Okay, I know this needs an update to cover the Game Boy Micro, not to mention the Microvision, N-Gage QD, etc. This, alas, is unlikely ever to be accomplished.

The Game Boy, though it became the dominant handheld games machine, was by no means the first, and its story properly begins, not in the Nintendo R&D labs of the late 80s, but with Mattel's release in August 1976 of its portable, LED-based Missile Attack — and with the NBC network's reluctance to broadcast advertisements for it, owing to fears that children would be traumatised if they failed to protect cities from the attacking missiles. Cue a swift rebrand as Space Alert: Battlestar Galactica. WIth the game's sucess and that of its follow-ups, by Mattel and others, the handheld gaming industry was born. LEDs soon gave way to LCDs, and in 1980 a Kyoto-based toy manufacturer called Nintendo, originally founded as a maker of playing cards, entered the market with the first of its Game & Watch products, an expansion of its arcade video game business into the handheld arena. Fifty-nine Game & Watch games were produced from 1981 to 1991, later ones introducing widescreen and dual-screen features.

In 1982, General Consumer Electronics released the Vectrex. It displayed monochrome wireframe graphics¹ on a 9" built-in screen with a joystick and buttons mounted beneath, and came with an Asteroids clone called Mine Storm built in. It did not, however, sell — the on-board screen failing to make up for its otherwise outdated hardware, and the 1984 video games industry crash finally putting paid to the experiment — but it is historically important as the first games machine to combine a built-in screen with the ability to accept games on plug-in cartridges. For a truly portable machine of this sort, however, the world would have to wait until the late 1980s, when home consoles were the 'in' thing, handhelds were in decline, and no sensible company would put major effort into producing a new handheld machine. Would it?

• Handhelden offers images of early LCD games.

• Game and Watch.com has information on the Game & Watch series, along with an impressive collection of links.

• A Vectrex FAQ is available here, and includes a number of Vectrex links. The rest of the site is also useful.

'Dot Matrix With Stereo Sound'

The release of Game Boy in 1989 changed the gaming landscape forever — just as the NES had done five years before. Here, finally, was truly portable cart-based gaming — and it was practical, too, with four AA-sized cells providing more than 30 hours of play. Even the product's limitations worked in its favour. The lack of processing power... forced developers to concentrate on raw game design — the perfect example being the legendary conversion of Tetris. Similarly, the yellow-tinged monochrome screen, with its crisp 160x144 resolution, was a limited canvas, but it invited really cute, innovative 2D art.
— Edge, Issue 104

The Game Boy

This is the story of a great and mighty dynasty, but the founder of that dynasty did not triumph through technical splendour. You actually had to attach headphones to hear the stereo sound, since the Game Boy (sometimes written 'GameBoy') was equipped with only a mono speaker, and Nintendo's then-president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, had instructed Gumpei² Yokoi's staff in R&D#1 to avoid a colour screen in favour of emphasising efficiency and affordability. The Game Boy displayed images in black and white (or, more acurately, black and greenish yellow), and was itself grey and bulky. Its processor was essentially a variant of the 8-bit Z80 chip used in, among other machines, Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, but running at 4.194304 Megahertz, compared to the Spectrum's 3.5 Mhz. However, it was, as Yamauchi intended, affordable and characterised by reasonably low battery drain. It could accept cartridges (or 'carts' for short) of up to four Megabits³; it was essentially capable of doing in four shades of grey what the Nintendo Entertainment System (known as the 'NES' for short, and in Japan as the Famicom, an abbreviation of 'Family Computer') could do in colour with a colour television; and a cable could be purchased that connected two Game Boys together for multiplayer games, with a few four-player games being produced for a four-way version of the cable. Lastly, in addition to third party support it had the backing of Nintendo's talented in-house software teams, including the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto — but it was not a Miyamoto game that became virtually synonymous with Nintendo's handheld.

The quest for the game that everyone can play, for the formula that appeals to both sexes and all ages, is the quest for the maddeningly elusive 'Tetris audience'. Tetris, monarch of the puzzle game genre, grandparent of what the Japanese call ochimono ('falling objects') games, was the perfect game with which to launch the Game Boy: so simple that it could be easily grasped, visually uncomplicated enough for its functional graphics to be ideally suited to the handheld's screen, and so compulsive that some people ended up playing it in their dreams. Nintendo had discovered Tetris at a trade show in 1988, and after battling through the intriacies of obtaining the licence to publish a game owned by Communist Russia had succeeded in gaining the handheld rights. The effort paid off, and demand for the Game Boy was assured⁴.

The other principal classic from the Game Boy's early days is widely acknowledged to be Super Mario Land, which despite not having aged gracefully as Tetris is still widely held to provide the distilled essence of Mario gameplay. It was followed by Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins, which offered more sophisticated graphics and more intricate gameplay; the baton then passed to one of Mario's major enemies for Wario Land. The final member of the top three was a member of Nintendo's other great franchise, the Legend of Zelda series. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was in few ways inferior to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System (otherwise known as the 'SNES', 'Super NES' and 'Super Nintendo', and to the Japanese as the Super Famicom); indeed, the tight construction required to fit it into a 4 Megabit cartridge arguably makes it a superior example of game design. In view of the Game Boy's famously tinny sound capabilities, creating a game with a plot involving music was not an obviously good idea, but players recovering the Instruments of the Sirens found that each had a distinct and not entirely unrealistic sound to complement the cries of seagulls, the lapping of waves on a beach, and a remarkably convincing hollow clank when a breakable wall was hit with a sword. The game was both an impressive indicator of the Game Boy's abilities and one of the best loved games on the system.

Late on in the Game Boy's life, it found itself suddenly revitalised by the immense success of Pokémon, a game of no outstanding technical merit, but one that made very effective use of the Link Cable that allowed two Game Boys to be connected together. Released in 1995, and combining the traditions of Japanese console RPGs with its creator's imaginings of an insect moving along the Link Cable between Game Boys, it created a worldwide sensation. The franchise increased sales of Game Boy units by 250%.

Nintendo's major hardware launch of 1995 fared nowhere near as well — but the sorry tale of the Virtual Boy has been left for another section.

• A Game Boy FAQ file can be found here.

• Tehnical information on Game Boy software development, for those interested, can be found here.

• A somewhat eccentric, but informative, site on Nintendo handhelds is DMG⁵ Ice.

