Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And it is a Friday.
Speaker 1: It's time for a classic episode. This episode originally published
Speaker 1: back on March third, two thousand fourteen. It is titled
Speaker 1: The History of Handheld Gaming, Part One. I bet you
Speaker 1: can already guess what the classic episode for next week
Speaker 1: is gonna be. But don't get ahead. I'm looking at you.
Speaker 1: Yeah you, yeah, you wait for it. All right, let's
Speaker 1: let's listen to this classic episode. This is definitely going
Speaker 1: to be a two parter. But in the interests of
Speaker 1: not going into exhaustive detail about too many things, we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna try to keep it snappy. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: also we've we're not going to mention every single handheld
Speaker 1: device that's ever been made, certainly not that would be
Speaker 1: very boring. It would also take like twenty episodes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're going to try to do like like a
Speaker 1: bird's eye view of some of the technology that was involved.
Speaker 1: But um, but we might branch a little bit of
Speaker 1: the more in depth information about that kind of stuff
Speaker 1: off into a different episode in the future, right right.
Speaker 1: Some of these, like friends instance, the I'm sure you've
Speaker 1: heard of a little obscure handheld device called the game Boy.
Speaker 1: Some of these could be their own episode from start
Speaker 1: to finish, so easily a two part our episode all
Speaker 1: on its own. So we are really kind of giving
Speaker 1: an idea of how the whole how the whole industry developed,
Speaker 1: how it evolved over time. We'll we'll give some technical
Speaker 1: specs here and there, but really this is more of
Speaker 1: a history lesson than anything else. And also, we're going
Speaker 1: to go ahead and skip any of the gaming devices
Speaker 1: out there that were specifically made as unlicensed clones of
Speaker 1: other gaming devices, right, that I think would make an
Speaker 1: interesting sub topic, separate topic. But no, we're not going
Speaker 1: to go into every single thing that has come out
Speaker 1: of China illegally past thirty years, right. And we have
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about these sort of things, like
Speaker 1: in our our episode about smart watches and digital watches,
Speaker 1: we mentioned a couple that were able to play games.
Speaker 1: One of those will pop up in this discussion, so
Speaker 1: spoiler alert. Yeah, And and if you would like to
Speaker 1: check out that episode, about digital watches. It was a
Speaker 1: two parter that we recorded back in July called Time
Speaker 1: for Smart Watches. You can tell that Jonathan titles these episodes.
Speaker 1: I got a lot of time on my hands, so
Speaker 1: that's what I do. Also, we are going to uh
Speaker 1: have to address one other fact, which is that in
Speaker 1: the beginning, these things were primitive, right. I mean, these
Speaker 1: were not like the kind of advanced graphics you would
Speaker 1: expect with a handheld gaming device back in the day,
Speaker 1: which was back in the late seventies. We're talking about
Speaker 1: a blip that you in control to get around or
Speaker 1: fight or otherwise compete against other blips. Absolutely, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is the digital equivalent of monkeys banging bones on
Speaker 1: the car. Yeah, it's pretty much like just kind of
Speaker 1: the you know, everyone has to start somewhere, right, So
Speaker 1: if you want to be specific and say, well, what
Speaker 1: was the first handheld game? And keep in mind these
Speaker 1: games were coming into prominence around the same time as
Speaker 1: arcades becoming popular and also home video game consoles becoming popular.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing about a home video game console, Lauren,
Speaker 1: It's not easy to carry around with you. No, especially
Speaker 1: not in that day when miniaturization was not so much
Speaker 1: a thing yet. Yeah, especially since uh, I mean, you
Speaker 1: don't want to carry a TV, especially in nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: TV around with you wherever you go, so you can
Speaker 1: play this game. So these were these were a good
Speaker 1: alternative for people who wanted to have something on the go,
Speaker 1: especially I'll tell you the best use case. I know,
Speaker 1: parents who want to get their kids to shut up
Speaker 1: on long road trips. That's exactly what I was about
Speaker 1: to say. Yes, so what was the very first handheld
Speaker 1: electronic game that we know of? Uh? It was actually
Speaker 1: by Mattel, which is crazy to me. And and it
Speaker 1: was MATEL Electronics Auto Race yep. And in fact, there
Speaker 1: are several different games that came out from Mattel. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about another one in just a second. Uh. And
Speaker 1: some people get the order a little mixed up. But
Speaker 1: if you were to get hold of one of these
Speaker 1: original handheld devices, and there are still some out there
Speaker 1: on eBay, and you know, collectors love these things. On
Speaker 1: the back copyright nine, and it packed a wallop. It
Speaker 1: had five hundred and twelve bytes of memory. That's a
Speaker 1: whole half. Yeah, that's that's what it had to work with.
Speaker 1: If you were to look at a model of these.
