The evolution of handheld gaming

 

When we think about handheld gaming, what do we think about? Probably the newest innovations like the Nintendo DS or Sony's PSP Go. Today in age, we have two main front runners in handheld gaming really, but there used to be so many. Today we're going to focous on the gaming handhelds. The handhelds of today have innovation and are amazing, but back before we had touchscreen technology and sharp graphics, we had many other options to choose from. Handheld gaming was for the gamer on the go. The ones who wanted to bring gaming with them anywhere they pleased. Want to play on the bus, sure thing. Want something to curve your time while you are on the road on vacation, no problem. With the small sizes of handhelds, portable gaming was possible. In 1977, Mattel sat down and decided to create the first handheld electronic game deemed Auto Race. Auto race was primitive with simple blips at the bottom of the screen and you had to work your way up to the top. It was a simple concept, but for the first handheld game device, I guess back then it wasn't that bad.

Auto Race was shadowed by Mattel's football handheld game that was released soon after Auto Race. Many years later, finally Coleco and Milton Bradley decided to throw down and they made their own single-game handheld device. Ofcourse can you really call it a true handheld gaming console if it didn't have cartridges and different games to play? Well, I guess you could call the first TRUE handheld gaming device to be the Milton Bradley Microvision that was released in 1979. This handheld actually led to moderate success, with the creators taking in $8 Million in the first year of it's release. The handheld also appeared in Friday the 13th Part 2. The problem was that there were very few cartridges to go to it, the screen was terribly small, and there was a lack of support from established home video game console companies. This all ultimately led to the demise of the Microvision.

In the early years of handheld gaming, the devices were deemed "non video electronic games" and "non-televsion game". Of course if this is so, that would mean that portable gaming actually started around 1960-1972 when there were handheld electronic tic tac toe (1972), Cragstan's Periscope firing range (1960s), and similar gaming devices. It didn't make it big until Matell brought out it's Auto Race and Football mentioned above. In the end, it turned into a $400 million category. Matell is the first recognized company for innovation in handheld game devices. Many others followed suit (Coleco, Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, Entex, and Bandai). The first one to introduce what we now know as the direction pad or d-pad in short terms on handheld gaming would be the cosmic hunter game on the microvision which was used to manipulate an on-screen character in four different directions.

In 1980, the paramount company, Nintendo began to break into the handheld gaming industry by designing the Game & Watch games. They designed the series of LCD-based games to include a digital time display at the corner of the screen. For later more complicated games, they designed the familiar cross shaped directional pad that we know today for controlling on-screen characters. The directional pad and the Game & Watch games were created by Gunpei Yokoi with Nintendo. Nintendo also used that directional pad design in their home consoles that followed. Yokoi basically is the one that made the lovely d-pad we have today. He made the standard. After the demise of the Microvision in the late 1980s through the early 1990s, things began to change durastically within the world of handheld gaming. Backlit LCD screens with colorful graphics and so on comsumes a lot of power and they were certainly not friendly with batteries by any means like the non-backlit original game boy which had monochrome graphics which allowed for much longer battery life.

By this point, technology was not yet available for rechargeable batteries so the gameboy was a very popular choice instead of the handhelds that ate batteries like no tomorrow like the Sega game gear and the Atari Lynx. Even though third-party rechargeable batteries were available for the battery-hungry alternative to the gameboy, these batteries employed a nickel-cadmium porcess and had to be completely discharged before being recharged to ensure maximum efficiency. The NiMH batteries were not released until the late 1990s, much later after the Game Gear, Lynx, and gameboy were pretty much discontinued. During this time when technology and handhelds had strict limits, batteries had a very low mAh rating which meant batteries just weren't as great as they are today. Oh there was other hanhelds out there besides the game gear, lynx and gameboy at the time? Oh yes, of course there was. Let's see now..

