very short while before it drained all the batteries and you had to replace them. So in fact, so much so that I remember that for some of these devices, including

this one. One of the peripherals that was that was launched shortly after the system debut would be little a C adapters for a car, like a car adapter so that you could actually play in the car without the batteries dying after half an hour. So not terribly popular, partly also because Sega had this issue about releasing a whole bunch of different video game consoles within a relatively short amount of time, and those consoles were mostly incompatible

with each other. Yeah, within like seven years they had released at least three and and that's yeah, it's a lot cutting down on your own market. It's never really the best idea. Yeah, I ended up saturating the market quite a bit, and so that also hurt them in the long run. This is an interesting one. It's the game dot com with the name of it right by

Tiger Electronics. And this was a handheld device and remembered this is that had Internet connectivity, yes, built in specifically you could do things like check your email or read web pages in text. Yeah, you couldn't play games online.

The internet functions were more for It was also kind of this dual function p D, a sort of thing because PDAs were so big in personal digital assistance for those who don't remember, right, Yeah, so this is that was what we called smartphones before there were phones in them.

Like many other p d a's of the time, it had a monochrome screen, whereas everything else coming out at this point had a color screen, So that that injured it definitely in the marketplace, definitely, definitely, And you know, it's kind of it's still kind of a cool idea. But apparently the games were also not very good, or some people would say incredibly bad. And so it did have a touch screen, which which was pretty innovative for the time for games anyway. Again, p d as frequently

had them, but gaming systems did not. So this is you know, marking two things that would become popular in future game systems, the touch screen and the internet connectivity. So it was a little ahead of its time. It was. It was an ambitious product. Ultimately was not failure. Yeah, something that was not a failure. One year later, and this was this was a decade after their last big one, Nintendo released the game Boy Color and that was the

first real update to the game Boy. I mean there had been that those few others that we talked about and the little but the guts of the game Boy had remained largely the same since it had debut. There had not been a major overhaul apart from some of the aesthetics of the actual case itself. This is where we finally get to a brand new kind of technology, where we get color screens on game Boys. So no more monochromatic tetris unless you're actually playing an old game

Boy cartridge. Because one the nice things about it was that it was backwards compatible, so if you bought a game Boy Color, you didn't have to worry about Well, now I have to tell all these games are useless and I have to have two devices with me if I want to Nope, you can play anything you want.

Nintendo was really good about being backwards compatible with a few of its different consoles, not all of them, but so much enough so that whenever you had a console come out, whether it was handheld or otherwise that was not backwards compatible, people got upset because they got used

to it. So but this one, definitely in that philosophy, did not have a backlit screen, just like the original game Boy, so again that meant that the battery consumption was a modest so it wouldn't die within half an hour, unlike the Sega Nomad. So uh. And then also that same year in n another company called Neo Geo released the Neo Geo Pocket in Japan, which was a monochromatic

handheld video game system. It didn't do very well, but in nineteen nine they released the Neo Geo Pocket Color or in GPC, which ended up being a device that the company would sell around the world. It wasn't just a Japanese product. Yeah, it was a pretty good competitor to to the Game Boy Color. Yeah, it was less expensive than the Nintendo device is also power efficient just like the Game Boy Color was. But ultimately Nintendo's biggest

advantage was again that amazing library of games. Neo Geo had some great games, but Nintendo had a tonnable yeah. Yeah, And and Neo Geo's strength and development was certainly in the console market at the time. Yeah. So that moves us up to that's when a Bandai, which was really known for those handheld hard coded l c D based games, the ones that would be like you know, uh, licensed after a particular product or whatever. Uh. It was really known for those the ones that weren't any kind of

cartridge based games. That's when they released the Wonder Swan, which was a monochromatic gaming device, and it was designed by by Gumpey Yukoi. Yeah, the same guy who designed the game Boy, the original game Boy. So this was a notable entry in that it was designed by one of the most successful, most influential designers of the handheld gaming industry. Right, and it was also the exclusive mobile platform at the time for the Final Fantasy series, which

was really huge, I mean mostly in Japan. Yeah. In fact that this game console never really got popular anywhere other than Japan. It was never sold in the United States, even after they updated it. They updated a couple of times. They had the Wonder Swan color, and then by night by two thousand two, rather they came out with the Swan crystal. I've seen pictures of them. Uh, I don't know how you were going to play games on these.