Speaker 1: We'll try and get some pictures together so that we
Speaker 1: can share them on social at some point. But this
Speaker 1: one in particular, er it looks kind of like a
Speaker 1: big plastic brick that has, you know, some switches and
Speaker 1: a little slider control on it. And if you were
Speaker 1: to look at the brick and look at the the
Speaker 1: say the upper right hand side of the brick, there's
Speaker 1: a vertical strip that goes down that side. That would
Speaker 1: be three quote unquote lanes of traffic. And so you
Speaker 1: were your job was to drive a car, which in
Speaker 1: this case was a little red blip, and that car
Speaker 1: would gradually move up this vertical strip on that right
Speaker 1: side of the game console um and then these other
Speaker 1: smaller red blips would be coming down the lanes. Those
Speaker 1: represented oncoming traffic, and your job was to steer between
Speaker 1: those blips to try and get to the top of
Speaker 1: your that little thin strip on the right side, and
Speaker 1: then you would reappear at the bottom. And you had
Speaker 1: to do this four times. If you could get all
Speaker 1: the way to the top four times, you made four
Speaker 1: quote unquote laps, and your score was how many seconds
Speaker 1: it took you to get there. So a lower score
Speaker 1: was better, and in fact it had some other sophisticated controls.
Speaker 1: It hadn't start and reset, but it was really on
Speaker 1: and off. And then I had a gear switch, which
Speaker 1: was gears one through four, which really just meant that's
Speaker 1: how fast the oncoming blips would come at you. You know,
Speaker 1: the higher the gear, the faster they would approach. And
Speaker 1: I actually watched the video of a guy saying, here's
Speaker 1: the strategy to this game. You position your thumb so
Speaker 1: that you do an upward motion that hits on and
Speaker 1: then immediately switches the gears from one to four because
Speaker 1: you couldn't just start in four, you had to start
Speaker 1: in one. So if you could do it at one
Speaker 1: smooth motion, then you would immediately be in that fourth
Speaker 1: gear going as fast as you possibly can. And that's
Speaker 1: how you would cut down on your on your time.
Speaker 1: And they were making like times of thirty five or
Speaker 1: forty seconds and saying, I'm really bad at this game.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking, you know, it's a simple premise, but
Speaker 1: I don't think I don't have the reflexes. Oh sure,
Speaker 1: sure that sounds like like my horror version of Frogger.
Speaker 1: Um uh, this the entire display was just red led um.
Speaker 1: And if you're thinking that this sounds like, well, that's
Speaker 1: only one game. How is this a a portable gaming system?
Speaker 1: A lot of these early ones were a single game
Speaker 1: per system. Yeah. Yeah. And just like the earliest game
Speaker 1: consoles for your home television set, like the Odyssey that
Speaker 1: was essentially Pong. Might it might be like ten different
Speaker 1: versions of Pong, but they're all ultimately Pong. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: it was just hard coded directly onto the computer system.
Speaker 1: So and that was all it would ever do. Now
Speaker 1: nine marks the debut of a second game from Mattel Electronics.
Speaker 1: And this is one that I've actually played. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I owned it or not, because you're talking
Speaker 1: about a time in my childhood when I was quite
Speaker 1: young and Lauren didn't exist yet I did not. So
Speaker 1: this is Mattel Electronics Football, one of the really popular games.
Speaker 1: Effects so popular that they made a sequel called wait
Speaker 1: for it, Football Too, and uh it had six control
Speaker 1: buttons and again you would control a little red dot
Speaker 1: that represented a football player and you had to try
Speaker 1: and work your way across the yardage the massive amount
Speaker 1: of yardage by that, I mean nine yards to try
Speaker 1: and score against the other team, and um it was
Speaker 1: interesting because there was a great interview with one of
Speaker 1: the guys who was behind the building of these things
Speaker 1: that I ran across, and he was talking about why
Speaker 1: the football players like little bitty red dashes. Everything in
Speaker 1: that day looked like little bitty red dashes. It's because
Speaker 1: they were using calculator microprocessors, and in fact, those processors
Speaker 1: are designed to show things like little digital numbers, right,
Speaker 1: So so those dots were like the segment of a number. Yeah,
Speaker 1: specifically the number eight. So yes, you were actually playing
Speaker 1: as a segment of the number eight and you were
Speaker 1: going up against other segments of the number eight, and
Speaker 1: uh yeah. Eventually, uh Tell would end up contracting with
Speaker 1: a company called National Semiconductor, which have you've been listening
Speaker 1: to tech stuff for a long time, you've heard us
Speaker 1: talk about that company, and it was to get sea
Speaker 1: moss chips rather than old calculator chips. And then they
Speaker 1: contracted with another company called Rockwell International to do the
Speaker 1: actual hard coding programming onto those chips. So that's where
Speaker 1: they started to uh kind of make more advanced versions
Speaker 1: of these early games. Now these games were not exactly
Speaker 1: um well, they had some trouble early on. See the
Speaker 1: agreement here was between Mattel and the department store Sears, right,
Speaker 1: and Sears completely doubted that they were going to be
Speaker 1: popular and therefore halted production at only a hundred thousand units. Yep.
