Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text stuff from half
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Either we wanted Welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickler and I'm Lauren Vocam, and today we're
Speaker 1: going to take a look at the history of handheld
Speaker 1: video games and electronic games. And it's um, it's a doozy,
Speaker 1: isn't it, Lauren. Yeah. As it turns out, even though
Speaker 1: this has really only been happening for about forty years now,
Speaker 1: there have been many much developments, many different handheld gaming consoles,
Speaker 1: a lot of different things have come out. This is
Speaker 1: definitely going to be a two parter, but in the
Speaker 1: interests of not going into exhaustive detail about too many things,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna try to keep it snappy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And also we've we're not going to mention every single
Speaker 1: handheld device that's ever been made, certainly not that would
Speaker 1: be 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. Uh,
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: to have to address one other fact, which is that
Speaker 1: in the beginning, these things were primitive, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: these were not like the kind of advanced graphics you
Speaker 1: would 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 would control two 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 card. Yeah, it's pretty much like just kind of
Speaker 1: the the You know, everyone has to start somewhere, right,
Speaker 1: So if you want to be specific and say, well,
Speaker 1: what was the first handheld game? And keep in mind
Speaker 1: these games were coming into prominence around the same time
Speaker 1: as arcades becoming popular and also home video game consoles
Speaker 1: becoming popular. But here's the thing about a home video
Speaker 1: game console, Lauren, It's not easy to carry around with you. No,
Speaker 1: especially not in that day when miniaturization was not so
Speaker 1: much a thing yet. Yeah, especially since uh, I mean
Speaker 1: you don't want to carry a TV, especially in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies TV around with you wherever you go, so you
Speaker 1: can play this game. So these were these were a
Speaker 1: good alternative for people who wanted to have something on
Speaker 1: the go, especially I'll tell you the best use case
Speaker 1: I know of parents who want to get their kids
Speaker 1: to shut up on long road trips. Exactly what I
Speaker 1: was about to say. So, what was the very first
Speaker 1: handheld electronic game that we know of? Uh? It was
Speaker 1: actually by Mattel, which is crazy to me. And and
Speaker 1: it was MATEL Electronics Auto Race yep. And in fact,
Speaker 1: there are several different games that came out from Mattel.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about another one in just a second. Uh.
Speaker 1: And some people get the order a little mixed up.
Speaker 1: But if you were to get hold of one of
Speaker 1: these original handheld devices, and there are still some out
Speaker 1: there on eBay, and you know, collectors love these things.
Speaker 1: On the back copyright nine and uh, it packed a wallop.
Speaker 1: It had five hundred and twelve bytes of memory. That's
Speaker 1: a whole half. Yeah, that's that's what it had to
Speaker 1: work with. If you were to look at a model
Speaker 1: of these, We'll try and get some pictures together so
Speaker 1: that we can share them on social at some point.
Speaker 1: But this one in particular, it looks kind of like
Speaker 1: a big plastic brick that has, you know, some switches
Speaker 1: and a little slider control on it. And if you
Speaker 1: were to look at the brick and look at the
Speaker 1: the say the upper right hand side of the brick,
Speaker 1: there's a vertical strip that goes down that side. That
Speaker 1: would be three quote unquote lanes of traffic. And so
Speaker 1: you were your job was to drive a car, which
Speaker 1: in this case was a little red blip, and that
Speaker 1: car would gradually move up this vertical strip on that
Speaker 1: right side of the game console um and then these
Speaker 1: other smaller red blips would be coming down the lanes.