The Game Boy Pocket

By 1996 the Game Boy, not slim and light enough to be entirely convenient to carry around, was due for a revamp. The Game Boy Pocket was no more powerful than its predecessor, but it was smaller and lighter, required half as many batteries, and most importantly had an improved LCD screen, consigning to history much of the blurring that had blighted the original Game Boy. There was some hope that it could be targeted at an older audience than the Game Boy, and accordingly it was coloured matt silver, with uniformly black controls, and marketed in the UK with adverts that placed various images, such as that of a dog staring mournfully at an empty bowl, alongside the slogan 'Seriously distracting'. The Advertising Standards Authority decided that a print advertisement depicting a lingerie-clad young lady tied to a bed went too far, and promptly banned it.

The Game Boy Light, Other Rare Versions, and Pirate Versions

Released only in Japan, the Game Boy Light was esentially a Game Boy Pocket that used two extra batteries to provide a backlit screen. The Japanese public failed to go wild with excitement; it was not until the Game Boy Advance arrived that there was widespread demand for a backlight.

Variations on the Game Boy's basic appearance include a Manchester United respray of the original, and Tommy Hilfiger and Pokémon versions of the Game Boy Colour. Perhaps the most exotic of the lot is the glow-in-the-dark unit given away in a competition; unfortunately, since the screen isn't backlit, it is apparently impossible to play games in the dark.

The Game Boy seems to have suffered rather fewer pirate clones than the NES, but it's said that clones named Sunny and WonderBoy, among others, were produced in Asia, and that there may have been a Russian clone named the Bitman2000. A picture exists of a clone made by Fortune Power Industries in Taiwan.

The Super Game Boy and Its Successors

The Super Game Boy was an add-on for the SNES that let one play Game Boy games on a television screen, without needing a Game Boy. Their apperance was enhanced by limited colour palettes and border images, both of which could be customised; some later Game Boy games were designed to have extra features (added colour, custom borders and improved sound — although some games made rather more use of these than others) when used with a Super Game Boy. The device was followed by the Super Game Boy 2 (coloured a rather attractive transparent blue in its Japanese version), which featured an external link port to permit the use of a Game Boy Pocket-type Link Cable. Third-party peripherals were released for the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation to let them play Game Boy and Game Boy Colour games, and a first-party peripheral, the Game Boy Player, exists to let Nintendo's GameCube play Game Boy games up to the Game Boy Advance generation.

Peripherals for the Game Boy and Its Successors

Numerous peripherals have been released for the Game Boy and its successors, including a number designed to improve the visibility of the screen through magnification and backlighting. Sound amplifiers also exist, although the Game Boy's sonic capabilities remain distinctly limited, and there are attachable joysticks too. Another common type of peripheral is the rechargeable power pack, essential for those sick of buying batteries; AC adaptors are also available.

More interestingly, the Game Boy Camera enables one to take rather rough-looking photographs, mess about with them, and incorporate them in some (pretty basic) games. The accompanying Game Boy Printer can print out stickers depicting the photographs, or images contained in compatible games. The software developers Rare developed a system whereby a photograph of a person's face, taken with a Game Boy Camera, could be transferred to a Nintendo 64 using the Transfer Pak [sic] device and applied to the face of a multiplayer character in the game Perfect Dark, thus enabling people to play as themselves in-game; unfortunately, the system was removed from the game during development when it was realised that, if some murderer was found to have been playing Perfect Dark with likenesses of his or her victims, the repercussions from the media would be, to put it mildly, undesirable.

There's also a Game Boy fishing reel — not just a reel-like peripheral, like the special joypad available for use with Dreamcast fishing games, but a sonar-equipped reel that scans for actual fish in water of the player's choice while a fishing game is played. Another curiosity is the Workboy, which adds a keyboard to the Game Boy and turns it into a Personal Organiser. A device that turns the Game Boy into a radio is known to exist somewhere. Then there's the bar code scanner, for the Game Boy version of Bar Code Battler. The Game Boy has even been made to interface with Singer's sewing machines, and shoes have been created that contain Game Boy Colour units.

• A webring exists for those wishing to use their Game Boys for non-gaming purposes.

The Competition: Part One

As the journey unfolds, it becomes apparent that Nintendo didn't win the race, but rather relied on other companies losing their way. This, combined with the fickle hand of fate and a sprinkle of Nintendo magic, made their rise to handheld kings almost inevitable...
— Total Control, Issue Eight

NEC's PC Engine GT and PC Engine LT

The 8-bit PC Engine console is little known now (in the West, at least), and its portable siblings are even more obscure. The LT was a PSone-style affair, with a separate joypad controller; the GT (released in the US as the TurboExpress) was more of a handheld in design terms, but was nonetheless impracticably large and bulky. Both machines, released in 1989, were hugely powerful compared to the Game Boy, and came with price tags to match; consequently they were never going to achieve anything like the Game Boy's market penetration. Still, for those who could afford them the systems' high specifications and ability to play any PC Engine game, along with the GT's clear and detailed images (on a 400 x 270 active matrix screen, albeit often with missing pixels, TFT LCD manufacturing processes not being fully developed at the time), gave them plenty of appeal, although NEC's handling of the PC Engine market in the US (their advertising strategies in particular coming in for criticism, along with their failure to get many of the best Japanese games translated) worked against the GT.

• The GT/TurboExpress features in this FAQ page alongside its non-portable sibling, the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16.

• Information on PC Engine software can be found at the PC Engine Software Bible.

The Atari Lynx

Towards the end of its life as a hardware manufacturer, Atari released the Lynx. They did so in 1989, putting their machine in direct competition with the Game Boy; however, they did so with too little third party support and too few units being supplied for the Christmas market. Moreover, the Lynx was substantially more expensive than the Game Boy (not least because six AA batteries were required to power five hours of play), and Atari's previous tribulations made some retailers treat their hardware with suspicion. Nintendo (whom the Lynx's developers, Epyx, had approached as possible purchasers of the Lynx technology, to be turned down) gained a lead that Atari never managed to take from them; by 1994, when the Game Gear had arrived as another competitor for the Lynx, they had given up.

The Lynx (followed by the slightly improved Lynx II) was markedly more powerful than the Game Boy; it had a colour screen, and a 16-bit graphics processor. It could also be flipped for the convenience of left-handed players. For multiplayer games, Lynxes could be daisy-chained together using the 'ComLynx' cable; two games supported six players, and one was announced (but never released) which would have supported sixteen. The machine played host to a number of conversions of Atari's classic arcade games, but never had a 'killer application' to take on Tetris.

A small Lynx fan base still exists, trying to get software produced for the platform, and a vendor exists on the Internet from which Lynxes and Lynx games may still be purchased.

