History Of Handhelds

I've been doing some reading on some random forums over the net, and found that, suprisingly, many people believed that the Sony PSP was the first compeition Nintendo ever received in the portable market. So I decided to write a brief history of past console wars, and all those who have fallen to the hands of the legendary Game Boy.

The original Gameboy was released in 1986 (lol, two years before I was born), and Nintendo IMMEDIATELY received competition. The Atari handheld, Lynx, was released in the same year. I'm sure you all know the specs of the Gameboy (aka nothing but a 2" screen which could produce 4 tones), but here are the Lynx's specs. It was the first handheld to have a colour screen, it also supported a backlight like the GBA SP and could produce GBA quality graphics. It could flip upside down for left handed gamers, and also connect to Atari's home console, the Janguar. It competed against the chunky Game Boy, and got HAMMERED.

I'm not sure how Nintendo did it. They hadn't officially become the king of consoles back then, and the best titles on the Game Boy were Super Mario Land, and Tetris. But I guess it was due to the Lynx's expensive price, production shortages, lack of quality games and bad battery life (sound familiar?). Even despite a new design of the console in 1991, the Lynx never sold well.

The next bit of competition Nintendo received was in 1990, when Nintendo's home system rival Sega, released the Game Gear. It had a colour and backlit screen, and Sega quickly produced many popular titles like Sonic shortly after release. The Game Gear did better in sales compared to the Lynx, but also lost to the Game Boy by a huge margin.

Several other attempts to compete with the Game Boy were released, such as the NEC TurboExpress, Supervision, Wonderswan, and Neo Geo Pocket. Despite the clear technological superiority of almost all of these handheld consoles, especially by the mid-1990s, none were ever a serious threat to the Game Boy's sales. In simpler terms, they all received their share of Yamauchi whipping :).

Basically, after all the pwnage shown by Nintendo, competing companies realised they could not compete with the Game Boy, even by producing superior handhelds to fight for sales. It was not until 2003, when the GBA SP dominated the handheld industry, when Sony decided they were stupid enough for another attempt, and thus produced the PSP. Nintendo saw Sony as the biggest threat, and quickly began production of their own console to rival Sonys. Instead of Multimedia, Nintendo wanted functionality. Instead of power, Nintendo wanted innovation. Instead of graphics, Nintendo wanted game play. The console they develeoped was first shown at e3 2004, by president Satoru Iwata. Nintendo called it their "Developer's System", or "NDS" for short.