Speaker 1: But it turned out that Sears had grossly underestimated the
Speaker 1: demand for home you know, portable electronic games, and they
Speaker 1: were so popular. Series immediately realized they had made the
Speaker 1: wrongest vision. So by mid January of nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: Now keep in mind Football came out in ninety seven,
Speaker 1: so these things have been on the market for a
Speaker 1: couple of years. Yeah, yeah, just kind of stagnating exactly.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't really It's one of those things where
Speaker 1: no one was really sure how to market them, and
Speaker 1: but now they were taking off. So by mid January
Speaker 1: night Sears said they wanted two hundred thousand units per week,
Speaker 1: not not a hundred thousand total, two hundred thousand every week.
Speaker 1: And then by February they said, you know, we were wrong,
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand per week. So Mattel said, huh, I
Speaker 1: think we know how to make money now. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: when they started producing a whole bunch of different games.
Speaker 1: That's sequel football to UM and also like Armor Attack, Subchase,
Speaker 1: Missile Attack. UM. I think there was a Dungeons and
Speaker 1: Dragons game there was. I took a look at it.
Speaker 1: It was um, you know, again, fairly primitive. Now now,
Speaker 1: at this point they were starting to work not just
Speaker 1: with l E ED displays, but also l c D displays,
Speaker 1: liquid crystal displays. So this is what a lot of
Speaker 1: you if you've ever had one of those um little
Speaker 1: handheld games, maybe it was licensed after an existing arcade
Speaker 1: game or a cartoon or movie or something you're probably
Speaker 1: familiar with. These are also the ones that you would
Speaker 1: see on watches a lot of times. Uh, super cheap
Speaker 1: to produce, very limited in their animation, very limited in
Speaker 1: what they could actually display, but still compared to a
Speaker 1: little blip on an l e ED screen, just a
Speaker 1: little dot, incredibly sophisticated and much less eye bleedy. LED
Speaker 1: displays tend to give me terrible headache. Yeah I can't
Speaker 1: at that rate. I also just have nightmares. Remember remembering
Speaker 1: the sound effects from football and football too, and yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're not all pleasant memories. But yeah, ninety nine,
Speaker 1: that's when we see the first like Mate looks. I
Speaker 1: was amazed to learn that this particular technology goes all
Speaker 1: the way back to nine, right, and we're talking now
Speaker 1: about rom cartridges. Yeah, so keep in mind those games
Speaker 1: we just talked about, like Laurence said, they were hard coded.
Speaker 1: You could not change those games out. What you bought
Speaker 1: was what you bought. But that was not the way
Speaker 1: of the future. Milton Bradley Company, Yeah, one of the
Speaker 1: one of the competitors of Mattel, especially at the time
Speaker 1: and in the gaming or not gaming but well board industry, right,
Speaker 1: produced this thing called the Microvision. Right, So they decided
Speaker 1: we're gonna do something similar to what some of the
Speaker 1: home video game consoles were starting to do, like the
Speaker 1: Atari system was was doing this creating a system that
Speaker 1: could play cartridges, so you could switch out what game
Speaker 1: you were playing. So now you weren't buying a single game,
Speaker 1: you were buying a platform upon which to play games,
Speaker 1: which is the way most of us are familiar with
Speaker 1: games today, right. I mean, when I go out and
Speaker 1: buy a game system, I expect I'm going to play
Speaker 1: more than just one game, more than just the Xbox
Speaker 1: at any rate. So this Microvision had a monoch from
Speaker 1: l c D, which was a a screaming big sixteen
Speaker 1: by sixteen pixel yeah resolution. Yeah, I mean at that resolution,
Speaker 1: you just you could pick out every single detail on
Speaker 1: that block that was yeah. Um. Also it had a
Speaker 1: pad on it that had nine sections of interactivity on it,
Speaker 1: which was which you didn't you didn't actually just use
Speaker 1: the naked pad. That's not how this game worked, right,
Speaker 1: That the cartridges that snapped in and out of the
Speaker 1: game would include their own buttons to overlay on top
Speaker 1: of that path exactly. So you can think of the
Speaker 1: cartridges as being half cartridge half case, and then you
Speaker 1: would pop the case open and put a new case
Speaker 1: on it in order to play a new game. That
Speaker 1: would also include overlays, which were a big thing back
Speaker 1: in the seventies and eighties, which would increase the playability
Speaker 1: by giving you would have a different, um superficial layer
Speaker 1: on top of the game. So it's permanent because it's
Speaker 1: an overlay, it's doesn't change at all, but it gives
Speaker 1: the games a certain uh personality. Yeah, and also would
Speaker 1: cut down on the work that the processor would have
Speaker 1: to do. You know, you give you more space to
Speaker 1: to play with your little blips and blobs exactly, and
Speaker 1: the system itself did have a little built in analog
Speaker 1: control knobs so that you could have some some basic
Speaker 1: functionality without using the other buttons, or in addition to
Speaker 1: the other buttons that any particular game would come with.
