The History Of Handheld Game Consoles

The history of handheld game consoles does not go back too far. Things really kicked off in 1989 with the Nintendo Game Boy. The screen was quite small and in black and white and it's processing power was reasonably low. However this little grey box took the world by storm and is now the best selling game console ever. The reason it became so popular was the games it had to offer, one of the best games was the highly addictive Tetris.

Soon after the arrival of the Game Boy the Atari Lynx was launched. It was the first handheld game console to be in colour. It featured a colour LCD screen with backlight, networking support with up to 17 other players and advanced hardware which enabled the zooming and scaling of sprites. These features however made the Lynx expensive, it also had a short battery life and far fewer games than the Game Boy. Although it was an innovative product it never really took off commercially.

The Sega Game Gear was another colour handheld console that came out in Japan in 1990 and in 1991 for the rest of the world. It was similar to the Sega Master System so this allowed Sega to create Game Gear games from its wide range of games for the Master System. The Game Gear was quite popular and managed to make a reasonable level of sales. Still not enough to trouble the popularity of the Game Boy though.

The Game Boy Color was released in 1998 and as the title suggests it had a colour screen. The processor was twice as fast as the original Game Boy's and had double the memory. It also featured an infrared communications port for wireless linking. A great feature was it's backward compatibility, all Game Boy games could be played on this new colour version.

The latest handheld consoles are the Nintendo DS, which came out in 2004, and the Sony PSP which followed shortly afterwards. The DS is quite innovative as you may expect from Nintendo, it has a touch screen and a range of games with original gameplay aspects. The PSP is very popular though. Along with PS2 quality games it can also play music and films which makes it more than just a handheld game console.

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