• A list of Frequently Asked Questions regarding the Lynx may be found here.

• Brief histories of the Lynx are available here and here.

The Supervision

In Edge's estimation 'frankly awful', the Supervision, manufactured in its different versions by several companies, lacked quality software and offered no other features that could have saved it from the Game Boy.

• One person who disagrees with Edge is Syd Bolton, who has created a Supervision Home Page.

The Sega Game Gear

Sega, Nintendo's traditional rivals until the arrival of Sony in console manufacturing, were not inclined to let Nintendo dominate the handheld market; in 1990 they released the Game Gear, an 8-bit handheld capable of displaying 32 colours, chosen from a palette of 4,096, at a time. With its large memory capacity the Game Gear was technically impressive, although its battery life was awkwardly short, and according to Total Control 'gamers couldn't escape the feeling that they were playing second rate Mega Drive software'. Not that second rate Mega Drive software was necesssarily that bad; the Game Gear was supported by Sega's in-house talent, whose portable Sonic the Hedgehog games, and and conversion of the ninja-based Megadrive hit Shinobi, impressed commentators. The Game Gear also had its own successful ochimono game in the form of Columns, although Tetris did not suffer regicide. Arguably, however, rather too much of the machine's software catalogue was made up of conversions. Sega also released television and radio tuners for the Game Gear, and a hardware emulator that allowed it to play games written for their Master System console. Weak in the UK, the Game Gear was popular in the US, and could not be called a failure, but never managed to overcome the obstacle of Nintendo's early lead in the market. It was re-released under licence, some years later, by Majesco.

'Red + Black = Sexy'⁶

The 3D rarely worked as Nintendo intended, but occasionally players caught a glimpse — usually only for a few seconds — of what could have been. At times the graphics were truly immersive, giving a wonderful feeling of depth and solidity. Unfortunately, the tricks used to convince your eyes that you were viewing a true 3D image were also the cause of nausea and sea sickness in many.
— Total Control, Issue Eight

The Virtual Boy

In the halcyon days of the mid-1990s, the Next Big Thing was called Virtual Reality — and the result of Nintendo's jumping on that bandwagon has probably contributed significantly to the company's subsequent reluctance to jump on any others. Someday, perhaps Virtual Reality will rise again, but the Virtual Boy will still be remembered as Nintendo's great failure. Arguably, as a non-portable console it shouldn't be mentioned here, but there are three reasons for including it: the name, the monochrome visual display, and the involvement of Gumpei Yokoi.

Launched in August 1995, the 32-bit Virtual Boy was a tabletop system that required players to peer into one of its sides; not having a head-mounted visor, it did not offer the potential for looking around computer-generated environments as one looks around real ones that 'Virtual Reality' is normally understood to involve. Yokoi had decided that head-tracking, the process of making what viewers of Virtual Reality displays see change according to their head movements, caused motion sickness, so he gave up on it. In fact, he gave up on the usual helmet altogether; worried about the discomfort a helmet's weight could cause, he mounted the Virtual Boy on a stand. (The contrast is with Sega's Virtual Reality prototypes; the official explanation for their failure to go beyond the prototype stage was that they were so immersive, children might try to walk while wearing them and injure themselves — although not everyone believes this story.) The one remaining element of Virtual Reality was what would have been the console's Unique Selling Point, had it actually sold: the stereoscopic visual display created by the Massachusetts-based Reflections Technology. The illusion of truly three-dimensional images that Yokoi hoped would 'encourage more creativity' and let game designers 'come up with new ideas'. By means of a clever use of mirrors the Virtual Boy could create an illusion of depth impossible to achieve on a standard television-style display⁷.

Unfortunately, this display technology soon became notorious for causing headaches and dizziness (to complement the backache that could be brought about by bending forwards to peer into the console). Pausing to focus the mirrors before every use of the console could help, but was not a complete solution. The red LED display was not even all that pretty; Yokoi had wanted a colour display, but technical difficulties and the threat of an unacceptably high retail price made this impossible. The Virtual Boy was greeted by general apathy when released, and was being wildly discounted not long afterwards. (It has, of course, now become alarmingly collectable.) It wasn't just retailers who lost faith quickly; Nintendo itself thought better of making great efforts to support the product, for which only twenty games were ever released. Many of these, such as V Tetris, effectively made no use of the Virtual Boy's three-dimensional capabilities, their gameplay remaining stubbornly two-dimensional.

Nintendo is a paradoxical company — one with a well-deserved reputation for fostering innovation and creativity, and an equally well-deserved one for the determined pursuit of profit; one that has long maintained a 'family-friendly' image, but is also noted for its corporate coldness and sometimes ruthless behaviour. Yokoi was experiencing the latter when obliged personally to man the Virtual Boy stand at a Nintendo trade show. 'This was his punishment,' writes Steven L. Kent in The First Quarter, 'the Japanese corporate version of Dante's Inferno. Gumpei Yokoi, the engineer who had created Nintendo's first toys in his spare time⁸, had been placed in the proverbial doghouse for creating the debacle that was Virtual Boy... When employees make high-profile mistakes in Japan, it is not unusual for their superiors to make an example out of them for a period of time, then return them to their former stature. Such seemed to be the case with Yokoi. Yamauchi would pretend to have forgotten that Game Boy, Metroid, and Dr. Mario had all come from his team, leave him to man a booth with a dying product, then eventually bring him back into grace.' This was not to happen; Yokoi left Nintendo in August 1996.

• The Virtual Boy has attracted affection as only a dismal failure can, and many related links can be found here.

• Fan sites include Planet Virtual Boy and Virtual-Boy.Net. Images of Virtual Boy games, minus the illusion of depth and mostly in black and white, may be found here.

The Competition: Part Two

With the Game Boy five years old and the Virtual Boy being given away, Sega had only to step in and grab the market for themselves. Unfortunately for them, Sega were about to prove that whilst Nintendo could fail badly, they could bomb-out even worse.
— Total Control, Issue Eight

The Sega Nomad

The Nomad, released in 1995 in the North American market only (but inspired by the Sega Mega Jet hardware provided for the entertainment of Japan Airlines passengers), was, to all intents and purposes, a portable version of Sega's Mega Drive (known as the Genesis in North America). As such, it offered 16-bit power, had colour graphics (and could be plugged into a television), and could play an extensive library of existing games. Unfortunately, this last selling point meant that an owner of one machine had little or no need of the other, and consequently the Nomad did little to expand Sega's sales. The fact that the Nomad's batteries ran out in a couple of hours didn't help. The machine was not, however, a disaster. The 32-bit Saturn, released by Sega in the same year as its new focus of attention, did fare disastrously against the PlayStation — but by the time its fate became apparent, it was too late for Sega to wish it had been in less of a rush to leave the 16-bit market. Still, if you're into eye surgery...