Speaker 1: We have more to say about handheld gaming systems in
Speaker 1: just a moment, but first let's take a quick right.
Speaker 1: I love the site this this Little this Little caveat
Speaker 1: about how it had serious electronics problems, including a lack
Speaker 1: of proper Faraday installation, which means that aesthetic charge could
Speaker 1: render your microvision inoperable, basically useless, or or at least
Speaker 1: permanently damaged in a way that it would never come
Speaker 1: back from. Same same sort of idea that when you're
Speaker 1: putting together a computer, you want to make sure that
Speaker 1: you discharge you yeah, yeah, the same, which makes sense
Speaker 1: because when you took the cartridge off, then you have
Speaker 1: a naked Yeah, so that would be um, yeah, good
Speaker 1: good tip, thanks Lauren. Yeah, And that's that is probably
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why even though the system where
Speaker 1: it was moderately popular, Milton Bradley did stop producing it
Speaker 1: only two or three years later. One furthermore, only thirteen
Speaker 1: games were ever produced for the Microvision. Wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I only could find twelve games that my oht one
Speaker 1: was only available in European markets, correct, which is a
Speaker 1: pretty common weird wiggie thing that happens, especially in these
Speaker 1: early days, although although still modernly like like, different games
Speaker 1: and different systems will only be available in Europe, or
Speaker 1: in the US or in Japan. Really frequently only in Japan. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll get You'll get entire systems that are available only
Speaker 1: in a single region. But even within the ones that
Speaker 1: span multiple regions. There are some titles. Sometimes game publishers
Speaker 1: say this title is never going to do well in
Speaker 1: ex country for why reasons, right, and until basically these days,
Speaker 1: the Internet proves the wrong and someone actually spends the
Speaker 1: money to port it over, yeah, or pirate it more
Speaker 1: likely that right. So by by now we're getting right
Speaker 1: into the very beginning of the eighties, and that's when
Speaker 1: we start seeing l c D technology becoming so cheap
Speaker 1: that uh that LED displays become kind of a thing
Speaker 1: in the past. So you know, company has already been
Speaker 1: kind of experimenting with it, but now it was something
Speaker 1: that they could do without having to charge huge amounts
Speaker 1: of money for relatively limited devices. So we start seeing
Speaker 1: better displays and fewer of those little blip ones, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, we're still treasured by collectors. Absolutely, miniaturization
Speaker 1: was also reaching the point that we were seeing, I mean,
Speaker 1: it was a lot cheaper to produce things, and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: and and it also meant that we can make smaller
Speaker 1: and smaller things, so you no longer had this giant,
Speaker 1: bulky brick for everything, at least not anything that was basic.
Speaker 1: And it even led to one of the things we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about in just a second, the the infamous
Speaker 1: digital watch games. So something that you've got to keep
Speaker 1: in mind is that this is the this is the
Speaker 1: era where everybody got into this. Mattel had shown they
Speaker 1: had struck gold with this idea. Also, consoles, home consoles
Speaker 1: were very popular at times, so so it was a
Speaker 1: huge industry. Everyone was saying, we got to get in
Speaker 1: on this. So here's just a quick list and not
Speaker 1: even an exhaustive list, but a quick list of some
Speaker 1: some game companies that got really famous for the handheld
Speaker 1: devices they produced. And you're probably gonna recognize some of
Speaker 1: these names. Acclaim, Atari, Bondai, Cassio, Colico, Galube, Kinner, Konami, Namco,
Speaker 1: Parker Brothers, Tandy, Texas Instruments, Tiger, and many many more.
Speaker 1: I like that was alphabetized. Yeah, well I took it
Speaker 1: from an alphabetized list, and I was too wazy to
Speaker 1: mix them up. Uh. In nineteen eighty, that's when we
Speaker 1: get the Casio game ten, which was one of the
Speaker 1: watches we mentioned I believe in our Digital Watch smart
Speaker 1: Watch episodes. Yeah, it was the first video game watch.