He's like, there was one that it looked like it had two directional pads on the same side of the game console. Is another one of those where I had the screen in the middle and the controls were on either side, but one side had a directional pad laid out on top of another directional pad, or at least that's what look like to meet. The picture was not terribly great quality, and I've never seen one of these in person. If anyone has has one, send us a picture, yeah,

or send us one. You've got an extra one, you can just send us one. That's fine. Send us some games too, because otherwise it's just not I mean, I'll be pretty good to look at. But yeah, so anyway, you can't. You can't program your own cartridge games for I don't have that kind of spare time. Want to see a game I have programmed, it'll it'll just be made entirely of puns. I do not want to see that russ festival. The game would be what it would

be um at any rate. A brief note from the year two thousand, that is, we started seeing a lot of retro nostalgia for for early games. I think around this time that that has been pervasive. I mean, not that not that nerds will have never not talked about things that they're really excited about from twenty years ago.

But um, but this is the year that Mattel re released its late seventies games football and baseball, and which you know, it makes sense because the the kids who got these as toys when they were kids have now grown up and are now able to purchase stuff on their own. Speaking of that, in the year two thousand that that is when Nintendo came out with the Game Boy Advance, which was its next big update to the Game Boy line. Yeah, they actually launched it in two

thousand and one. They had been developing it for a while, and the this one ended up having a color screen, It had had a shoulder buttons as well as the regular buttons that you had on the games, so I increased the things you could do with it. I owned one of these at any rate. Um. It was backwards compatible with game Boy and game Boy Color cartridges, so that gave it a lot of utility. But you know, anything that was a Game Boy Advanced game was way

more uh insticated. Yeah, and pretty exactly. You could you could do more stuff. Um, and they had about the same amount of firepower, you could say, as one of their former consoles, right, the SNS, the Supernintendo Entertainment System, which had debuted like like a decade earlier. And and I find it really impressive that miniaturization had had occurred to the point where in only ten years you were able to pack this huge bulky s nest handheld to

the handheld. Yeah, and they would also update this line multiple times. So in two thousand three, Nintendo released a clamshell version of the game Boy Advanced, and then two five they released the game Boy Advanced Micro, which was a much smaller version of it. Because yeah, that first one they came out was a bit a bit clunky. Uh, that's the first version, is the one that I have. By the way, I don't have the Micro or the

clamshell version. They also would even go on to offer a wireless adapter in two thousand four, so instead of using cables to connect your Game Boy Advance with someone else's machine, if you both had this wireless adapter, you could play games over wireless um and so yeah, very popular. I also gave you some connectivity with the Nintendo GameCube. So if you owned both the GameCube and a game Boy Advance, and you own the the compatible titles, you

could have access to additional content on both. Right, Right, you would hook it up by by a special cable and and not that many games had this capacity, right, but you could you could access a little bit of simultaneous content. Yeah, you could. You could actually use your game Boy Advance as a controller and it would display extra information inside the game Boy Advances screen. So this kind of pre dates and it and it foreshadows the

Nintendo We You, which wouldn't come out for another decade. Yees. So the we You, I mean we you know, it's got that tablet based controller where you can get extra stuff on it that you know. That's obviously not a new idea and Nintendo I've been playing that idea for a while. Also in two thousand one, over in Korea, there was a company called game Park that released the g P thirty two handheld gaming console, full color screen, typical kind of handheld, but it was a little bit

different from the previous consoles we had seen. Yeah, this one was was really interesting because games were not stored on cartridges. They used little flash cards, yeah, smart media flash cards, which meant that anyone could develop a game for this and then store it. As long as you knew how to program for this device, you could build a game for it or an application for it, and store it on a smart media card and use it on the system because you know cartridges that's hard to

program for. You're talking about actual physical circuits, you media, right, right, Yeah, this is a much more expensive so this was much easier to code for. It was a great boon to two independent developers who were interested in getting into it. Unfortunately, it also made things really easy to pirate, yeah, which made a lot of the established game companies say, you know, we're not going to develop for this because we don't

want to have our stuff stolen everywhere. It doesn't make any sense for us to pour a lot of money into development, marketing, sales, all that kind of stuff, only to see a handful of games go out before they're

all pirated. So it didn't get a lot of support from the industry, but it was one of those things that really took off in the independent circle and the emulator circle, the people who wanted to create emulators that could play games based on other systems, and then you would have one handled console that could do practically anything. Two thousand three. Here's where we have one of our big flops stories. One of my favorites. Actually, I remember

when this came out. Yeah, the Engage. Yeah, so um Engage also sometimes called the taco because it was vaguely taco shaped. And here's the crazy thing. Did you ever see anyone having to make a call on one of these things? I never saw anyone use one period. Okay. So the speaker and the receiver on it. If you think of a taco like a taco shell, the fold of the taco shell like a hard, crispy taco. Gosh,