'Portable, Colour, Fun!'

The Game Boy Colour uses ten- to fifteeen-year-old technology, and is still one of the hottest things on the shelf. Its only advantage is the LCD display and low cost.
— Scott Marshall of Marshall Multimedia, commenting at the Game Boy Colour's zenith

The Game Boy Colour

Released in 1998, the Game Boy Color (this spelling being officially used in all territories, although not by all commentators) offered, as the name suggests, Game Boy games with colour graphics. It can play games designed for the original Game Boy in limited colour, basically displaying backgrounds in four shades of one colour (if black and white count as shades of a colour) and sprites in four shades of another; games designed to make only limited use of the Game Boy Colour's capabilities can be played in black and white on the original Game Boy. Up to 56 colours, chosen from a palette of 32,768, can be used to make up sprites (although each individual sprite can be comprised of only four colours, with one always transparent), and with clever programming those sprites can be persuaded to exist on top of static background images that put as many as 2,800 colours on the screen at once.This isn't the only improvement over the original Game Boy, though; the Game Boy Colour's central processing unit can run at 8 Mhz, double the Game Boy's 4 Mhz (hence the promise on the side of the box of 'double speed capabilities'), and the machine contains several times as much onboard memory as its predecessor. The unit also features an infra-red port that enables the exchange of data between two machines with no need for cables, although the rate of data transfer is too slow to make cable-free competitive play possible in real time, and the capability has been put to fairly limited use owing to low bandwidth and a range of only three centimetres (and perhaps in part to lukewarm technical support). Taking inspiration from the development of vibration peripherals and vibrating joypads for consoles (intended to make games more immersive by creating a 'rumble' effect at appropriate moments, such as when a character sustains damage), some developers created games to be released in special cartridges that could make the entire Game Boy Colour vibrate when they were inserted; few games of this sort were released, however.

Early software releases in particular indicate a readiness on Nintendo's part to stick to the familiar, albeit spruced up with new features. Tetris DX was Tetris in colour. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe resurrected the NES classic in handheld form, with added bonuses including a challenge mode requiring players to find hidden items. Link's Awakening DX was perhaps the most improved, appearing not only with colour graphics but also with an entire extra dungeon to explore (as well as the potential for printing out images using the Game Boy Printer). The conversion trend wasn't limited to Nintendo's games; other companies rushed to produce Game Boy Colour versions of their software, from ancient coin-operated arcade games to the far more recent Grand Theft Auto. There were sequels, too: a new Wario Land game from Nintendo, and new Pokémon installments. Capcom, better known for fighting and survival horror games, was drafted in to create, under Nintendo's supervision, two new Legend of Zelda games: named Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, they offer adventuring in the style of Link's Awakening DX, with the additional feature that players can collect rings that affect the game in various ways, and connect their machines together in order to transfer rings between the two games. (Three games — Tale of Wisdom, Tale of Courage and Tale of Power — were originally planned, but it was decided during development that transferring items between all three was a messily overcomplicated affair.) Third parties were more than happy to add their franchises to the list, and so the Game Boy Colour saw, for example, a return by Konami to 8-bit stealth in a Metal Gear game in the style of the series' NES installments. There was also a franchise extension that in retrospect looks deeply ironic: Conker's Pocket Tales, a spin-off from what was then in development for the Nintendo 64 as the exceedingly twee Twelve Tales: Conker 64. A later change in thinking on the part of the developers, the Twycross-based Rare, saw the Nintendo 64 game renamed Conker's Bad Fur Day and turned into a sort of deranged parody of all things cute and fluffy, with the squirrel protagonist invited to get drunk, urinate on enemies and gorily dispatch them, among other things. The aura of innocence that once surrounded Conker's Pocket Tales is now lost beyond recovery.

One particularly interesting franchise extension from a technical point of view is Alone In the Dark: The New Nightmare, which in spite of the name is not a direct conversion of its cousins on more powerful hardware, but was designed to resemble them stylistically as closely as possible. By making the game's protagonist able to move 'towards' and 'away from' the screen, as though inhabiting a three-dimensional environment, the developers were able to demonstrate the extent to which the Game Boy Colour's power extended beyond that of its predecessor. Unfortunately, they also ran up against one of its technical limitations: attempts to extend their approach to combat revealed that, if the protagonist and a monster were both 'near' the camera (and hence at their largest), the hardware was unable to draw enough sprites for them to appear as they should. Consequently combat takes place on a traditional, flat combat screen viewed from a top-down perspective. Still, at least Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare was actually released; a conversion of Resident Evil, once highly anticipated, died, not because the hardware couldn't handle it (although the dogs that inhabited the PlayStation original had to be replaced with rats; nevertheless, by placing less emphasis on prettiness than the developers of Alone In the Dark: The New Nightmare the Resident Evil converters were able to avoid needing a separate combat screen), but because the publishers, Capcom, ended up deciding that the costs and technical limitations were too great. (Leastways, that's what they're reckoned to have decided.) The Game Boy Colour did see the much less ambitious Resident Evil Gaiden (gaiden denoting a spin-off story or side-quest).

• Game Boy Colour hardware FAQs can be found here.

The Competition: Part Three

History has shown that when a video game company attempts to ply its trade in the portable-handheld market by introducing a new form of hardware, it finds the move to be an increasingly bold venture. For the majority, it's tantamount to brand suicide. It's not difficult to deduce why: Toppling the establishment is a task easier said than done.
— A comentator on the Game.com's cancelled Castlevania

Tiger Electronics' Game.com

The name now seems redolent of a bygone era, but even when the Internet wave was at its peak the system's text-based browsing was by then dated. The Game.com, followed by the Game.com Light and Game.com Pro, was a retail failure, but retains some historical interest by virtue of having played host to wildly cut-down versions of Sonic Jam and Duke Nukem 3D, and even a Resident Evil (the latter two titles apparently reflecting a desire to target the 'mature' gamer). Furthermore, its screen, though offering a Game Boy-esque four shades of grey, was a touchscreen, and so in one respect the Game.com anticipated the Nintendo DS.