Speaker 1: It had a version of space invaders, yes, and it
Speaker 1: was like three lines of dashes that you could shoot
Speaker 1: with your little dot. But again you use buttons on
Speaker 1: the side of the watch to control your your little
Speaker 1: your little ship and fight off against these space invaders,
Speaker 1: which again were just sort of dashes. Oh and also
Speaker 1: very important it also told the time. Yes, important side
Speaker 1: note about this watch. Um. Also in Nintendo started releasing
Speaker 1: this entire series of hard coded handheld video games called
Speaker 1: called Game and Watch, and the very first one was
Speaker 1: Ball Yeah really fancy. Yeah. You played as a juggler,
Speaker 1: which I appreciate being a juggler myself. Um. And the object,
Speaker 1: of course was to keep multiple objects in the air
Speaker 1: and not let any of them drop. And you had
Speaker 1: two controls which essentially controlled the juggler arms arms. Okay,
Speaker 1: and that's one other thing I was going to mention
Speaker 1: also was that these hard coded games. You may wonder
Speaker 1: how did they stick around long after we started getting
Speaker 1: these cartridge based systems. One of the ways they stuck
Speaker 1: around is that they could have specific controls for that
Speaker 1: game that are unique, you know, not just your little
Speaker 1: direction pad and buttons. Sure you and you don't have
Speaker 1: to recode the buttons for it every time that you
Speaker 1: want to play a different game or learn a new
Speaker 1: controller schematic. It's just that thing specialized. So it's very specific. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that way it ended up filling a niche that
Speaker 1: your generic, you know, cartridge based systems couldn't because the
Speaker 1: game control is always going to be the same unless
Speaker 1: you build buy some sort of crazy peripheral that can
Speaker 1: also plug into it. Anyway, the Game and Watch series
Speaker 1: was incredibly popular. They produced sixty different games under that brand.
Speaker 1: Only one of those was one you could not buy.
Speaker 1: It was actually a prize. You had to win it
Speaker 1: in a in a contest type thing, uh and um.
Speaker 1: And they would release several different models of the over
Speaker 1: the years. Eventually, starting in nine two, they started releasing
Speaker 1: games that had two screens set up in this clamshell
Speaker 1: kind of thing that looks bloody exactly like the Nintendo DS.
Speaker 1: It really does. And you know, you look at this
Speaker 1: and you're like, huh. All the way back in two
Speaker 1: they had this idea and uh, and it was you know,
Speaker 1: it was one of those that ended up really paying
Speaker 1: off down the line. So they had a lot of
Speaker 1: different models, a lot of different designs. Um they also
Speaker 1: they're under different names, like you have the Silver, uh,
Speaker 1: you have the Gold, Uh, you had the multi screen,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And then he had tabletop and the tabletop.
Speaker 1: They introduced those in three. They look like teeny tiny
Speaker 1: arcade machines. So I had a friend who had Pac Man.
Speaker 1: I think it was either pac Man or Donkey Kong,
Speaker 1: one of the two. But it looks like a little
Speaker 1: mature arcade. It's probably Donkey Kong now I think about
Speaker 1: because it's a Nintendo. So yeah, a little like tiny
Speaker 1: little arcade machines. So it's really a tabletop, not so
Speaker 1: much a handheld, but you could have held it in
Speaker 1: your hands. You just wouldn't be able to control both
Speaker 1: the joystick and the buttons very easily. But um but
Speaker 1: it was you know again one of those they only
Speaker 1: produced four, So Donkey Kong Jr. That's the one I
Speaker 1: was because they didn't do Pacman. It was Donkey Kong Jr. Snoopy,
Speaker 1: Mario's Cement Factory, and Popeye. So um yeah, mostly notable
Speaker 1: because they had this very evocative form factor. Unfortunately, ine
Speaker 1: that that was also the year that the video game
Speaker 1: console industry crashed. Yeah, we all know the story. You know.
Speaker 1: The market was flooded with with game games and game
Speaker 1: systems that ranged in quality from pretty good to abysmal.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, there were a lot of the abysmal category, uh,
Speaker 1: including the infamous pac Man Atari Port and the e
Speaker 1: T the Extraterrestrial Game. So it ended up crashing that
Speaker 1: that whole industry. However, handheld games fared better than the
Speaker 1: video game cons did one because they're less expensive and
Speaker 1: too they fulfill a different need than the home video
Speaker 1: game console. So very interesting. And then we also saw
Speaker 1: at this time some experimentation with cartridge based systems similar
Speaker 1: to what Microvision had tried. They included game systems like
Speaker 1: the Intexts select a game, which I think only had
Speaker 1: five or six game titles ever come out, the v
Speaker 1: Tech Variety, Palm Text, super Micro, and the Epoch game
Speaker 1: pocket Computer. And if you haven't heard of any of these,
Speaker 1: I guess that kind of indicates what happened. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's pretty indicative. Yeah. So still they knew that this
Speaker 1: was going to be a thing, like people were going
Speaker 1: to want to have a system where they could play
Speaker 1: multiple games, not just a single game hardcoded onto it.
Speaker 1: But no one had cracked that code yet. Guys, have
Speaker 1: gotta hand it to you. This classic episodes pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick break, Okay, So, Lauren, I
Speaker 1: had hinted that the next system we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about really cracks the whole problem of building a cartridge
Speaker 1: based system that that resonates. What was I talking about?
Speaker 1: You were probably talking about Nintendo's game Boy. Whole boy.