Speaker 1: Those represented oncoming traffic, and your job was to steer
Speaker 1: between those blips to try and get to the top
Speaker 1: of your that little thin strip on the right side,
Speaker 1: and then you would reappear at the bottom. And you
Speaker 1: had to do this four times. If you could get
Speaker 1: all the way to the top four times, you made
Speaker 1: four quote unquote laps, and your score was how many
Speaker 1: seconds it took you to get there, So a lower
Speaker 1: score was better, And in fact, it had some other
Speaker 1: sophisticated controls. It had start and rees at but it
Speaker 1: was really on and off. And then I had a
Speaker 1: gear switch which was gears one through four, which really
Speaker 1: just meant that's how fast the oncoming blips would come
Speaker 1: at you. You know, the higher the gear, the faster
Speaker 1: they would approach. And I actually watched the video of
Speaker 1: a guy saying, here's the strategy to this game. You
Speaker 1: position your thumb so that you do an upward motion
Speaker 1: that hits on and then immediately switches the gears from
Speaker 1: one to four because you couldn't just start in four,
Speaker 1: you had to start in one. So if you could
Speaker 1: do it at one smooth motion, then you would immediately
Speaker 1: be in that fourth gear going as fast as you
Speaker 1: possibly can, and that's how you would cut down on
Speaker 1: your on your time. And they were making like times
Speaker 1: of thirty five or forty seconds and saying, I'm really
Speaker 1: bad at this game. And I'm thinking, you know, it's
Speaker 1: a simple premise, but I don't think I don't have
Speaker 1: the reflexes. Oh sure, sure that sounds like like my
Speaker 1: horror version of Frogger. Um. Yeah, this the entire display
Speaker 1: was just red led. And if you're thinking that this
Speaker 1: sounds like, well, that's only one game. How is this
Speaker 1: a a portable gaming system. A lot of these early
Speaker 1: ones were a single game per system. Yeah yeah, And
Speaker 1: just like the earliest game consoles for your home television set,
Speaker 1: like the Odessey that was essentially Pong, might be might
Speaker 1: be like ten different versions of Pong, but they're all
Speaker 1: ultimately palm. Yeah. And and it was just hard coded
Speaker 1: directly onto the computer system, and that was all it
Speaker 1: would ever do. Now, nineteen seven marks the debut of
Speaker 1: a second game from Mattel Electronics. And this is one
Speaker 1: that I've actually played. I don't know if I owned
Speaker 1: it or not, because you're talking about a time in
Speaker 1: my childhood when I was quite young and Lauren didn't
Speaker 1: exist yet I did not. So this is Mattel Electronics Football,
Speaker 1: one of the really popular games. Effect so popular that
Speaker 1: they made a sequel called wait for it, Football Too,
Speaker 1: And it had six control buttons, and again you would
Speaker 1: control a little red dot that represented a football player
Speaker 1: and you had to try and work your way across
Speaker 1: the yardage the massive amount of yardage by that, I
Speaker 1: mean nine yards to try and score against the other team.
Speaker 1: And um, it was interesting because there was a great
Speaker 1: interview with one of the guys who was behind the
Speaker 1: building of these things that I ran across, and he
Speaker 1: was talking about why the football players like little bitty
Speaker 1: red dashes. Everything in that day looked like little bitty
Speaker 1: red dashes. It's because they were using calculator microprocessors, and
Speaker 1: in fact, those processors are designed to show things like
Speaker 1: little digital numbers, right, So so those dots were like
Speaker 1: the segment of a number. Yeah, specifically the number eight.
Speaker 1: So yes, you were actually playing as a segment of
Speaker 1: the number eight, and you were going up against other
Speaker 1: segments of the number eight, and uh yeah. Eventually, uh
Speaker 1: Mattel would end up contracting with a company called National Semiconductor, which,
Speaker 1: of you've been listening to tech stuff for a long time,
Speaker 1: you've heard us talk about that company, and it was
Speaker 1: to get sea Moss chips rather than old calculator chips.
Speaker 1: And then they contracted with another company called Rockwell International
Speaker 1: to do the actual hard coding programming onto those chips.
Speaker 1: So that's where they started to uh kind of make
Speaker 1: more advanced versions of these early games. Now these games
Speaker 1: were not exactly um well, they had some trouble early on.