I want tacos now. But if you think of the fold of the shell, the speaker and the receiver were on the outside of that fold, so you actually like a like a taco out to the side of your face. Yes, didn't sit flat against your face. The edge was against

your face. So the it was enormous. Okay. So this was clever in a way, and the concept was clever in the in the Nokio was a really dominant force in the cell phone business at the time, and they were trying to make a cell phone that was also a handheld gaming system and and hey, we we have some things that are kind of like that today. Yeah, at the time, that was before the smartphone revolution had really taken off. So this was a really brand new

kind of Oh sure, sure. Unfortunately, it was a terrible phone and a terrible gaming system. Yeah, it really was awful at both things that was supposed to do, and so it did not get very far. There was a sequel to the Engage, which was more about kind of a game system, like a game library that you could download to Nokia based phones. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of years later it would it would release an update to the Engage that was better than the Engage had been.

It was called the q D Engage qt uh but it's still flopped and um and right. And then then after that they would they would release this a kind of app that was that was sort of an in in phone gaming system. It was getting away from that physical form factor that had burned them so badly. But but it would even abandon that and Heather in another few years, as as app stores became things, they realized that having a specific gaming app wasn't as useful. Yea.

So two thousand four, this is where we see one of the big influential players get into the space finally yea, Sony, Yeah, with the where have you Been? Sony? Yeah. They had been developing the PlayStation Portable or PSP. They launched in Japan in December two thousand four, didn't get over into the United States and uh in Europe until the next year. Of course, being Sony at the time, it did not

use cartridges or or even flash cards. It went straight for optical discs, which you're like, what you know, when you think about it, it's a real challenge to make any kind of portable device that uses optical discs because any kind of jost it's gonna it's gonna the laser, the laser of course. Yeah. And and these these are those those little mini optical discs. They look like a

little yeah, universal media discs. S. Yeah. In this case, they did a really good job at designing it so that you you know, unless you were particularly rough with your PSP, or you were you know, maybe going down a dirt road, perhaps you're a good old boy, never meaning no harm, then you might have some issues, but are wise, it's pretty smooth. Uh. It had connectivity to the internet, you could connect other PSPs, connect to console. Um, pretty pretty good machine. I mean, I I remember getting

the chance to play on them. Again, I didn't own one of these. Boy, that's just a story of my life here. I'm like, I'm actually craving some of these. Now I can see why collectors get so passionate about this hoblem. Yeah. We we looked at a lot of different collections while we were pulling together the information for this podcast, and there are a lot of people out there who have huge collections of handheld gaming devices. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Another cool thing about this because you know, because it was a Sony property, Um, you could watch Sony films on these little mini discs in the correct aspect ratio, yeah, sixteen nine aspect ratio, so it wasn't that four three, which the old television sets were. And this is that wide screen format, so you didn't have the little black bars on the top and bottom. It actually would play in full view on the screen in the native aspect ratios.

That was a really, really hard idea and it also was kind of again they were predicting how we were going to be using mobile devices to consume media. They were ahead of the game on this one, and it did pretty well. You know, it still wasn't really catching up to Nintendo's domination of the market, but they weren't hurting either, certainly not. Although it did not help their case that two four was the same year that Nintendo

released their DS. Oh yes, another incredibly popular game platform. Now, this was where they said, you know that game Boy that we've been making, it's taken us a long way, and I think it's pretty much gone as far as it can go. We need to take the next step. We need to go a big jump beyond what the

game Boy can do. And that's when they came out with the d S and the The innovative thing about the DS was something that we talked about from way back in the eighties on that game and watch series, the multi screen series all right, right, it had it had these two screens, and one of them was was was touch capable. Yeah, so you could actually have a touch capable part on that you're you're playing actively on and a second screen that could be displaying whatever else

it needed to. Uh. You could also create games that didn't use the touch screen at all, but use both screens so that you could move your character between one or the other. I mean all kinds of different options. And some of the games that came out for this were so innovative, and I think that that's one of the huge selling points of it. It was that independent library, or not independent, but just just individual library of games

that you couldn't get anywhere else. Absolutely, and so, you know, the PSP although it was an incredibly powerful device and and and if you were to look at the specs, it outstripped the Nintendo entirely. But Nintendo sold more than PSP. In fact, it was, according to at least some estimates, it was a two to one ratio twice as many Nintendo ds has sold as PSPs. It had half the screen resolution or just about. Yeah. Yeah, and like an eighth of the onboard RAM that was expandable via via slot.