Speaker 1: What you know, if you want to talk about cracking
Speaker 1: the code, game Boy remains one of the top selling
Speaker 1: consoles of all time period, doesn't matter if you're talking handheld.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're talking handheld, it is, but I
Speaker 1: mean in just video game consoles, it's still one of
Speaker 1: the Top. Oh yeah, yeah, and this came out, So
Speaker 1: we're skipping ahead a few years. There wasn't much development
Speaker 1: on the scene. Yeah, a lot of more of those
Speaker 1: hard coded games. We had talked about um and it
Speaker 1: was developed by gun Pay. Yes, and gun Pay. We
Speaker 1: talked about him in an episode when I when I
Speaker 1: did an episode about the history of Nintendo, we talked
Speaker 1: about gun pay okoy because he was very, very influential
Speaker 1: at Nintendo, both for some things that were incredibly popular
Speaker 1: and and one thing in particular that was a notable flop.
Speaker 1: So among the popular ones, where the game Boy, which
Speaker 1: again one of the most popular game consoles of all time,
Speaker 1: also Metroid of one of the most successful video game franchises,
Speaker 1: and then hey, the Virtual Boy, which totally not successful.
Speaker 1: A Virtual Boy technically kind of falls into the handheld category,
Speaker 1: depending upon whom you ask. I didn't add it into
Speaker 1: our notes because I was like, I don't really think
Speaker 1: that there's a handheld. I mean, I think that was
Speaker 1: definitely a desktop. Anything where you're wearing it and it's
Speaker 1: blocking your vision. I can't imagine that being, you know, handheld.
Speaker 1: Plus that thing would make you sick when you're just
Speaker 1: sitting still. Can you imagine how you would feel after
Speaker 1: five minutes of playing one of those in the back
Speaker 1: of a car. I would certainly not want to wear
Speaker 1: it around like I kind of want to wear the
Speaker 1: Oculus Rift around everywhere. I would be acting like crazy, y'all.
Speaker 1: So anyway, the Nintendo game Boy ended up using four
Speaker 1: double A batteries, and it was actually a pretty good
Speaker 1: about not gobbling them up immediately, right. I think that
Speaker 1: that like, like colloquially, most people got about twenty hours
Speaker 1: and can play out of it. Nintendo claimed that you
Speaker 1: could go up to thirty five. I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: I ever did that personal right, well, but part of
Speaker 1: the reason why it was so efficient was that it
Speaker 1: was a monochromatic screen and it was not back lit.
Speaker 1: So in other words, if you were in a dark
Speaker 1: room and you turned your game Boy on, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: though you have to turn the light on. In fact,
Speaker 1: there were there were accessories that were sold where it
Speaker 1: was that little is like a book light exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So uh, but that meant that you didn't have to
Speaker 1: spend extra power to keep a light lit, so that
Speaker 1: helped conserve battery life. Sure, despite that, the resolution was
Speaker 1: pretty good. It was one way better than that sixteen
Speaker 1: by sixteen panel we talked about from a few years back.
Speaker 1: All right, for the time it was it was pretty shiny, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it had four different shades of gray. Well by
Speaker 1: bye gray, you mean like green to black, but yeah,
Speaker 1: they called it gray, but yes, it really was green
Speaker 1: to black gray. And you could actually have the reports
Speaker 1: where you could link game boys together. That was, I
Speaker 1: mean incredibly forward thinking at the time. You're talking about
Speaker 1: allowing multiple play, and it's not just I'm going to
Speaker 1: take a turn. Oh my turn is over. Now I
Speaker 1: hand this device to you and you take a turn.
Speaker 1: That's the way the old systems were. So to have
Speaker 1: something like this as a dense is this where you
Speaker 1: could potentially linked together two different systems and play the
Speaker 1: same game, was pretty phenomenal. Now, the original game Boy today,
Speaker 1: a lot of players call it the brick. It was
Speaker 1: pretty large, yeah, and it the way it was laid out,
Speaker 1: if you have never seen an original game Boy, imagined
Speaker 1: a rectangle and at the top of the rectangle is
Speaker 1: kind of a squarish screen, and below the screen is
Speaker 1: where you would find the directional pad and the two
Speaker 1: years to be and the A and so there was
Speaker 1: there were some problems with people playing for a long
Speaker 1: time in game their hands kind of cramped up because
Speaker 1: the controls were right there below the screen and not
Speaker 1: to either side the way we're used to now. But
Speaker 1: still very innovative. And I think I think it was
Speaker 1: the perfect storm in that there was a game paired
Speaker 1: with game Boy that together it was an unstoppable force.
Speaker 1: Do do do do Do Do Do Do Do Do
Speaker 1: Do do do do do do do do do do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Jonathan of course is talking about Tetris or singing about
Speaker 1: Tetris the case maybe singing is very generous. I think
Speaker 1: you for it. But yes, Tetris one of the most
Speaker 1: popular titles in video game history. And uh, I mean,
Speaker 1: we should do a podcast just about Tetris. At some
Speaker 1: point I talked about that you have not already? Yeah,
Speaker 1: well we could never fitted in. Oh no, at any rate.
Speaker 1: Uh I even looked off like what would have been
Speaker 1: off camera for that? That's how bad that pun was.
