Game On: A History Of Handhelds

It seems we can't go anywhere these days without tapping into some sort of electronic gadget at every spare opportunity. Whether it's a mobile phone, PDA or a netbook, society's obsession with portability seemingly knows no bounds.

Indeed, the gaming and communications industries have even converged to some degree, with a number of handheld consoles such as the PlayStation Portable (PSP) offering Wi-Fi internet connectivity and other multimedia functionality in addition to its primary purpose of providing hours of gaming fun.

The gaming industry has progressed leaps and bounds in the past two decades so it's perhaps worth a little nostalgic trip down memory lane to see how far we've actually come in 30 years.

Ignoring the very early primitive handheld LED games from the likes of Mattel and Milton Bradley in the late 1970s, Nintendo produced the first glimpse of what was to come from the pocket gaming industry with its 'Game and Watch' Series from the early 1980s onwards. Although they came with a clock and alarm installed, the main attraction were the games with the likes of Donkey Kong and Super Mario being introduced to the world for the first time.

From the release of 'Ball' - the first game in the 'Game and Watch' series - it was to be almost another decade before the first of the new wave portable gaming systems were to be released...and it was certainly worth the wait.

The Nintendo Game Boy hit the shelves in 1989 and it's impossible to overstate the impact it had on the gaming industry. The original Game Boy is one of the most successful video games ever produced - handheld or otherwise - and one of its main selling points besides game playability was that it had video game cartridges that could be slotted into the device, something that hadn't been done before with any great deal of success.

Most of the 1990s was dominated by the success of the Nintendo Game Boy, but there were a few other notable success stories. The Atari Lynx was one of the main challengers to the Game Boy's crown and, upon its release in 1989, it was fairly obvious that its colour screen and graphics were much superior and were actually on a par with normal console systems of the time. Its main pitfall was its price and its comparatively bulky size and it never quite made the grade in the end.

The Sega Game Gear was released in 1990 and was probably the Game Boy's biggest rival, with a reasonable price, colour screen and great game playability; but alas, it couldn't compete with the marketing wizards at Nintendo.

Indeed, Nintendo have effortlessly shrugged off the competition of many handheld gaming devices over the years, from NEC and Neo-Geo, to Bandai and Nokia. Today, the Nintendo DSi has the lion's share of the portable gaming marketing alongside the PlayStation Portable, which is an excellent device in its own right.

Daniel Collins writes on a number of topics on behalf of a digital marketing agency and a variety of clients. As such, this article is to be considered a professional piece with business interests in mind.