But nonetheless, and uh yeah it did, it did. I'm not sure how the PSP connected to the internet, but the I I know that the d S had WiFi built in, which for two thousand four was was pretty impressive. Yeah, yeah, WiFi was. Having something that could could connect to WiFi was a big advantage. Although, uh the WiFi was still fairly young in those early days, Like not everyone had a WiFi router at that time. A lot of people were using you know, wired connections. I know I was

using wired connections for quite some time. Yeah, yeah, pry about two thousand seven or so. Well. On top of that, Nintendo would end up updating the DS line, which is, you know, kind of similar to what they did with the Game Boy. They came out with things like the D S Light in this case it's l I T E uh, the D S I which had a larger display and front and rear cameras, but unfortunately at that point there was no more Game Boy advanced compatibility built

into the device. Then eventually the d S I x Cell, which had the largest screens of that line ever, and so um, you know, that's an interesting development here we once again see Nintendo really having a stranglehold on the dominance of the handheld market. But Sony is doing a great job, and you know that's their first foray into

the handheld gaming. Hey guys, Joathan from one Now, technically when I record this, man, time is time is hard, right, I'm going to take a quick break, uh and listen to a couple of ads while I I sussed this out come with me. Alright, So now, Lauren, we talked about we talked about the Engage and how that was a massive flop. Surely there are no more high profile massive flops and the handheld gaming history, are there? Well, you referring to one right before the ad breaks, So

I think, I think it's pretty likely. But yes, the Tiger Telematics released the Gizmondo two thousand five, and I can't believe that something with that cool of a name could possibly flop. Yeah, I know, with the world with a name like Gizmondo, the sky is the limit. Gizmondo originally was called the Game Track, but that's not nearly guess cool as Gizmondo Mondo. So I think that's coming

out like the Nondo Mondo. So yeah. They showed off a prototype of this device back at c E S two thousand four, And this one is an interesting game system to me, partly because of the operating system it used. Yeah, it was. It was Windows based, Windows CE four point two to be specific, right, and so I mean it was the first handheld gaming device to actually use the

Windows platform as its native operating system. And and and and partially due to that, it was also kind of hopping on to the to the very tail end of of that sort of p d A trend or maybe that was over, but but just people were thinking a lot more about combining different features into devices at this juncture. And uh so it also had a camera and GPS and texting capabilities, SMS and UH and Bluetooth Bluetooth, right, all of those things, and so you think, wow, this

thing is packed. Why didn't it sell incredibly well? Part of that reason was because, uh, well, there were two different flavors of gizmutton Do that you could purchase. The first one that came out was four hundred dollars. Yes, that was unsubsidized four hundred dollars. And when you when I say unsubsidized, you may say, what do you mean,

what was the subsidized version. It's because when the that that first one didn't sell basically at all, they came out with an ad supported version, Yeah, for two y nine dollars. Still didn't do well, and in fact, within eleven months of the product launching, the company goes bankrupt. Yeah, and it was one of one of those devices that initially got a lot of people excited, but the longer

the saga went, the more skepticism was involved. And by the time it launched, I think a lot of people felt exactly the opposite of how they had when you know, it was just an idea and non an actual product. So both the Gizmondo and the aforementioned Engage are frequently found on worst console lists ever, like worst console ever, not just worst handhelds, not like yeah, no, like this is going up against you know, those video game consoles that would come out and have three games and then

disappear forever. These were way up there, and part of it is because they were really expensive. They ended up costing companies. You know, in this case, it cost a company its existence. So it's it's tough, you know. It's one of those things you don't want to see it happened. There's some schaden freuda there, I'm sure, but you don't want to see that ever happen to anybody. Oh sure, although okay, so so Strangely enough, the next entry on our on our list, which would turn into a huge um.