Speaker 1: Um At any rate, the fact that Tetris was so
Speaker 1: popular and that the Game Boy was such a great
Speaker 1: form factor in the sense you could take it anywhere
Speaker 1: you have this incredibly addictive puzzle game, this incredibly portable platform.
Speaker 1: It was a perfect match. I mean when I think
Speaker 1: game Boy, that's the first game I think of. You know,
Speaker 1: I also think of some of the Mario games, because
Speaker 1: those were really popular too, but but Tetris is the one.
Speaker 1: I mean, anyone I knew who had a game Boy
Speaker 1: that was in heavy rotation, no matter what other games
Speaker 1: they owned, so incredibly forward thinking on that part too.
Speaker 1: It was also relatively inexpensive. It retailed for a D
Speaker 1: nine dollars, so you know, not not chump change. But
Speaker 1: still we're going to talk about some game systems that
Speaker 1: came out, you know, either around this time or shortly
Speaker 1: thereafter that. We're much more expensive and not nearly as
Speaker 1: popular for multiple reasons, but one of them is that
Speaker 1: you know, they cost more. So uh yeah, game Boy
Speaker 1: ends up being a huge hit. It's it's, you know,
Speaker 1: compared to today's systems, not the most powerful one, but uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they made some great decisions. They they went
Speaker 1: with the cartridge based game systems, which load instantly so
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about you know, if you're
Speaker 1: used to an optical drive and you have to wait
Speaker 1: for a game to load spin up. Yeah, that's one thing,
Speaker 1: but if you're used to cartridge based systems, you don't
Speaker 1: even know what load time means. So it was really
Speaker 1: really fast, and um yeah, it got a couple of updates, actually,
Speaker 1: probably half a dozen or so updates before we get
Speaker 1: to the next true version of the game Boy. Right.
Speaker 1: Over the next several years, there would be a slimmer
Speaker 1: version that had a true gray scale screen called the
Speaker 1: game Boy Pocket, and in Japan there was a version
Speaker 1: called the game Boy Light that had a backlit screen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so its l I g h T not l I
Speaker 1: T right, but yeah, we um. We wouldn't see a
Speaker 1: color screen update to the game Boy for almost a decade,
Speaker 1: which gave a bunch of its competitors a really good
Speaker 1: into the market. Yeah, or at least appeared that way
Speaker 1: for some of them. They did a pretty good job. Others,
Speaker 1: like the one we're about to talk about, had a
Speaker 1: rougher start. So that same year that the Game Boy
Speaker 1: comes out for Nintendo, Atari releases their first handheld gaming system,
Speaker 1: their first like handheld cartridge based gaming system, the links
Speaker 1: Ye L Y n X, And so it's the first
Speaker 1: color handheld portable video games system, and it also had
Speaker 1: multiplayer functionality. Now, this thing, if you looked at it
Speaker 1: was very wide, the screen was in the center, the
Speaker 1: controls were off to either side. Um. It was originally
Speaker 1: actually called the Handy or sometimes called the Handy Boy,
Speaker 1: depending upon who you ask, were the Handy Pack. That's
Speaker 1: because it was developed by this other company called Epics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Epics started shopping it around. They went to ce
Speaker 1: S way back in nine and started to uh to
Speaker 1: meet with other companies and say, look, we've developed this hardware.
Speaker 1: Are you interested. Nintendo said, you know, we've got our
Speaker 1: own thing. We're gonna pass. But Atari said, you know,
Speaker 1: we really wanted it back into this market, and this
Speaker 1: is this looks like it's a great way of doing it.
Speaker 1: So they partnered together and they launched this. Now they
Speaker 1: were billing it as being much more powerful than the
Speaker 1: Game Boy. It had had that color screen, so that
Speaker 1: alone made it appear, at least on the surface, to
Speaker 1: be a better system. But there were a couple of
Speaker 1: things against it. Yeah, it was it was heavier, it
Speaker 1: was more clunky. Um, it was almost twice as expensive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a big one. And also they had a
Speaker 1: real hard time getting developers to make games for it
Speaker 1: that really took advantage of the Links's abilities, which is
Speaker 1: a story we've heard time and time again with various systems.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, I mean, you know, the specs on this
Speaker 1: thing were pretty spectacular. It was on par with some
Speaker 1: of the consoles that were coming out at the time,
Speaker 1: but without the developers to make the games. Yeah, then
Speaker 1: eventually they would end up offering a basic links system,
Speaker 1: which meant they didn't include all the connection cables you
Speaker 1: could have UM and that is about ARS. But that
Speaker 1: was too little, too late because the game Boy had
Speaker 1: had such a trounced it. Yeah, they had already had
Speaker 1: such a big initial push, they were ahead of the game,
Speaker 1: and literally they would try one more time with the
Speaker 1: with the links to UM which which was more compact,
Speaker 1: but but still didn't really ever make any headway and
Speaker 1: would eventually fade out of production over the next couple
Speaker 1: of years. Uh. Now, this was one of my favorite systems,
Speaker 1: just for what it could do. I didn't own one,
Speaker 1: I had a friend who owned one. I had a
Speaker 1: lot of friends who owned games. I got a lot
Speaker 1: of vicurious joy out of the friends who lived in
Speaker 1: my neighborhood. But this one was the ANYC Turbo Express.
