When Handheld Gaming Was Hard Trivia Quiz

Answer: Mr. Game and Watch

First released in 1980, the Game and Watch was Nintendo's first truly successful forays into video gaming. Each toy could play one built-in game or function as a digital clock. The displays were rudimentary: like many electronic games of the era, they used black and white liquid crystal displays that would light up individual sectors to show pre-made graphics.

Though simple, the games were fun, and even included simplified versions of "Mario Bros.", "Donkey Kong", "Popeye", "Tetris", and "Zelda." The line sold over 40 million units. Some of the Game and Watches used a folding design with two screens - the clear inspiration for Nintendo's DS consoles decades later.

In "Super Smash Bros. Melee," Nintendo included the two-dimensional. badly-animated Mr. Game and Watch as a joke character.

Answer: 16 by 16 pixels

"MIcro" couldn't be a more apt term for this system's screen. The graphics for the thing made "Snake" on a Nokia phone look like "Grand Theft Auto 17". To put 16 by 16 into perspective, in the Game Boy's "Super Mario Land", Mario's sprite alone is twelve by sixteen pixels.

The system was simple, but well-conceived in many ways. Although sources call them "cartridges," each game was more like a faceplate, which contained the game board inside. This meant that each game had a new set of buttons as well as screen overlays to explain the game action. That helps, since the device has barely enough screen space for a respectable game of tic-tac-toe.

When it came time for Nintendo to sunset the Game and Watch line, the Microvision gave them a starting point for the Game Boy. Popular Microvision games include "Block Buster" (a clone of "Breakout"), "Connect Four," "Sea Duel" (a sea combat game) and "Mindbuster" (a puzzle game). Fun fact: excluding home computers, the Microvision was the first "console" to get a "Star Trek" game (subtitled "Phaser Strike").

Answer: Full color

The mystery of the Game Boy's overwhelming sales dominance, in spite of its significantly weaker hardware, has captured the interest of many an industry analyst. SEGA's marketing director declared: "There is clearly a need for a quality portable system that provides features other systems have failed to deliver." Promo or no, that sounds superficially right, so why did so few kids get Game Gears?

It came down to appreciating where technology was at the time of its release. At the time, the costs of full color were substantial. Despite emphasizing fast action in its ads, the Game Gear's frame rate chugged through many sections. It also ran for less than 10 hours on six AA batteries (compared to the Game Boy's 30 hours on 4 AAs). And Game Gear launched at $149 USD, a year and a half after Game Boy launched for just $89 USD.

Then there's the issue of bulk. A Game Boy was not much bigger than a portable cassette player - you could, if you wanted, slip it into a coat pocket. The Game Gear was thick, bulkier than a Switch 2, large enough where I'd say you pretty much need an external carrying case. This was at a time when video games still had a stigma as a children's pastime - a stigma the slim, colorless, briefcase-friendly Game Boy could sneak past, but the Game Gear could not. When the Game Gear was discontinued in 1997, it had sold 10 million units; the Game Boy sold 60 million units by then.

Answer: TurboGrafx 16/PC Engine

It's true that SEGA's Game Gear was extremely similar to the Master System, but by the time it came out, the Master System had been replaced by SEGA's Genesis/Mega Drive. The TurboExpress was the real deal: a fully functional TurboGrafx (PC Engine in Japan), just three years into that console's lifespan, and only a year after the Game Boy. Well, almost fully functional. Part of the appeal of the PC Engine was its many add-ons, billing itself as a modular system. The TurboExpress, only being able to play cartridge games, lost out on the console's CD library, but

Although NEC's systems only carved a small place in the market, it backed its little Engine that could with gusto. Even the lowly Express had numerous special accessories, including a link cable and even a receiver that turned the thing into a TV set!

While its power was impressive, it didn't come free. It cost $100 USD more than the Game Gear which, as we established, already struggled at its price point. And if you thought the Game Gear's 6 hour battery life was bad, the Turbo Express's was half that! Better hope the drive to grandma's house isn't too far.

Answer: SEGA Nomad

The Nomad was one of the products of SEGA's awkward mid-'90s era. After the Genesis achieved its valiant goal of disrupting Nintendo's market dominance in North America, SEGA seemed lost on how to continue to grow. Unlike Nintendo, who started off as toymakers, SEGA's forte was always in manufacturing cutting-edge arcade machines.

In a strange way, this backfired on them as home console designers. Their laser focus on bringing the arcade experience home, as exactly as possible, created strange developments like the SEGA CD and the 32X - impressive hardware specs-wise that nonetheless improved graphics so little, you'd be forgiven for not noticing the difference.

The Nomad, while very cool for its time, contributed to this oversaturation. SEGA poised the Nomad to prolong the lifespan of the Genesis indefinitely - to me, that iterative, "if-it-ain't-broke" mindset suits arcade game design, but fails to understand how home consoles obsolesce. It would also take attention away from the SEGA Saturn, the Game Gear, the 32X and the SEGA CD, all of which needed all the help they could get. Plans to continue supporting the Nomad were quickly shelved. The machine sold fewer than a million units, and are hard to find on the secondary market today. Even the TurboExpress outsold it (1.5 million units).

Answer: Searing black-and-red display

Was it a handheld? A controller? Some kind of escaped arcade contraption? Basically, Nintendo's Virtual Boy was a self-contained virtual reality headset that functioned as a uniquely portable game system. The trouble with the Virtual Boy was that it was an extremely low-powered virtual reality system. The system itself was bright red, with red-and-black graphics, that caused nausea and headaches in most players in less than an hour. (Some people have claimed that the real issue is adjusting the mirrors improperly. That may be true, but I speak from experience... the color is NOT flattering.) It ran on batteries, with a wired controller that looked similar to an SNES controller with grips. The thing stood on a little, poorly-balanced piece of plastic that made it look like a flying saucer with a kickstand.