I hate the word disruptor. I think it's overused, but disruptor in the market um was was another multi use device, and I'm talking about the iPhone, introduced by Apple in two thousand seven. Yes, so when it first came out, it just looked like an amazing device. I don't think any of us had uh, the inkling of how disruptive it was going to be until the app development really started to open up and people began to make games

specifically for the iPhone. Sure, sure, I mean, of course, the iPhone is not a handheld gaming device except for the part where you can use it like one, Yeah, you can have you. It's a handheld device that can

play games, so it's really a multi use device. But the point here is that it had and it continues to have a really big influence on the handheld gaming industry as a whole, because you've got some consumers out there who say, well, I could buy this single use device even if it can play multiple games, it's still just a game device. Or I can buy this thing that's also a phone and an interactive map and lets

me connect to the internet and etcetera, etcetera. So it's one of those that has really started to take a big bite out of the mobile gaming world. Now there are different markets, and some of those markets are more attuned to those gaming devices than to the smartphone world. So it's not the handheld gaming devices are now irrelevant. You know, it's not like they're they're going obsolete, but

they're having a tougher time. Come on here and we will we will talk more about that um in in the the very end of our podcast as we get into the current years. But but for now, let's let's talk about that. This is a really interesting one to me. This came out in two thousand nine and it was the game pack GP two x Whiz. Yeah, the GP two x Whiz is one of those open source handheld gaming systems. It was actually made so that people could fiddle around with all the different programming for it and

create all sorts of applications and games. Again kind of godly. Yeah, it's designed for independent developers and and emulators even right right, This is going back to that same one we talked about the Korean game system we talked about earlier. This is kind of similar to that. It had a thirty three Mega Hurts processors, so it was, you know, packing a bit of a wallet for an open source system, and uh yeah, it was also had really awesome packaging.

I mean I looked at the packaging. It looks like this, this kind of leather bound sort of box that says the Whiz on it, and I thought, I want I kind of just want the box at this point. It was it was really sleek and um and I think that two thousand nine was was one of those peaks of emulator use that that we've that we've you know, it's it's it's a it's an undulating wave of people who don't really mind kind of pirrating games. Well, in some cases it's people who want to have access to

old titles that are no longer supported. Oh sure, and and especially at this particular time point before a lot of studios had begun creating legal ports of their games for for app stores, because app stores were not in two thousand nine what they are today at all. Um So, so that was it was it was filling a piece of the market that Yeah, it was really quite clever.

It was going unserved at that point. Yeah, for example that then now you can get ports of classic Arcade games delivered to like an iPad, you know, you can get their apps just for that. But at the time that really wasn't that wasn't something you would find. So Nintendo and not content to sit back upon its haunches and cackle maniacally releases the three D S which I was at the E three where the three D S D Yeah, uh, it was you know, the win a debut.

It definitely got a lot of attention because people thought, this is it's a brand new handheld from Nintendo, which automatically made it really interesting. It also had this three

D capability. The three D capability was was nifty, but also one of those things that people were skeptical about because three D has traditionally been a yeah, it's been hard to get into the consumer market, right sure, sure, although you know glasses free three D is there's always more um dynamic I think, to to the consumer market then then glasses Yeah, you know when you don't have to Yeah, you don't have to keep track of yet another piece of equipment, right right, Although of course you

could also play games in two D, you can have to play them in three D. Had a special camera where you could take three D pictures, but you can only view them on the three D s obviously. Uh. It was neat and also had some augmented reality features to it. I didn't put that in the notes, but I remember getting to play with that where you you got like a little card and it had a symbol from Mario like it might have one of the question mark blocks, and you put it down on a table

and you hold the camera to it. And you activate the correct app on the three D S because it wasn't just you know, magically recognizing it, but with the right app, it would then have a little virtual character pop up on the picture of the whatever card was that you had put down on the screen. Right. Yeah, so on the screen it looks like there's an actual physical character walking around on your table. If you were to actually look without using the three D S, you

would think the person was crazy. But, um, but it was really kind of a cool little gimmick. Uh. They'd also update this in two thousand twelve as the three D S XL. I bet you can guess what that means. Um, it didn't perform nearly as well as the company was kind of anticipating at first, and they would they would splash the price after it had only been on the

market for a couple of months. Yeah. It was actually when I heard that, I thought at first it had to be a mistake because Nintendo is not known for doing that. Yeah. Yeah, they usually are very aware of what they want a price to be and are very savvy about what what the market will handle. Um. But but sales did start to pick up over time, and and eventually it would it would do really pretty well, um, certainly much better than the WEIU, which would launch the