Speaker 1: See the agreement here was between Mattel and the department
Speaker 1: store Sears, right, and Sears completely doubted that they were
Speaker 1: going to be popular and therefore halted production at only
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand units. Yep. But it turned out that
Speaker 1: Sears had grossly underestimated the demand for home you know,
Speaker 1: portable electronic games, and they were so popular. Sears immediately
Speaker 1: realized they had made the wrong decision. So by mid
Speaker 1: January of nineteen seventy eight, Now keep in mind Football
Speaker 1: came out in nineteen seven, so these things have been
Speaker 1: on the market for a couple of years. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just kind of stagnating exactly. And it wasn't really It's
Speaker 1: one of those things where no one was really sure
Speaker 1: how to market them, and but now they were taking off.
Speaker 1: So by mid January night, Sear said they wanted two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand units per week, not not a hundred thousand total,
Speaker 1: two hundred thousand every week. And then by February they said,
Speaker 1: you know, we were wrong, five hundred thousand per week.
Speaker 1: So Mattel said, huh, I think we know how to
Speaker 1: make money now. Yeah. That's when they started producing a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of different games that sequel football to um
Speaker 1: and also like armor Attack, sub Chase, missile attack. Um,
Speaker 1: I think there was a Dungeons and Dragons game there was.
Speaker 1: I took a look at it. It was, you know, again,
Speaker 1: fairly primitive. Now now, at this point they were starting
Speaker 1: to work not just with l e ED displays, but
Speaker 1: also l c D displays, liquid crystal displays. So this
Speaker 1: is what a lot of you if you've ever had
Speaker 1: one of those little handheld games, maybe it was licensed
Speaker 1: after an existing arcade game or a cartoon or movie
Speaker 1: or something you're probably familiar with. These are also the
Speaker 1: ones that you would see on watches a lot of times. Uh,
Speaker 1: super cheap to produce, very limited in their animation, very
Speaker 1: limited in what they could actually display, but still compared
Speaker 1: to a little blip on an l e ED screen
Speaker 1: just a little dot, incredibly sophisticated and much less eye bleedy.
Speaker 1: LED displays tend to give me a terrible headache. Yeah
Speaker 1: I can't at that rate. I also just have nightmares.
Speaker 1: Remember remembering the sound effects from football and football too,
Speaker 1: and yeah, they're they're they're not all pleasant memories. But yeah,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, that's when we see the first like
Speaker 1: mate looks I was amazed to learn that this particular
Speaker 1: technology goes all the way back to ninety nine, right,
Speaker 1: and we're talking now about rom cartridges. Yeah, so keep
Speaker 1: in mind those games we us talked about, like Laurence said,
Speaker 1: they were hard coded. You could not change those games out.
Speaker 1: What you bought was what you bought. But that was
Speaker 1: not the way of the future. Milton Bradley Company, Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of the one of the competitors of Mattel, especially
Speaker 1: at the time and in the gaming or not gaming
Speaker 1: but board industry, right, produced this thing called the Microvision. Right,
Speaker 1: so they decided we're gonna do something similar to what
Speaker 1: some of the home video game consoles were starting to do,
Speaker 1: like the Atari system was was doing this creating a
Speaker 1: system that could play cartridges, so you could switch out
Speaker 1: what game you were playing. So now you weren't buying
Speaker 1: a single game, you were buying a platform upon which
Speaker 1: to play games, which is the way most of us
Speaker 1: are familiar with games today, right. I mean, when I
Speaker 1: go out and buy a game system, I expect I'm
Speaker 1: going to play more than just one game, more than
Speaker 1: just the Xbox at any rate. So this Microvision had
Speaker 1: a a monochrome l C D which was a a