• The Video Game Museum offers an article on the Game.com and the cancelled game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

SNK's Neo-Geo Pocket and Neo-Geo Pocket Colour

Utilising a 16-bit processor and a bright screen capable of displaying eight shades of grey, 1998's Neo Geo Pocket (or 'NeoGeo Pocket'), a portable sucessor to a console of earlier days, introduced on-board battery backup (instead of the usual system of having games save to cartridges), and also offered a built-in calendar, world clock and horoscope. More importantly, it was well supported by SNK (proably most famous for its King of Fighters games) and third parties. Released in 1999, the Neo-Geo Pocket Color (as it was officially known), combining a 16-bit central processor running at 6.144 Mhz and a Z80 running at 3.072 Mhz (used to control sound output), offered performance not terribly inferior to that of the Game Boy Advance, but still kept power consumption low. 'Now a firm cult favourite,' writes Edge, 'the Neo Geo Pocket Color plays host to some outstanding games, Faselei being the most highly prized.' It also received support from Sega in the form of Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure, and a cable was available that could connect it to Sega's Dreamcast console. However, the system couldn't compete with the Game Boy series, and in 2000 SNK withdrew it from markets outside Asia, citing commercial failure. Internal problems following SNK's purchase by Pachinko manufacturers Aruze may also have been a cause, as may communication problems with third parties. In 2001 SNK ceased to exist altogether.

• Neo Geo For Life has a good Neo Geo Pocket Colour page.

• A Neo Geo Pocket Colour FAQ file can be found here.

Bandai's WonderSwan and WonderSwan Colour

Marketed in Japan by the Bandai corporation, the WonderSwan was actually the product of a company named Koto ('small town'). The company had come into being quite recently; its founder had left Nintendo only in August 1996. 'The WonderSwan,' writes Edge, 'was the Game Boy creator's first project outside [Nintendo's] walls, and one that caught Japanese gamers' imaginations like few other handheld consoles have... An object of desire for Japanese youth, the unit was also ably supported by big thirdparty developers.' Using a 16-bit processor running at 3 Mhz, and a 224 x 144 screen, the WonderSwan still ran for up to forty hours on a single AA battery. It also adopted one of the Lynx's better ideas: it was designed to be easily flipped so that the screen could be used horizontally or vertically. The WonderSwan was followed by the WonderSwan Color (as it was officially known), which was itself followed by the improved SwanCrystal. Accessories included the WonderWitch, a development kit enabling the creation of custom WonderSwan games, and the WonderBorg, a programmable robot.

In 1997 the founder of Koto was driving along a highway with an associate when their car was struck by another vehicle. Stopping and stepping out to examine the damage, he was hit by a third vehicle (his associate escaping with a fractured rib). Gumpei Yokoi was pronounced dead in hospital two hours later.

• Quality WonderSwan sites in English are surprisingly hard to find; quite a few sites give the impression of abandonment. You could try the links at The WonderSwan.

• Technical information can be found at http://www.zophar.net/tech/files/wstech23.txt

The Game Axe, and Other Pirate NES Clones

Pirated consoles are never exactly destined for great things, but the Game Axe has at least acquired some notoriety for being a rare portable example of a pirated Famicom. (Many types of Famicom clone exist, but almost all use a television display only, as the Famicom itself did.) Manufactured in Taiwan, it can run any Famicom game, and via an adaptor can run any NES (Western) cartridge.

The Game Axe was not, however, the first portable NES clone. That dubious honour goes to the legendary Top Guy. The machine was assembled by hand, and it's said that only a thousand or so were ever made. In addition to its LCD screen, it had a special feature: a transmitter that could make every television in the vicinity display the game being played.

Rumour has it that another portable Famicom clone, the Pockefami, has been produced. Supposedly other portable Famicom clones may exist in Asia, but hard, verifiable information is distinctly lacking. Meanwhile, the pirates have moved on: a modified, portable (but not handheld) Dreamcast, called the Treamcast, has surfaced in Hong Kong.

• The Game Axe has at least one fan, who has produced an information page here.

• Articles on the Top Guy can be found here and here.

'Game Boy Powers Up With 32-Bit Technology!'

Suddenly the esoteric world of 2D multiplayer FPS-ing is open to those who had no access to office or university LANs in the early 90s... Veterans willl be weeping as they blast each other.
— Edge, Issue 104, reviewing the Wolfenstein 3D-styled Ecks Vs Sever

The Game Boy Advance

Rumours of a 32-bit colour Game Boy hd been floating around even before the Game Boy Pocket was announced, and indeed ARM⁹, the manufacturers of the Game Boy Advance's central processor, had originally approached Nintendo in 1993; finally, the time had come. The Game Boy Colour, retaining the restrictive nature of the original Game Boy's architecture, was very much an evolution of that design. The Game Boy Advance, though it retained backwards compatibility, was a more flexible system, besides being a far more powerful one. Combining its processors and memory onto a single piece of silicon for the sake of efficiency and cost reduction, it featured a 32-bit processor, supported cartridges of up to 256 Megabits, and offered roughly the same performance as a SNES (albeit at a resolution of 240 x 160, and with two fewer buttons). The one major source of complaints was the fact that the screen wasn't backlit. That had been true of earlier Game Boys, of course (although the Game Boy Light nonetheless wasn't a startling success at retail — something that Nintendo probably took into account when deciding its priorities), but the superior graphical abilities of the Game Boy Advance led gamers to expect something more sophisticated than the bright, simple images of before, and that led to visibility problems, particularly with dark images such as those of the Gothic-styled Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. Still, this problem didn't severely hurt the system's sales when it launched in 2001 (its release having been delayed in order to let the Game Boy Colour come to the end of its natural life — for why should Nintendo kill off its own hardware while sales remained strong?)

The Game Boy Advance has seen quite a number of conversions from other hardware: Nintendo launched the system with Super Mario Advance, a conversion of Super Mario Bros. 2¹⁰ (a NES game later converted in prettier form to the SNES for the Super Mario All-Stars bundle), and went on to turn Super Mario World (originally for the SNES, and widely reckoned to be one of the finest games on any system) into Super Mario Advance 2, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (one of the best games from the latter days of the SNES) into Super Mario Advance 3, and Super Mario Bros. 3 (another NES game that resurfaced in 16-bit form for Super Mario All-Stars, and very highly regarded, especially in its day) into Super Mario Advance 4. Another Nintendo classic to return from the SNES era was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past — another name able to cause heart palpitations in many. Later in the Game Boy Advance's life, Nintendo introduced its 'NES Classics' range: conversions of the best NES games, including the original Metroid and The Legend of Zelda. In some cases, however, Nintendo proved keen to update its franchises with new installments, rather than simply convert and re-release its earlier work. Conversions of F-Zero (a futuristic racing game from early on in the life of the SNES), Super Mario Kart (yet another classic, especially fondly remembered for its multiplayer modes¹¹) and Super Metroid (the SNES installment of an unusually dark series by Nintendo's standards, followed by the GameCube's Metroid Prime games) would have satisfied many, but Nintendo opted to create new installments in all three series.