There was the TubeExpress which was a portable version of the TurboGrafx, released in 1990 for a whopping $249.99. The price was however raised to $299.99 for a brief period of time. The price did soon drop back down to the original pricing and by 1992, the price dropped to $199.99. It's Japanese equivalent was the PC Engine GT. It was the most advanced handheld of the moment and could play all the TurboGrafx-16s games. It had a 2.6 in screen which was the same as the game boy and it could display 64 sprites at once. It had 64kb of ram. There was an optional "TurboVision" television tuner included RCA audio/video input, allowing people to use the TurboExpress as a video monitor. There was also the "TurboLink" that added on two player play like the game Falcon on it that was a flight similator that include 2 player head to head dog fights on it. The mode was only accessible through the TurboLink though. However, very few TG-16 games offered up multiplayer in the first place.

Then there was Bitcorp Gamate which was released in Asio in 1990 and then released worldwide in 1991. This was the first handheld that was created in repsonse to Nintendo's boasting Gameboy. It looked similar to a game gear, being horizontal and requiring 4 AA batteries. It was professionally assembled. Later gameboy clones actually were poor in quality. The system had a pretty big flaw though.. It's screen. Even by standards back then, the screen was actually difficult to use and it suffered from motion blur problems which the first generation Gameboy also had. Bitcorp closed it's doors in 1992 mainly because of the poor sales figures of the handheld. They had no choice but to call defeat. Even though the company called it quits, strangely enough it was found much later that new games continued to come out and published for the Asian gaming market as late as 1994. The total number of games released is unknown though. Another very odd thing about the Gamate is that the games were actually all designed for stereo sound, but the handheld was only equipped with a mono speaker. People could get the full stereo sound by simply plugging in headphones.

Let's talk more about the Game Gear by Sega shall we? The Game Gear was the third color handheld console to be released. The first two were the Atari Lynx and the TurboExpress. The Sega Game Gear was released in 1991 in the US, and 1990 in Japan. It was based on the Sega Master System which gave Sega the ability to rapidly turn out games from it's library of games for the master system. The Game Gear never did reach the success that the Gameboy did, but it did however give off as a fairly durable competitor compared to the rest of the rivals to the Gameboy and to me, that says something at least. The Game Gear was mostly seen in black or navy blue colors, but what most don't know is that it did infact come in odd colors such as red, light blue, yellow, clear, and violet. All of these weren't widely known mainly because they were only released in very small quantities and frequently only in the Asian market.

Another handheld console that was released to compete with the gameboy was the release of Watara Supervision in 1992. The first model was actually designed very similar to the Gameboy, but it was a greyish color and had a larger screen. However the second model was made with a hinge across the center and could be bent a little bit to provide greater comfort for the owner. The Watara Supervision did actually have a little bit of success, it didn't have any sort of impact on Nintendo or Sega. The company decided to go for one last attempt and thus the last version of this handheld was released and deemed "The Magnum" and it was released in limited quantities. It was sort of the equivalent to the Gameboy pocket. It released with three primary colors which were yellow, green, and grey. Watara designed many of the games for it themselves, but it actually had some third-party support most notably from Sachen.

Next we've got the ambitious game.com. This device had many great ideas in mind. It could be connected to a 14.4kb/s modem, it had two slots for game cartridges (Only the first model did), it was similar to a PDA, it had touchscreen features along with a stylus, and it just was alot different. This was aimed at the more older audience. IT was released in 1997 by Tiger Electronics. Tiger hoped to gain a different fanbase than the Gameboy, but also tried to challenge the gameboy and gain some of the younger fans as well. It had plenty of features, but it didn't have a backlit screen at all making it hard to pinpoint with the touchscreen and the screen was also had a fairly low sensor resolution. It lacked precision and it was quite hard to see the onscreen controls. Many of the cool features of the game.com actually were limited compared to later portable devices such as the Nintendo DS. Now it's not fair to compare it to a DS because well, this technology wasn't the same as it is now. Tiger ultimately failed to sell the product to the older audience even though they obtained licenses such as wheel of fortune, sonic the hedgehog, mortal kombat, Duke nukem, and Resident Evil. The game just didn't sell in great numbers.