Speaker 1: screaming big as six team a sixteen pixel yeah resolution. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean at that resolution, you just you could pick
Speaker 1: out every single detail on that block that was um Also,
Speaker 1: it had a pad on it that had nine sections
Speaker 1: of interactivity on it, which was which you didn't you
Speaker 1: didn't actually just use the naked pad. That's not how
Speaker 1: this game worked, right. That the cartridges that snapped in
Speaker 1: and out of the game would include their own buttons
Speaker 1: to overlay on top of that path exactly. So you
Speaker 1: can think of the cartridges as being half cartridge half case,
Speaker 1: and then you would pop the case open and put
Speaker 1: a new case on it in order to play a
Speaker 1: new game. That would also include overlays, which were a
Speaker 1: big thing back in the seventies and eighties, which would
Speaker 1: increase the playability by giving you would have a different,
Speaker 1: um superficial layer on top of the game. So it's
Speaker 1: permanent because it's an overlay, it's doesn't change at all,
Speaker 1: but it gives the games a certain personality, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: and also would cut down on the that the processor
Speaker 1: would have to do. You know, you give you more
Speaker 1: space to to play with your little blips and blobs,
Speaker 1: and the system itself did have a little built in
Speaker 1: analog control knobs so that you could have some some
Speaker 1: basic functionality without using the other buttons, or in addition
Speaker 1: to the other buttons that any particular game would come with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I see here. I didn't actually see that this
Speaker 1: note that you had added until just now. But I
Speaker 1: love the site. This, this little this little caveat about
Speaker 1: how it had serious electronics problems, including a lack of
Speaker 1: proper Faraday installation, which means that aesthetic charge could render
Speaker 1: your microvision inoperable, basically useless, or or at least permanently
Speaker 1: damaged in a way that it would never come back
Speaker 1: from the 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, so the same which makes sense
Speaker 1: because when you took the cartridge off, then you have
Speaker 1: a naked platform. Yeah, so that would be um yeah,
Speaker 1: good good tip, thanks Lauren. Yeah, and that's the It
Speaker 1: is probably one of the reasons why, even though the
Speaker 1: system was moderately popular, Milton Bradley did stop producing it
Speaker 1: only two or three years later. Furthermore, only thirteen games
Speaker 1: were ever produced for the Microvision. Wait A minute, I
Speaker 1: only could find twelve games that my look, oh 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: X country for why reasons, right, and until basically these days,
Speaker 1: the Internet proves them wrong and someone actually spends the
Speaker 1: money to port it over. Yeah, pirated, well more likely that, right.
Speaker 1: So by by now we're getting right into the very
Speaker 1: beginning of the eighties, and that's when we start seeing
Speaker 1: l c D technology becoming so cheap that uh that
Speaker 1: LED displays become kind of a thing of the past. So,
Speaker 1: you know, company has already been kind of experimenting with it,
Speaker 1: but now it was something that they could do without
Speaker 1: having to charge huge amounts of money for relatively limited devices.
Speaker 1: So we start seeing better displays and fewer of those
Speaker 1: little blip ones, which by the way, are still treasured
Speaker 1: by collectors. Miniaturization was also reaching the point that we
Speaker 1: were seeing I mean, it was a lot cheaper to
Speaker 1: produce things, and uh yeah, and and it also meant
Speaker 1: that we could make smaller and smaller things, so you
Speaker 1: no longer had this giant, bulky brick for everything, at
Speaker 1: least not anything that was basic. And it even led
Speaker 1: to one of the things we're gonna talk about in
Speaker 1: just a second, the the infamous digital watch games. So
Speaker 1: something you've got to keep in mind is that this
Speaker 1: is the this is the era where everybody got into this.