Third parties were happy to take a similar approach. Sega's Sonic Team¹² created Sonic Advance in the style of their mascot's other 2D outings. Square produced a Game Boy Advance version of the PlayStation's Final Fantasy Tactics¹³.

Other games were created for Game Boy Advance that were not parts of existing franchises. One of the launch games was Kuru Kuru Kururin, which involved guiding a constantly rotating rod around a maze without letting it touch the walls. An early example of the RPG genre on the system was Camelot's Golden Sun, which showcased the hardware's capabilities with attractively drawn graphics and an expansive game world ; a sequel later followed.

Early on in the system's life, several developers showed a readiness to develop Doom-style sprite-scaling engines for it; indeed, Doom itself received a conversion. A company called Pocketeers set to work on an even more ambitious task: the creation of fully three-dimensional Game Boy Advance graphics; the result was a conversion of Need for Speed: Underground, along with some technical demos.

• A Game Boy Advance FAQ file may be found here.

• Should you wish to turn your handheld console into a non-handheld, there's a site that explains how to do just that.

The Game Boy Advance SP

The Game Boy Advance SP ('Special Project') is essentially to the Game Boy Advance what the Game Boy Pocket was to the original Game Boy: a smaller, silver replacement with some hardware improvements, but basically the same hardware inside. Folding into a compact form for storage, it features the backlit screen and built-in, rechargeable lithium ion battery that Nintendo had originally rejected for reasons of cost. The unit does, however, lack the formerly customary headphone socket. The standard Game Boy Advance SP is plain silver, but Nintendo has also released more interesting alternatives than the usual rainbow of alternatively coloured models: a dual-tone platinum/onyx version; a 'Tribal Edition', featuring black images based on Polynesian and Indian tattoos¹⁴ (and promoted with a fairly strange website); and a 'Classic NES Edition' that uses a colour scheme similar to the original NES hardware, going nicely with the 'NES Classics' software range. A pink version has also been produced, aimed at females, and a banana yellow SP was used to promote Donkey Kong games in Japan. The game Mario Vs. Donkey Kong (a sort of sequel to Mario's first appearance in the Donkey Kong arcade game) was promoted with a Mario-themed SP, combining a silver lower section with a red lid featuring a Mario 'M' design. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (another Legend of Zelda game produced by Capcom rather than in-house by Nintendo) was promoted with a gold SP featuring the series' iconic Triforce emblem on the lid and the crest of the royal family of Hyrule (the knigdom in which many of the Zelda games are set) near the controls. Twenty-four units with 24 carat gold plating were created as prizes for competitions.

Peripherals for the Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP

Given all the complaints about its screen, it's unsurprising that the Game Boy Advance has its own range of screen lamps; it's even possible to have a third-party backlight, called the Afterburner, installed. The TV Tuner makes it possible to use the Game Boy Advance as a portable television, while the Movie Player enables the viewing of film clips on the Game Boy Advance. From Nintendo itself comes the E-Card reader, which can read data off special cards and combine data from different cards to produce miniature games. In a similar vein, from Bandai there comes the Crystal Base, with which you can transfer creatures in the game Legends from monster data cards into the Game Boy Advance. A mobile 'phone adapter to permit remote communication between Game Boy Advance units was produced at one point; this technology had perviously been developed for the Game Boy Colour.

Most significantly, a cable is available that connects the Game Boy Advance to one of a GameCube's controller ports; this makes it possible to transfer data between the two machines, and the Game Boy Advance can even be used to control compatible games. Nintendo had tried the data transfer idea before: the Transfer Pak [sic] for the Nintendo 64 was used to exchange data between Game Boy Pokémon cartridges and the Nintendo 64 Pokémon Stadium games. Nintendo had been working on a virtual pet game called Cabbage, in which the pet could be put into a Game Boy 'basket' when one went out, but this idea died with the Disc Drive for which it was intended¹⁵. (The idea of having console games download data and mini-games to a portable unit was also tried by Sony, with its PlayStation-compatible PocketStation, and by Sega, whose Dreamcast VMU — 'Visual Memory Unit' — had a built-in screen, encouraging developers to use it for more than just game save files. However, both of these units were technologically very limited, and neither was used as much as it might have been.) The idea of using a Game Boy as a controller had been developed for the Nintendo 64 and 64DD, but it was with the GameGube and Game Boy Advance that it properly came into being, although, again, it was not widely used, not least because of the limitations of the Game Boy Advance's controls. The idea was that the Game Boy Advance's screen would permit each player to view secret information, or at least information that would have cluttered up the main screen. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles made probably the fullest use of this in a bid to encourage co-operation in its multiplayer mode, although how many groups of four, each equipped with a handheld and cable, ever clustered around a GameCube for even a smidgeon of a quest is unclear. Nintendo itself created Roll-o-Rama, in which a sphere could be rolled around on the two available screens using a Tilt Sensor built into the Game Boy Advance cartridge¹⁶. This sensor enables one to control a game by tilting one's handheld; Rare had previously employed it as a control method for the airborne racing game Diddy Kong Pilot.

The Competition: Part Four

The setting is this year's E3¹⁷ show. Amid the showgirls, wannabe actors in alien suits and paranoid execs stands a CEO from one of the latest wireless games start-ups. He looks around, sees the past, and says: 'In two years this will be a very different place.'
— Edge Special Edition: Essential Hardware Guide 2000

I'm very clear that a mobile phone is not a Game Boy. Combining all of the devices I carry around with me into a single device looks like a good call for a geek. But the history of media devices is [that] they remain enormously separate. So the assumption that PDA and Game Boy and phone will converge is, I think, a fallacious one. I'm probably a bit heretical on this...
— John Brimacombe, CEO of nGame, quoted in Edge, Issue 89

Mobile 'Phone Gaming

The Holy Grail of much of the communications and entertainment technology industry is convergence: the union of previously disparate devices and systems into a few multi-functional ones, believed by many to be desirable, and by some to be inevitable. In the convergent world, your PC and your washing machine would share a common software standard, the washing machine would tell you it had finished washing your clothes by sending a message to your mobile 'phone, and, most significantly for this Entry, that 'phone would also be the games machine of choice, and a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to boot. Now any of these things may happen at some point, but what can be said with certainty in 2004 is that the convergent world is not yet here, although some convergent devices are. The idea that the mobile 'phone would evolve into a sort of handheld PC has come partly true, and games of varying degrees of sophistication can be played on mobile 'phones. Nonetheless, the Game Boy Advance has noticeably failed to fall into an early grave.