More on the game.com, the company actually marketed the device all wrong. At the given time, the game.com was almost fully ignored by the gaming press. Tiger used potentially insulting marketing, satirizing the condescending commercials of other gaming platforms with a video of a mock marketing spokesman saying "It plays more games than you idiots have brain cell", which may have actually lost more supporters than gain them. Not only was the commercial in bad taste, but most gamers thought that it was a video of an actual Tiger press conference, despite the fact that the commercial ends with the marketing spokesman is mobbed by a crapload of angry gamers before the commercial ends. In the end even after Tiger released a pocket version of the device, it just didn't sell enough.

Let's talk gameboy color.. The Gameboy Color was released in 1998 and it featured obviously a color screen and it was slightly bigger than the gameboy pocket. The processor was twice as fast as the original gameboy and it had twice as much memory. It also had an infrared communications port for wireless linking action which did not appear in later versions of the gamboy such as the advance oddly enough. The color was created due to the want from game developers for a new system to build upon since they felt the gameboy just wasn't good enough to keep shooting for. The result product was backwards compatible and that was a first for a handheld system and it helped leverage a huge library of games. This has become quite a big feature for the gameboy line and it proved to be quite useful since each time it released a new gameboy, it was always backwards compatible and it carried that library of games over to form a bigger one. This was marketing genius at it's finest in my opinion. The handheld was able to display up to 56 different colors on screen from it's palette of 32,768 and could add four-folor basic shading to games that had been developed for the original gameboy. It could also give sprites and backgrounds seperate coloring.

Then came the Gameboy Advance in 2001. Nintendo kept pushing forward with with the gameboy line and this looked so much different than the past handhelds from Nintendo. This gameboy advance added two shoulder buttons, a larger screen, and more computing power than the gameboy color. The screen wasn't backlit until a two years later when Nintendo decided that the advance needed a good old makeover and the Gameboy Advance SP was born. The SP design was a clamshell of sorts. It had a hinge and it allowed it to be shut when not playing thus protecting the screen. The SP had an amazingly lit screen with different brightnesses to play around with an also the option of turning off the backlight for extra battery life. The SP was rechargeable and you didn't have to go in and take the batter out. Just plug it in and let it chage. This was great for the SP. The screen stayed the same size until Nintendo decided to randomly go for another version deemed the gameboy micro which was essentially a very small version of the SP that wasn't closeable. The revision sacrificed alot of the good stuff though. The screen was small and backwards compatibility with previous gameboys were cut from the design. However, the micro did have a brighter backlit screen. A newer SP model did come out with a brighter screen in some regions around the same time as the micro release.

The game park 32 or GP32 was released in 2001 by a south korean company deemed Game Park a few months after the release of the gameboy advance. This device boasted a 32-bit CPU, 133 MHz processor, MP3 and Divx player, and an e-book reader. The memory for this was a smartmedia card which could hold up to 128MB of anything downloaded via USB cable from the PC. The GP32 was then later re-designed in 2003. A front-lit screen was added to the design and this was deemed the GP32 FLU (Front-lit unit). In summer 2004 though, another redesign came and this was ofcourse to iterate a back-lit screen and it was deemed the GP32 BLU (Back-lit unit) This version of the unit was planned to release outside of South Korea; in Europe, and it was released for example in Spain. This wasn't much of a huge seller, but it did end up being used mainly for user-made applications and emulators of other systems ironically.

The Nokia N-Gage was released in 2003 and boy was it odd.. It was designed as MANY different things. It was a combination of MP3 player, PDA, radio, gaming device, and a cell phone.. Yep, thats right.. A cell phone. I don't think this was designed at all to be much of a handheld gaming device because the people that made it actually made it a pain to take cartridges out and place another one in and believe me, it recieved a TON of criticism because of it. In order to swap out game cartridges, you had to take the back off, take the battery out and only then could you swap out your games. This device was also seemingly not too well designed as a phone either. It looked odd when one person would talk on it.. It looks like you were indeed talking to a taco.. Yes.. a freakin taco. This was because the reciever and speaker were actually placed on the edge of the device instead of flatly on the sides. Nokia obviously seen the flaws that they made and they redesigned the N-Gage deemed N-Gage QD. It did address the flaws, but did they really move forward when they removed MP3 playback, FM radio, and USB connectivity that was in the original? Hmm, I think not.

