TAKING YOUR FAVOURITE GAMES OUT ON THE ROAD WAS A BIG PART OF PLAYING IN THE NINETIES, AS THE MAJOR MANUFACTURERS TOOK TO MAKING HANDHELD CONSOLES. IT DIDN’T ALWAYS GO WELL FOR THEM, BUT THEIR EFFORTS LEFT AN UNFORGETTABLE LEGACY FOR GAMERS
There are so many times in life when your only option is to sit down and wait. You could be passing time before seeing the doctor, or in the back of a car during a long journey. Whatever the situation, filling these waits suddenly got a lot better as handheld consoles grew in popularity. Of course, handheld videogames weren’t an invention of the Nineties, not by a long shot. Whether you want to cite the MB Microvision or the popularity of standalone devices like Tiger Electronics’ games or Nintendo’s Game & Watch series, it’s clear that players could enjoy gaming on the go throughout the Eighties. The big difference was that while handheld gaming had been around for a while, handheld consoles as we have come to know them today came of age in the Nineties.
The stage for the handheld boom was set during 1989, when Nintendo introduced its
Game Boy. Atari introduced the Lynx later that year, and Sega followed in 1990 with the Game Gear, both of which offered full colour displays. Atari and Sega both tried to offer an experience comparable to that of home consoles, providing full colour backlit LCD displays. Nintendo famously went for a more modest design with a greyscale display, and would ultimately outsell all of its competitors by a wide margin.
All too often, the Game Boy is said to have won out because of its battery life, and while there’s some truth to that statement it does a massive disservice to the console’s brilliant games. The Game Boy’s display was so different to home consoles that it practically demanded bespoke experiences, and Nintendo delivered superbly. If you wanted the full Zelda
experience, you’d need a Game Boy to pick up Link’s Awakening. Mario fans would naturally want to see the unique stages of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, as well as its new villain Wario. Donkey Kong was expanded from its original arcade form into an incredible puzzle-platformer. That’s before we even get to excellent original titles like Kirby’s Dream Land and Mole Mania, or third party favourites like Gargoyle’s Quest and Batman.
That’s not to say that owners of the other systems missed out on great games, mind. While Lynx owners did often have to wait quite a while between games, being able to take excellent versions of STUN Runner, California Games and Klax out with you was rather lovely. Game Gear owners received plenty of conversions from other Sega platforms, particularly the Master System that its hardware was based on, as well as fantastic exclusive entries in the Sonic The Hedgehog, Shinobi, and Shining Force series. But both companies elected not to follow up on their handheld consoles, and by the mid-nineties Nintendo was the only purveyor of portable gaming.
But what really cemented Nintendo as the master of the handheld console was how it kept the Game Boy relevant for over a decade. It had held off both dedicated handheld designs as well as miniaturised home consoles like the PC Engine GT and Sega Nomad, but by early 1996 the old system was looking a little long in the tooth. The arrival of Pokémon – a game designed around the system’s portability – revived interest in the venerable system almost single-handedly. Plenty of Game Boys were dusted off, and many more were purchased brand-new to experience the
popular monster battling RPG. Kids around the world would join in the fun as translated versions came out later in the decade – and many of them would do it on the Game Boy Color, introduced in 1998 as the first major upgrade to the near decade-old platform.
That’s what made handheld consoles so different from the rest of the gaming scene at the time. Companies weren’t preoccupied with making more powerful systems, but more efficient ones. The kind of games you could play on a Game Boy Color or Neo Geo Pocket Color weren’t tremendously different to those you could have played on a Lynx – but that was the beauty of it. Handheld consoles weren’t just a way to keep the kids quiet – as the last bastion of 2D gaming, they were a haven for games as they used to be, and plenty of coding veterans kept themselves busy making portable games. From returning favourites like R-type DX and Paperboy to downscaled interpretations of contemporary classics like Tomb Raider, the handhelds of the Nineties had a game to offer for just about any fan of old-school design – and that remains true today.