Speaker 1: Mattel had shown they had struck gold with this idea. Also, consoles,
Speaker 1: home consoles were very popular at this time, so so
Speaker 1: it was a huge industry. Everyone was saying, we gotta
Speaker 1: get in on this. So here's just a quick list
Speaker 1: and not even an exhaustive list, but a quick list
Speaker 1: of some some game companies that got really famous for
Speaker 1: the handheld devices they produced. And you're probably gonna recognize
Speaker 1: some of these names. Acclaim, Atari, Bondai, cass Eo, Colico, Galube, Kinner, Konami, Namki,
Speaker 1: Parker Brothers, Tandy, Texas Instruments, Tighter, 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 lazy 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 of hard coded handheld video games
Speaker 1: called called Game and Watch, and the very first one
Speaker 1: was 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's 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 bass systems. One of the ways they stuck
Speaker 1: around on is that they could have specific controls for
Speaker 1: that game that are unique, you know, not just your
Speaker 1: little direction pad and buttons. Sure you and you don't
Speaker 1: have to recode the buttons for it every time that
Speaker 1: you want to play a different game or learn a
Speaker 1: new controller schematic. It's just that thing specialized. So it's
Speaker 1: very specific. Yeah. So that way it ended up filling
Speaker 1: a niche that your generic, you know, cartridge based systems
Speaker 1: couldn't because the game control is always going to be
Speaker 1: the same unless you buy some sort of crazy peripheral
Speaker 1: that can also plug into it. Anyway, the game and
Speaker 1: Watch series was incredibly popular. They produced sixty different games
Speaker 1: under that brand. Only one of those was one you
Speaker 1: could not buy. It was actually a prize who had
Speaker 1: to win it in a in a contest type thing,
Speaker 1: uh and um. And they would release several different models
Speaker 1: of these over the years. Eventually starting 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 captain. It was probably Donkey Kong now I
Speaker 1: think about because it's a Nintendo. So yeah, look like
Speaker 1: a tiny little arcade machines. So it's really a tabletop,
Speaker 1: not so much a handheld, but you could have held
Speaker 1: it in your hands. You just wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: control both the joystick and the buttons very easily. But um,
Speaker 1: but it was you know, and again one of those
Speaker 1: they only produced four, So Donkey Kong Jr. That's the
Speaker 1: one was because they didn't do Pacman. It was Donkey
Speaker 1: Kong Jr. Snoopy, Mario's Cement Factory, and Popeye. So um yeah,
Speaker 1: mostly notable because they had this very evocative form factor. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: in three that that was also the year that the
Speaker 1: video game console industry crashed. Yeah, if we all know
Speaker 1: the story, you know, the market was flooded with with
Speaker 1: game games and game systems that ranged in quality from
Speaker 1: pretty good to abysmal. And unfortunately, there were a lot
Speaker 1: of the abysmal category, uh, including the infamous pac Man,
Speaker 1: Atari Port and the e T the Extraterrestrial game. So
Speaker 1: it ended up crashing that that whole industry. However, handheld
Speaker 1: games fared better than the video game consoles did one
Speaker 1: because they're less expensive and too they fulfill a different
Speaker 1: need than the home video game console. Absolutely so very interesting.
Speaker 1: And then we also saw at this time some experimentation
Speaker 1: with cartridge based systems, similar to what Microvision had tried.
Speaker 1: They included game systems like the Intexts Select a game
Speaker 1: which I think only had five or six game titles
Speaker 1: ever come out, the v Tech Variety, Palm Text, super Micro,
Speaker 1: and the Epoch game pocket Computer. And if you haven't
Speaker 1: heard of any of these, I guess that kind of
Speaker 1: indicates what happened. Yeah, that's that's pretty indicative. Yeah. So, still,
Speaker 1: they knew that this was gonna be a thing, like
Speaker 1: people were going to want to have a system where
Speaker 1: they could play multiple games, not just a single game
Speaker 1: hardcoded onto it. But no one had cracked that code
Speaker 1: yet insert sting here. But we'll talk about the the
Speaker 1: system that did crack that code in just a moment.
Speaker 1: Before we do, let's take a quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor. Okay, So, Lauren, I had hinted that the
Speaker 1: next system we're gonna talk about really cracks the whole
Speaker 1: problem of building a cartridge based system that that resonates.
Speaker 1: What was I talking about? You were probably talking about
Speaker 1: Nintendo's game Boy. Whole boy. What you know, if you
Speaker 1: want to talk about cracking the code, game Boy remains
Speaker 1: one of the top selling consoles of all time period.