The Nintendo DS was released in 2004 and boy did it bring the innovation to handheld gaming. It had two screens. The bottom screen being a touchscreen. It also boasted wireless connectivity for some awesome multiplayer fun, a microphone port, and similar to the Gameboy SP, it has a clamshell feel to it with two hinges that allow you to shut and protect the DS. The touchscreen was designed to be touched with the included stylus that it came with or you could use your fingers or a special thumb pad. It also had the more traditional controls that we're used to seeing from Nintendo. It had the d-pad and the four main buttons along with the select and start buttons and the L and R buttons at the top. This brought back backwards compatibility as well which gave you access to an unbelievable library of games. The DS had several different versions released over time. It had the DS Lite that came next, which was essentially a smaller and sleeker version that actually looked pretty stylish. The DS Lite was 42% smaller and 21% lighter than the original.

It had a much cleaner design, a brighter and more colorful screen, longer battery life, and the ability to connect wirelessly to a Wii console. Then came the DSi. The DSi was actually had a larger screen with 3.25 inch screens and two integrated cameras. It also has an SD card slot for storage in place of the gameboy advance slot. This means that the DSi isn't backwards compatible with gameboy games which was a let down to alot of people. Then lastly, the newly releasing DSi XL is a larger 4.2 inch screens. The DSi XL isn't much different from the DSi really except being larger. The DSi and DSi XL both have the ability to surf the internet using wifi and you can purchase game right from the system itself and download them on there. It's a great idea and it's advancing the handheld gaming market.

The PSP was released in 2005 and it is the first handheld console to ever use UMD discs as it's format. The PSP has a rather large screen, multi-media capabilities, and connectivity with PS3s, other PSPs, and the internet. The PSP has amazingly graphical games and it boasts some awesome games. It had many versions come out to make it slimmer and then the recent PSP Go which is supposed to make gaming even easier. PSP Go was the thought that you could download games straight to the device and not have to worry about UMDs or any of the sort. It's just download and go with your games. Now some people seen this as a failure and well, it isn't really fairing too well. Most people like having the product in their hands. The PSP screws the used game industry as you can't resell a downloaded game on it's memory. However there are actually people that like the concept and have bought it. People like doctors and such. They don't have time to keep track of all the UMDs and games. It's easier to just goto your PSP and start playing. This was the concept of PSP Go and for these people it works.

The last handheld I want to talk about is the Apple Iphone / Ipod touch. In 2008, Apple released an SDK allowing individuals and companies to start developing software for the popular iphone and itouch.devices. With it's rather large user base and over 20,000 games listed for sale on itunes, the device has become a de-facto handheld gaming console.Mainstream game franchises such as Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Phoenix Wright, Sonic the Hedgehog, Madden, NHL, Command and Conquer, Call of Duty, Prince of Persia, Mirror's Edge, Tom Clancy's HAWX, Need for Speed, Sims, SimCity, Doom, Wolfenstein, Star Wars, Prey, Rage, Quake, Duke Nukem, Skate, Hexen, Rise of The Triad, Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution, Driver, Ace Combat, Grand Theft Auto, FIFA, Assassin's Creed, Spore, Earthworm Jim, Myst, Uru, Guitar Hero, Silent Hunter, NBA Live, and more have come or are soon coming to the platform. Both devices are FULL touchscreen devices and everything you do is by touch. You play your games by touching it hence the name. The original itouch didn't have a speaker built in, but since then all the iphone and itouches have had built in speakers as well as the headphone jack. The iphone also features a built in microphone and some games actually use a digital compass which is very cool and advance. These use very cool technology and you can tell that they boast very nice features along with very hefty prices. Is it worth it? Thats soley up to you.

This begins the closing of this.. Are there handhelds I didn't touch base on? Yes, I am very sure there is, but there are so many out there that I couldn't mention every single one of them. Handheld gaming has certainly came a long way and I think it has brought many technological advances and innovations along the way and in some aspects almost bigger than the home consoles. I do hope you enjoyed this article. My next article is going to be about a character that has been on handheld, home consoles, and PCs. You'll just have to wait and see just what I bring you next. Stay tuned, this is DJ Gamer signing off!