Not that there's any guarantee that it would even if mobile 'phone gaming were ubiquitous. The existence of a large PC games market has never got close to killing off console gaming; the PC-based architecture of Sega's Dreamcast console, and even more so Microsoft's Xbox, is a form of convergence, but by so being serves to underline the existence of two separate markets, two distinct applications of similar technology. Mobile 'phones lack the appeal of the technological leading edge offered by the most powerful PCs of the moment; they have a leading edge of their own, but it isn't necessarily being driven by demand for more sophisticated games. Indeed, it isn't necessarily being driven by very much. In the year 2000 Her Majesty's Government auctioned off the licences for operating networks for third-generation (3G) mobile 'phones, technologically a marked step forward from previous models. Both the government and the bidding companies employed the services of game theorists; as it turned out, the bidders had the worse theorists, or were in the wrong game. The auction was held at the zenith of the stock market's mobile telecoms frenzy, got completely out of hand and raised a huge sum for the Treasury. A few weeks later, the bubble had burst, and the holders of 3G licences, having wildly overspent, were experiencing 'financial difficulties'.

The problem for the games industry (as opposed to the telecoms industry) was not that mobile 'phones are unviable as games platforms; rather, it was that the expected paradigm shift missed its appointment. The industry had taken a similar bruising from the explosion of the dot-bomb not long before, when companies had realised that someday games might be downloaded rather than sold over the counter, high street retailers' share prices plummeted in a general panic... and then the Internet bubble burst and left a lot of people looking rather silly. 'What occurred,' according to the Edge Essential Hardware Guide 2000, 'was collective Future Lag.

'It's the logical evolution of Future Shock, the tendency first revealed in Alvin Toffler's book of the same name, which noted that people were increasingly alienated by the rapid rate of change in their 20th Century lives.

'Future Lag is a more highly evolved malaise. Sufferers see we'll be living in a different world tomorrow, but, surrounded since their teens by rapidly evolving computers and timetabling their businesses according to Moore's Law, they overestimate the rate of change. Used to galloping "internet time", they wrongly correlate that advances in technology can bring equally quick changes in comsumer habits.'

Consequently, 'game companies scrambled for Internet partners. Publishers made alliances with Web portals. Developers set up WAP teams before their publishers knew what WAP was.'¹⁸ Meanwhile, the Game Boy Colour kept selling.

For the purposes of this Entry, the technology behind mobile 'phone gaming is fairly unimportant; in any case, it is continually evolving and differs from unit to unit. In addition to the perceived threat of mobiles to the Game Boy dynasty's dominance, there is another point of relevance, that strangely enough could be taken to indicate the opposite: the widespread belief that the mobile 'phone gaming market will be quite different from the traditional Game Boy market, and will be best served by the provision of 'entertainment snacks', games designed to amuse for short periods of time while on the move. This indicates diversification rather than direct competition, but the possibility remains that as mobiles become more sophisticated they will move into the traditional market as well, although the revolution has largely failed to arrive. Nintendo, for its part, appears unruffled: it has experimented with using mobile 'phones to let Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance units communicate with each other over long distances.

It should be noted that mobile 'phone gaming is likely to be driven by the Japanese market, in which DoCoMo is all-powerful and developers consequently don't have to worry too much about different versions of technologies. However, sucess for the Final Fantasy VII spin-off Before Crisis does not necessarily have much bearing on occidental markets.

Game Park's GP32

The Korean company Game Park put together an interesting piece of hardware: it had a built-in Web browser, MP3 player and media player, and was designed to have software downloaded onto it via a PC or mobile 'phone. The development kit is free, and the main development program is open source. The unit was technically sophisticated, had a large screen and offered RF wireless connectivity. The prospect of writing one's own games, however, appeals to a rather limited number of people when it actually involves technical stuff, and so the GP32 has acquired a loyal fan base without having much prospect of acquiring mass appeal. The amount of commercial software available for it is small, and if the GP32 ever did become better known bright legal spotlights would perhaps shine on the number of programs that have been written to make it emulate other machines. Still, while it won't give Nintendo's accountants sleepless nights, it could well be worth a look if you're into homebrew software; while amateur Game Boy Advance programmers have been subject to some suspicion on Nintendo's part, the hardware that allows them to interface with the Game Boy Advance also being the hardware that allows the illegal copying of its software, no such problems afflict GP32 programming.

• Much more information on the GP32 and the development of its software can be found at the UK-based GP32 World and at GP32Xtreme.

Tapwave's Zodiac

Games written for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have been diverting their owners for some time, but the Zodiac — marketed under the slogan 'Works hard. Plays harder.' — places an unusual emphasis on them. Designed for games and multimedia, the machine runs a custom version of PalmOS (and so is compatible with much PalmOS software). However, despite receiving some positive comments, the Zodiac looks set to remain an outsider in the games market.

• Further information on the Zodiac as a games machine can be found at Zodiac Gamer.

Nokia's N-Gage

The N-Gage actually did get some pretty prominent displays in high street shops — which makes it all the more telling that so few people bought it. It's not yet clear whether this child of the convergence dream was ahead of its time or a technological blind alley, but its dismal initial performance at retail indicates that it was one of these. Despite Nokia's intention to remain in the market for the long haul, third parties may prove reluctant to come along for the ride, especially with the Game retail chain having dropped the product.

Although the machine's gaming capability has been at the centre of attention, it is every inch the long-awaited, multi-functional, convergent device: games machine, mobile 'phone, FM radio, WAP Internet browser, media player, and more. It can connect wirelessly to PCs, mobile 'phones and other N-Gages for multiplayer gaming and image transfer. It can store and play music files. It can run applications written in J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition). It includes PDA functions. It can do still more. So how could it possibly fail?

A definitive answer isn't yet available, but one suggestion is that the N-Gage was launched at too high a price point. Of course, with handheld gaming there is also the recurrent theme of the Game Boy dynasty's dominance; a lot of people already have Game Boy Advances, and pretty graphics have never been able to convert gamers from platform to platform on their own. The N-Gage lacks a 'killer app', and the games that have appeared for it tend not to make much use of its distinctive, convergent features.