following year. Yeah. So again this is one of those long tail kind of approaches and uh and part of that I think was the fact that the games for the three D s started to get more and more sophisticated and that helped a lot. Also that same year, in two thousand eleven, Sony comes out with a couple of things that were big news. One was Experience play I remember that at the three as well. People were

calling it originally the PlayStation phone. Yeah. Yeah, because this was another like like the failed Engage uh phone plus handheld gaming system. Yeah. It used Android OS originally two well, originally two point three, which is gingerbread. It was supposed to get an upgrade to ice Cream Sandwich, which is Android four point oh. However, Sony did some tests on the phone. So Sony Ericsson really I should say, because

that's the company that actually made the phone. The sub company under Sony Sony Ericson made the phone, tested it under Android four point oh ice Cream Sandwich and found out that it was not very stable, so they ultimately decided to keep it at two point three, which disappointed some consumers. The same year, Sony also launched the PlayStation Vita, which is much more successful than the experien play uh yeah, flagship handheld device. It's essentially the replacement for the PlayStation

and portable to PSP. So Vita has an arm based to Giga Hurts processors. Let's got some serious firepower under the hood compared to other handheld devices. I know, if you're you know, talking about your mega awesome gaming PC at home, two giga hurt sounds like nothing, but for a handheld device at this time, it was really pretty powerful. And it was also one of the big features that they touted when they launched the Vita was how it

could interact with PlayStation home consoles. It had two thumbsticks for control, had a lot of buttons, had directional pad as well, had WiFi and Bluetooth capability, and you could also get a more expensive one that had three G capability. Of course, you have to get a contract with that. All right, guys, we've got a little bit more to say about the history of handheld gaming. But first let's take another quick break. You can't plug in a PSP

game and play it. It's not compatible in that sense, but you could download PSP games, yes, so you could purchase PSP games for download and play them on the Vita that way, So it's a digital download as opposed to reading the optical discs. The u m D from the old PSPs and the launch price was two fifty dollars, although it has since dropped in price, so you can you can buy one for less than that. Now, that

is when we started getting into um gaming tablets. Yeah, which you know again like you could look at something like the iPad and you can play games on the iPad, right, but it was a more devoted device. Yes, couple of these were more devoted. Yes, definitely marketed as gaming devices as opposed to this is a general purpose tablet that can also play games. So yeah, the Arcos game Pad is one of those, another Android based game and also

open source. So this one, if you were to look at one, it looks like a tablet that's had to controller like handle things fused on the side. We'll be talking about another one in a second, but it's the razor edge, but that was a little different. I'll get to that in a minute. So these look like it's actually part of the case itself. Um. And they had thumbsticks, directional pad buttons on those little the little game controllers that are fused onto it um And uh yeah, it

was a pretty powerful device. And the fact that it's open source is another one of those things that developers really love because they have the chance to make stuff

without having to jump through any hoops. Um. You know, like some of the other companies like Nintendo for example, obviously they want to have a good control on quality because they learned that valuable lesson from way back in three with the video game Crash that you don't control quality, you flood the market with crappy stuff and then you

suffer for it. Well, um, you know. The the downside to that is that if you're a little independent developer, you may not have the resources that you would need to make a game for the kind of platform. So this is a very attractive alternative, oh sure. And also at the time, game development for mobile platforms was was

in a crazy boom. Um. In fact, the according to digital market analysis company app Annie Global iOS, app store game expenditures overtook in handhold console game expenditures overall, So so the amount of money being spent on on iOS Games was way more, or maybe not way more, but but it was. It was. It was edging out the

handheld game system. That's that's big news. And again another one of those things where the handheld game industry has to take notice and say, we have to acknowledge that this is sure, especially after Google Play expenditures would do the same thing in early Yeah, and that's as as pretty eye opening. Also that's when Razor released the Razor Edge, another gaming tablet that I have to s Yes, this one run on Windows eight, so runs I guess it

currently still exists, Yes, it does. It does still exist Windows eight, so it's a Windows eight machine. Um. And you know, again another one of those that that kind of splits off from the crowd. It's not Android or its own proprietary system and has an Intel processor. Depending upon which one you get, it might be an I five or an Ice seven, and uh, you know, is

high resolution, high performance gaming tablet. It also had a snap on kind of case, and the snap on case had handles on either side that had additional controls to it, so it kind of looks like you're holding a steering wheel that's missing the top and bottom and the center of the steering wheel instead of it being the horn is the screen of the tablet, right, So you could actually use this and have a game that uses the orientation of the tablet as a control like a driving game,