Speaker 1: So if you've ever heard of the video game called Soul,
Speaker 1: called the Turbo Graphics sixteen, this thing was a handheld
Speaker 1: gaming device that could play those games. Like you could
Speaker 1: get the Turbo Graphics sixteen cartridge plug it into this thing,
Speaker 1: which I guess you can make imagine. Was that was
Speaker 1: a little clunky, you know, and also drained batteries like
Speaker 1: nothing comments. Yeah, okay, so batteries were expensive back then.
Speaker 1: They're still not cheap, so it would drain batteries really fast.
Speaker 1: But but but at least the Turbo Express itself was
Speaker 1: modestly priced at a oh two dollars never mind, I
Speaker 1: don't know where I was going with that. Yeah, speaking
Speaker 1: of expensive, but but but it did have a color display, um,
Speaker 1: it had a similar to the Nintendo model, the directional pad,
Speaker 1: and two very very much the standard game control. And also,
Speaker 1: for an additional price, if you wanted to spend more
Speaker 1: than the two dollars plus the hundred dollars or so
Speaker 1: in batteries to keep it going, you could get a
Speaker 1: optional television tuner and turn it into a portable TV.
Speaker 1: So I mean it was it was interesting to me,
Speaker 1: and that this was the first attempt to build a
Speaker 1: handheld video game system that could play video game consoles
Speaker 1: like a television console games and and not a port.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm talking about the exact same game that
Speaker 1: to me was really phenomenal. Was also the year that
Speaker 1: the first serious competitor to the Game Boy came out.
Speaker 1: And by serious competitor, I mean they did a decent job.
Speaker 1: They didn't it wasn't the game Boy was in danger.
Speaker 1: But they didn't just appear and then disappear, certainly not.
Speaker 1: This is the Sega Game Gear, and at the time,
Speaker 1: the second Genesis was the leading console, so so it
Speaker 1: had some serious firepower behind it. Now, originally it was
Speaker 1: it was when it was top secret, it was still
Speaker 1: in development. It was not called the game Gear. I know,
Speaker 1: it was called the Project Mercury. Yeah. At the time,
Speaker 1: Sega was naming all of its different projects after planets,
Speaker 1: which shouldn't come as a surprise if you owned a
Speaker 1: Sega Saturn. Oh right, yeah, so at a lot of Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of cool. I mean it's I love finding
Speaker 1: out like Apple calls all their stuff after cats. But okay,
Speaker 1: so this one cost less than the Turbo Express. It
Speaker 1: was not trying to They were trying really hard to
Speaker 1: kind of be competitive in that same space as the
Speaker 1: as the Game Boy. It was more expensive than a
Speaker 1: game Boy because it was at a d when it launched.
Speaker 1: But but that's but that's not as as much. Hundred
Speaker 1: dollars less than the Turbo Express. Yeah, it had that
Speaker 1: color screen, it was cartridge based. It came with a
Speaker 1: single game kind of replicant of of Tetris columns if
Speaker 1: you remember that it was. It was a puzzle based game.
Speaker 1: So it was clear they they saw a game Boy
Speaker 1: and its success with Tetris and said, let's make sure
Speaker 1: we pair this with a puzzle game so we can
Speaker 1: get all those casual gamers hooked and then we'll be
Speaker 1: we have a license to print money. Uh. And actually
Speaker 1: it did, like I said, pretty well. They ended up
Speaker 1: producing more than two hundred fifty games over the lifetime
Speaker 1: of the Game Gear, which was up until now just
Speaker 1: like the Game Boy. We didn't mention this, but the
Speaker 1: game Boy and the Game Gear both could produce stereo sound,
Speaker 1: but only if you plugged in headphones because had a
Speaker 1: single single so very similar in some ways to the
Speaker 1: game Boy, and it was a good competitor against the
Speaker 1: Game Boy. However, the game Boy eventually just wins out
Speaker 1: over the fact that it had an incredible library of
Speaker 1: games that just grew year over year, and just again
Speaker 1: that price point seemed to be a magic spot that
Speaker 1: wraps up this classic episode. Obviously, next week we are
Speaker 1: going to listen to part two of this series to
Speaker 1: learn more about handheld gaming systems. This is one that
Speaker 1: I could clearly do a an update on since this
Speaker 1: episode originally published, So if you would be interested in that,
Speaker 1: or perhaps there's some other topic you would like me
Speaker 1: to cover, reach out on Twitter. The handle is text
Speaker 1: stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y.
Speaker 1: Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.