• One of the best places for N-Gage information seems to be Gamespy, which in addition to its N-Gage area offers various interesting articles, including Nokia's response to early reports of disappointing sales, a report on the attitudes of shop assistants towards the product, and a wry account of a quest to find a fellow N-Gage owner on the streets of New York. They also have a Beginner's Guide to the N-Gage.

• A very good dedicated site is All About N-Gage.

Homebrew Portable Versions of Consoles

These don't really count as competitors, but are included for the sake of interest. It's not just pirates looking for profit who create portable versions of games machines; it's also hobbyists doing it in their spare time. The NES is a favourite target: there's Portendo, which incorporates a Nomad; there's the NPES (Nintendo Portable Entertainment System), created by a French hobbyist; and there's an entire 'NESp' project to let people build their own NES portables.

Also in existence are portable Ataris, a portable SNES, and a portable PlayStation. Much of this is down to one Benjamin J. Heckendorn, engaged at the time of writing in the creation of a portable Nintendo 64 called the P64. For the sake of h2g2's legal security, however, you aren't getting any links.

Where Next? - What Can Be Seen of the Future, and What Remains to Be Seen

The following was written in September 2004. Both the DS and the PSP have since been released, though in the latter case not yet in the U.K. As it turned out, the PSP's price point was lower than widely expected, although questions about the battery life were not entirely unfounded.

The traditional model — the model followed so successfully by the Game Boy dynasty — of handheld games machine manufacture views the handheld as a device that allows console-style games to be played anywhere, probably with some power being sacrificed to make this possible. It remains to be seen how much impact the games industry's interest in 'entertainment snacks' for mobile 'phones will have on this way of thinking in the long run, but it is possible to see Sony's PlayStation Portable and Nintendo's DS as two different ways of reacting to changing circumstances. At the time of writing, both machines have yet to be released, but the battle lines have already been drawn between their respective groups of supporters.

Sony's PSP takes the traditional paradigm and runs with it, providing something akin to a PlayStation 2 in portable form. A portable console that powerful has an obvious appeal, and at the same time seems to have little risk of being overtaken by mobile 'phone technology during its lifetime. Moreover, the PlayStation brand is powerful in itself, and third party support is assured. The system's Achilles' heel is likely to be its cost: that amount of power, in a portable case, is expected to prove expensive (and there are also worries about the achievable battery life). The machine's ability to play films is attractive (and shows off a much-lauded screen), but it remains to be seen how many films will actually be released on Sony's proprietary UMD format alongside the usual DVD versions. Like other handhelds before it, the PSP does roughly what a home console can, on the move. The question is, how much will people pay for that?

Nintendo's DS represents rather more of a conceptual risk; Nintendo has put together a machine that looks intended not so much to outun mobile 'phones as to sidestep them. Of the unit's two screens ('DS' standing both for 'Dual Screen' and for 'Developers' System'), one is pressure-sensitive; consequently games can be controlled not only using traditional buttons and a D-pad, but also using a stylus. When the first playable demos were unveiled, players were invited to use the stylus to target enemies in a first-person Metroid game, to rub the screen in order to reveal an image (somewhat like brass rubbing against the clock) in one of several stylus-controlled minigames, and to draw pictures and send them to each other via the DS's wireless link. (Some other demos, notably a 'new Super Mario Bros.' game, used a more traditional approach.) This control method opens new avenues for developers to explore (and the unit's power, reckoned to be roughly equivalent to that of a Nintendo 64, should give programmers plenty to play with), but it remains to be seen whether coders will make the most of its potential, and whether gamers will take to it. If not, price will become the DS's principal advantage against the more powerful PSP, although the talent of Nintendo's game developers and the kudos of the company's intellectual property can never be ignored. At any rate, if Gumpei Yokoi were still alive it might please him to see that a desire to 'encourage more creativity' and let game designers 'come up with new ideas' apparently still burns within Nintendo's R&D labs.

Meanwhile, convergence marches onwards. From Tiger Telematics comes the Gizmondo (formerly the GameTrac, and not to be confused with the technology weblog Gizmodo, whose creator is not at all happy about the similarity of the names), the latest combination of games machine and PDA to be offered to the public. The public's affections will also be vied for by various semi-handheld devices: the FlipStart, a device formerly called the Eve (it turned out that somebody else owned the name), and the oQo.

• Sites specific to the Nintendo DS include DS Central and Nintendo DS News (the latter of which is UK-based).

• A PSP FAQ can be found here. PSP news can be found here.

• News on recent and forthcoming portables, including more obscure ones, can be found at Portagame.

For the purposes of this Entry, though, the most crucial question is: Is the DS the successor to the Game Boy dynasty? Nintendo's decision not to use the famous Game Boy brand for its new machine raised a few eyebrows, and appears to be the result of a desire to indicate the DS's novelty. The company's insistence that the DS would be a 'third pillar', alongside its home consoles and a continuing Game Boy dynasty (perhaps, some have speculated, developing more along the lines of the PSP), has attracted considerable scepticism (and worries about how many handheld games machines the market can support), especially since it was revealed that the DS will be backwards compatible with Game Boy Advance games (in single-player mode). Nontheless, Nintendo is unwavering.

We introduced the analogue control stick with the N64 and now with the DS we're continuing to introduce these new styles, whether it's touch control with the stylus or using a microphone that's built in to attain control, or even the wireless features of the DS. We've taken all of these features and we've added them into one hardware system that's going to allow us to really create new styles of software that we've never seen before. So really our biggest objective with the DS is to take what has become a rather segmented and focused market, which is the hardcore gamer, and we want to expand beyond that.
— Shigeru Miyamoto, Director and General Manager of Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development Division

Of course, that assumes that Nintendo is still around to manufacture hardware...

If the DS succeeds, we will rise to heaven, but if it fails we will sink to hell. The next two years will decide Nintendo’s fate.
— Hiroshi Yamauchi, President Emeritus¹⁹ of Nintendo Co. Ltd.

Finally, after all that about the history of the video game industry, and all those wise quotations, here's just one more:

...[T]he videogame industry has progressed over the last ten years. Today, reviews are less about how a game runs, and more preoccupied with how a game plays. Technical statistics aren't as important to the gamers as they once were. This sort of development isn't unique to the videogame industry. In fact, there's an interesting parallel with the visual arts in 15th Century Italy.
— Edge, in one of its moments. Quoted from the Pseuds Corporate section of Private Eye, Issue 1090.