and then you steer with the two control sticks that you have or the control sticks also had you know, thumb sticks, button, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Um. Yeah, I got to play with one of these at ce S. It was actually as funny because it was, as I recall, razor originally would just have a representative holding the razor edge and showing it off, or it was inside a case and so that as as close as you could get. But the longer you stayed at c E S, the

less they seem to care. So if you happen to walk up on the last day and say can I can I take the closer look at that, they would hand it to you and you're like, wow, this is pretty awesome. I need to remember to book my stay to come at the end of CS and not the beginning of c E S. Yeah, so it was neat. Again, it's pretty high. It's like a high price uh item. It's not one of those that I don't think that

it's necessarily done a huge amount of business. Yeah, and it's gotten some flak for being gimmicky for what it is. I mean, you know, for for being as expensive as it is having a relatively low capacity for what it does. Right and and again, like you were saying, I think around this time, we're talking about mobile games just taking off. Oh yeah, yeah, the the amounts of money that people were spending on mobile games had been doubling or even

quadrupling year over year. Handheld gaming was was also still climbing in sales, but by less than ten percent year of a year. Um And And by by this point I mentioned that that in iOS game expenditures had had edged out handheld they were far and away doing the best. By this point, the dust in absolutely in the dust. Um And one of the advantages I think for for mobile games here is that they seem to be way less seasonal, way less like a treat or a special

occasion kind of purchase than handheld games tend to be. Yeah, I mean, I can I can imagine like it being a real impulse by for one thing, the entire experience is digital. You're not buying a physical but are like a cartridge. You never have to think about walking into a store, going to Amazon or whatever. And granted, a lot of the handheld devices these days work on that same principle, but but the smartphones just had an advantage

because that's how they always had done it. So also in two thousand thirteen, that's when in Video released The Shield, another one of those devices I got to see it's the s and another when I got to hold after sticking around long enough. Um, this one looks a lot like an Xbox controller that has a clamshell screen kind of welded onto it, although you know you can't open and close the screen. It's not like it's stuck in place. A touch screen by the way, Yeah, it's touch screen

and it can run Android games. So if you ever wanted to play an Android game using a actual Xbox controller, you could totally do that. Uh and I shouldn't say it's an Xbox controller, it just looks like one. But it also it also could run streaming games that you're streaming from a PC, right right, So yeah, you run like a PC game, but you want to be able to play it in the living room or you want

to lay down in bed and play this game. You don't want to and you don't want to take your alien wear enormous desktop computer to bed with you because it would set the sheets on fire. So you have the Nvidios shield instead and just stream the content directly to your game, to your your device. And so, yeah, it was. It was pretty cool. The launch price was three dollars, which a lot of people kind of you know, ball that it is now down to two, so it

they have cut the price on it again. One of those devices that I think has its devoted followers, but it's a niche market. Sure was was a good year for downgrading. Really. Nintendo released the two DS the year, which is a scaled down version of three D S. Yeah it's one D list. Yeah, also doesn't. When I first heard of the two D S, I just imagined that it was a three D S that had the three D stuff removed. But in fact the foreign factor

itself is a little different. Instead of being a clamshell, it looks it looks like a tablet that has two screens, one screen mounted on top of another with a divider in between. And it was marketed to a younger audience. I mean, it was definitely its own separate product. Yeah, yeah, I know that there are people who question Nintendo's strategy with that, but I mean it was really when you look at how the Nintendo three DS initially performed, you

could understand the impetus behind the Sword of Decisions. Sure, and Nintendo was also struggling pretty hard. And in this general time, they you know that the WEIU was basically a flop, and uh they they merged their console and handheld teams that year in order to just give anyone

a boost, or they were pretty desperate, yep, yep. And also this most recently three was when we started seeing companies like Microsoft and Sony show off the interoperability between tablets and their their new consoles, the Xbox One in the PlayStation four. The idea being that you could use a tablet to play a play along with a game that's already in the going on in some other format, ye to have a second screen for mini games or side information, or you have just a totally different, um,

a totally different function to fulfill in the team. Right. So the one that I kept on seeing over and over again was let's say it's a squad based kind of game where you've got four or five people playing on an Xbox on their Xbox one with their controllers and everything, and then you have another member who's using the tablet as a tactical uh kind of interface, so they're coordinating. They're saying, okay, uh, you know, Uni, bravo, you need to advance two feet and then turn left,

