Hardware:The History of handhelds
By HoldOnToYourAsses 8 Comments
NOTE:IF YOU WON'T READ IT AT LEAST READ A PART AND THEN YOU CAN COMMENT
Yes a new series :D
Today,when we're surrounded by multiple systems for handheld gaming and even more mobile phones which are capable of running more than OK games,its hard to beleive that just 10-ish years ago handheld gaming was a very rare thing.
The early years
Hadnheld gaming started way back in 1977,when Mattel decided to get videogames out of the arcades. Mattel presented series of handhelds,which all consisted of one game,based on the LED technology. There was a lot of these things so there is Baseball,Football,Basketball,Missile Attack,Armor Battle,Sub Chase and the list goes on.......
That kind of system of designing wasn't very efficient,so the compay Milton Bradley decided to make the first handheld that used cartridges. The console Microvision appeared in 1979 and had a screen with 16x16 pixel resolution.
Unfortunately the screen was shitty,and the cartirdges were very easily destroyed so the console was never famous. Nintendo got in the handheld bussines with their line of handheld named Game & Watch which followed the same concept as Mattel's handheld of one console=one game.
As the name suggests it also had the feature of a clock and alarm clock,but what mattered were the games. Nintendo made a few tens of these with many different games. The older ones among you might remember Donkey Kong which was extremely popular,and it was also the birthplace of Mario and Zelda.
The failure of the Microvision was apparently pretty impressive since for 5 full years nobody dared to make another cartridge based console! The Epoch Game Pocket Computer or the EGPC was a console that appeared in Japan in 1984 and used cartridges all...5 of them?! The games were played on an LCD screen with a 75x64 resolution. Unfortunately the EGPC failed just like the Microvision.
The next one we can call the biggest success in the history of handhelds-the Game Boy! The Game Boy got to the market in 1989 and it was the first successful cartridge-based handheld,there were certainly better selling handhelds but the Game Boy was still a revolutionary system,if it wasn't for him game & watch styled stuff would still be a common thing!
The reign of Nintendo begins!
Compared to the competition,the Game Boy was technologically inferior,but its low price and Tetris were tempting enough for both the consumers and the developers. It was the beginning of the rule that games define a console,not its hardware. There was also the Atari Lynx made by Epyx and Atari,but it failed just like NEC'S Turbo ExpressThe beggining of the 1990's was the golden age for the handheld industry,because a fourth player was coming-SEGA. SEGA succeeded at what Atari and NEC failed at,and that is make a worthy competitor to the Game Boy,and they actually made two! First was the Game Gear which was successful,but it didn't even rock Nintendo's both,and the same was with the SEGA Nomad (A handheld Genesis).
Internet slowly coming to handhelds
In 1997,Tiger Electronics presented their handheld-the game.com (which you read as gamecom) which introduced "teh interwebz" to handhelds which was getting more and more popular,unfortunately its shitty screen only allowed for checking mail and text surfing. There was no online play,so the console failed miserably,but it showed where the handheld market will go. The Neo-Geo Pocket was Nintendo's next challenger but it had a black & white screen and frankly,it sucked! At the same Nintendo launched their first console with color,the Game Boy Color,compatibility with older Game Boy titles meant automatic success! In 2001,Nintendo launched their next big hit-the Game Boy Advance,and unsurprisingly it was also a major hit.In the following years there was also the Advance SP,and Micro with equal success. Since there was a lot of money involved in all of this handheld business there was a lot of competitors wanting a piece of the handheld cake!
The first one was Nokia with its N-Gage,which failed,because...you know what,it would take me a fucking book to describe why this thing was a piece of shit! There was also the Gizmondo,which also failed,and the today's PSP,which was the only successful one!
We can only see what comes next,but whatever it is,it better be good!
P.S. Could someone make a better logo?