In the VB's defense, few games tried to convince anybody they were looking at reality through its rose-colored glasses. Most were simple, like "Tetris 3D," "Mario Clash," "Mario Tennis" and "Nester's Funky Bowling." This did it few favors: they were so simple that they could've ran on Game Boy, and so the Virtual Boy offered nothing but a cumbersome play posture and an eyesore paintjob.

The appeal of the machine was supposed to be its ability to simulate 3D, a concept Nintendo did revisit with its 3DS decades later. The initial asking price of the Virtual Boy was $180 USD - at the time, the Game Boy cost only $60 USD!

Answer: Atari Lynx

Too bad for the also-rans, what's good for the goose is not always good for the gander. Given the rudimentary hardware available in 1990, the Game Boy's black and green screen wasn't too much of a concession compared to the Game Gear.

By 1997 - a year before the Game Boy Color released - that was no longer true. Nintendo's entrance to monochrome was as well-timed as its exit. Meantime, several game makers shot themselves in the foot by trying to copy its homework. Both SNK's Neo Geo Pocket and Bandai's WonderSwan were ambitious, powerful, and well-designed systems that regretted launching in monochrome. Both put out a colorized revision less than a year after launch.

Even worse was the fate of the Game.com. With a name that sounds like a website - and no, it's not a website you should visit these days - you just know it's a late-90s fad. Game.com was devised by Tiger, they of Furby fame. Tiger had a previous tacky system called the R-Zone, a knock-off of the VIRTUAL BOY. Need I say more? Okay, I'll say this... its "innovation" over the Virtual Boy was that it went directly over one eye, so it only seared one retina, not both. Got a spare eyepatch handy?

The Game.com was a better swing, but not by much. It promised advanced features like wi-fi connectivity and a touchscreen - not to make the games better, but solely as proof of how advanced it was. Something we should acknowledge was that the Game Boy had a HIGH-QUALITY black-and-green screen. The Game.com was glitchy, fuzzy, and looked more like one of those bad digital assistants relegated to tech's dustbin. The extremely ambitious game line-up did less to show the system's potential and more to expose its computational wimpiness: "Resident Evil 2," "Mortal Kombat," and an exclusive 2D "Sonic" game (that played sluggishly). "Metal Gear Solid" and "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" were announced, but soon cancelled.

Answer: Taco phone

To talk into your N-Gage, you held it up sideways to your head - imagine talking into a taco, and you've got the right idea. Mocking memes abounded of people making asinine facial expressions while holding other handhelds, entire consoles, and arcade cabinets to their heads. Imagine that: people playing video games on their phone!

To give the N-Gage a slightly fairer shake, the idea of an all-in-one device was appealing in 2003, and I firmly believe that if players could get over the Game Boy's lighting issues, they could've accepted the side-taco orientation for calls. (Bluetooth headsets are still around...)

The real problems were to do with build quality and hardware. "The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey", a portable format of the PC games loved for their vast open worlds, suffered from a myopic draw-distance, barely a few steps ahead of your character. The screen's portrait orientation didn't help, either. N-Gage only sold about 2 million units.

Answer: Built-in ads

If you hold the N-Gage up (sideways, of course) against the Gizmondo, it looks good by comparison. $400 USD (or £230) for a machine that, over its year lifespan, released a whopping 14 games. Like the N-Gage, the Gizmondo promised to be more than a handheld: it featured a camera, cellular texting, and GPS functionality (though, it won't surprise you, you did have to pay separately for the GPS software). That's why the "Smart Adds" (sic) were so invidious: they worked with your GPS data to tell you that, not only should you buy "Sticky Balls," you should do it at the store that's only a dozen miles away. Imagine that: ads that track your location!

The machine was made by Tiger Telematics - no relation whatsoever to Tiger Electronics, they of Game.com fame - which went bankrupt within a year of the Gizmondo's release. Board members were linked to the "Uppsala Mafia" and accused of defrauding investors, counterfeiting money, and selling stolen sports cars.

Gizmondo also suffered from serious build quality issues. The entire console was made out of a rubberized plastic, the kind that has a tendency to melt in, oh, two or three decades. Those few collectors who own one say they're afraid to even touch theirs, lest their grip deform it.

Answer: Miniature discs in plastic cases

PSP games came on "Universal Media Discs", each one emblazoned with the letters UMD. It remains the only handheld I can find that uses any kind of optical disc. Why? Consider the pros and cons.

Upsides: Full-length movies. Bask in the glory of Sony's proprietary genius. Increase your desire for a Blu-Ray player.

Downsides: Bigger than cartridges. Higher price to manufacture. Longer load times. Casings had a hole that left discs exposed to debris. Door on disc drive could fall open.

Even Sony abandoned the format: the digital-only PSP Go was released in 2009, and the PSP's successor, the PS Vita, used tiny game cards.

If you accept my proposition that handheld gaming - meaning something distinct from phone gaming and hybrid console gaming - is truly a thing of the past, then by now you'll have noticed a big, N-shaped pattern. No portable ever unseated Nintendo's dominance in the market. Only the PSP ever came close. The PSP's roughly 80 million sales about match the figures on Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, although the PSP was trounced by the Nintendo DS (over 150 million units). You could say this lack of viable competition made handheld gaming even harder.