you know. So they could actually kind of be extra set of eyes, which I thought was a really cool idea. I have yet to see that in action in a way that really has grabbed me, but I love that. I love the concept. Yeah, justin it's a really good application. That killer app. It's got to have that killer app. So yeah, this is kind of bringing us up to today. We talked about how Nintendo has been really kind of struggling. There's been rumors about them getting into some form of

partnerships with phones. Yeah, they're so so they've been operating at a loss for a solid two years in a row as of as of when we're recording this podcast in I'm late February to be specific. Um, and it's it's sounding like they're they're considering developing like device hardware that will help link their handheld and sold markets and focusing on that rather than trying to port their games

and characters to existing smartphone experiences. And Nintendo has a reputation for really wanting to control everything about the experience, so I can understand why they would be reluctant to say, license their characters or to port their games over to a platform they don't have control over, which is what would happen if they created You know, Super Mario for iOS doesn't stop people from trying to create clone games

of it, but certainly not and and emulators do exist. Yeah, but you can understand why Nintendo says, no, we want to be able to make sure that our players have the best experience possible. Now you can debate on whether or not, you know, how successful they are in their own right on doing that, but there's no debate on the fact that if you don't have control the platform, you can't make that guarantee at all. So that's their idea.

And then also finally kind of wrapping this up, and those some of the most recent news you have this about a a Samsung device right right, it's called the game pad right right now, I think it's only in Germany and Korea, but they're planning on rolling it out worldwide.

I believe it's a It's a Bluetooth smartphone accessory, which I think is really interesting because because again going back to the fact that mobile apps are really overtaking other forms of handheld gaming, and it lets you it lets you dock your device in in this controller plus screen holder thing. You're you're not literally docking, You're not connecting, You're not connecting the device to this stuff only via Bluetooth. Only via Bluetooth, right, um and and it turns your

phone into a handheld Android based gaming system. You can use any Android based phone or many Android based phones anyway, as long as they have appropriate Bluetooth connectivity. They don't just have to be Samsung's um and and and there are plenty of other products on the market that have done similar stuff. I know that, like Logitech has one for for iOS SUM or iPhones. Specifically, it would have

to be much larger to accommodate uh iPad um. But I just thought it was interesting that it was being offered by a device company and and therefore kind of being this entry into the market that's like, hey, uh yeah, maybe ignore those handheld gaming devices over there and really

just turn turn your phone into your new gaming device. Yeah, especially if that means they can get in on the peripheral side and not have the burden of producing a full handheld system that could totally tank in the marketplace. Oh sure, exactly. I mean, and it's only I think it's only like ninety bucks or thereabouts and in the equivalent euro got gotcha. So we might see that expand beyond. And uh, they'll be interesting to see how handheld gaming

progresses from here. There are a lot of people who still predict that smartphones will essentially obliterate handheld gaming, and the only the only people that will are the only companies that remain will be the open source ones that are cattering to a very specific niche audience. So they're doing it on a much more modest basis. They're not they're not producing millions and millions of units. They might

be producing maybe a hundred thousand. But we'll have to see, because yeah, I could I don't know, I could see some systems kind of kind of going away. But I would be really personally sad if Nintendo didn't have an active handheld on the market. Yeah, well, especially seeing as how they've struggled so much with the the home with the consoles. Consoles, yeah recently so in anyway, that is

the history of the handheld electronic gaming device. Like we said, we didn't mention in everything that's out there, certainly not if we missed one of your favorites. Here's what you can do. You can send us a message and say, hey, Lauren and Jonathan, I know you didn't have time to mention x handheld gaming console, but it's really cool and here's why. And here's a picture of me with my ex gaming console and here's a list of my favorite games for EX gaming console. That's the way to do it.

Don't say you guys are stupid because you didn't mention the blah blah blah, because that's that's the email equivalent of unplugging someone's controller when they're in the middle of a really good a bout of I like like punch out. And that wraps up that classic episode of tech stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I do hope that I can go back and revisit this, maybe do another intrigue into the series, or you know, I tend to do things a little differently now than I did a few

years ago. So maybe I'll even like take a much deeper dive into handheld gaming. Who knows. If you guys have interest in that, or if there's some other topic you would love for me to cover on tech Stuff, reach out and let me know. The best way to do that is over on Twitter, where we use to handle tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.

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