Speaker 1: Doesn't matter if you're talking handheld. I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: talking handheld, it is absolutely but I meanven just video
Speaker 1: game consoles, it's still one of the top Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and and this came out, so we're skipping ahead a
Speaker 1: few years. There wasn't much development on the scene. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of more of those hard coded games. We
Speaker 1: had talked about UM and it was developed by Gunpaykoi. Yes,
Speaker 1: and gun pay We talked about him in an episode
Speaker 1: when I when I did an episode about the history
Speaker 1: of Nintendo, we talked about gun pay Koi because he
Speaker 1: was very, very influential at Nintendo, both for some things
Speaker 1: that were incredibly popular and one thing in particular that
Speaker 1: was a notable flop. So among the popular ones where
Speaker 1: the Game Boy, which again one of the most popular
Speaker 1: game consoles of all time, also Metroid one of the
Speaker 1: most successful video game franchises, and then hey, the Virtual Boy,
Speaker 1: which totally not successful. A Virtual Boy technically kind of
Speaker 1: falls into the handheld category, depending upon whom you ask.
Speaker 1: I didn't add it into our notes because I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't really think that there's a handheld. I mean,
Speaker 1: you think that was definitely a desktop anything where you're
Speaker 1: wearing it and it's blocking your vision. I can't imagine
Speaker 1: that being, you know, handheld. Plus that thing would make
Speaker 1: you sick when you're just sitting still. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: how you would feel after five minutes of playing one
Speaker 1: of those in the back of a car. I would
Speaker 1: certainly not want to wear it around like I kind
Speaker 1: of want to wear the Oculus Rift around everywhere. I
Speaker 1: would be yaking like crazy. You. So, anyway, the Nintendo
Speaker 1: game Boy ended up using four double A batteries, and
Speaker 1: it was actually a pretty good about not gobbling them
Speaker 1: up immediately, right, I think that that like, like colloquially,
Speaker 1: most people got about twenty hours again play out of it.
Speaker 1: Nintendo claimed that you could go up to thirty five.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that I ever did that personal right, well,
Speaker 1: but part of the reason why it was so efficient
Speaker 1: was that it was a monochromatic screen and it was
Speaker 1: not back lit. So in other words, if you were
Speaker 1: in a dark room and you turned your game Boy on,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't though you have to turn the light on.
Speaker 1: In fact, there were there were accessories that were sold
Speaker 1: where it 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: A right for the time it was it was pretty shiny, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it had four different shades of gray or by
Speaker 1: by 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 h the way it was
Speaker 1: laid out. If you have never seen an original game Boy,
Speaker 1: imagine a rectangle and at the top of the rectangle
Speaker 1: is kind of a squarish screen, and below the screen
Speaker 1: is where you would find the directional pad and the
Speaker 1: two Moneys, the B and the A, and so there
Speaker 1: was there were some problems with people playing for a
Speaker 1: long time and game their hands kind of cramped up
Speaker 1: because the controls were right there below the screen and
Speaker 1: not to either side the way we're used to now.
Speaker 1: But still very innovative. And I think I think it
Speaker 1: was the perfect storm in that there was a game
Speaker 1: paired 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
Speaker 1: do do do. Yeah, Jonathan of course is talking about
Speaker 1: Tetris or singing about Tetris the case maybe singing is
Speaker 1: very generous. I thank you for it. But yes, Tetris
Speaker 1: one of the most popular titles in video game history.
Speaker 1: And uh, I mean, we should do a podcast just
Speaker 1: about Tetris. At some point I talked about that you
Speaker 1: have not already? Yeah, well, we could never fit it in.
Speaker 1: Oh no, at any rate. Uh I even looked off,
Speaker 1: like what would have been off camera for that? That's
Speaker 1: how bad that pun was. Um. At any rate, the
Speaker 1: fact that Tetris was so popular and that the Game
Speaker 1: Boy was such a great form factor in the sense
Speaker 1: you could take it anywhere. You have this incredibly addictive
Speaker 1: puzzle game, this incredibly portable platform. It was a perfect match.
Speaker 1: I mean when I think game Boy, that's the first
Speaker 1: game I think of. You know, I also think of
Speaker 1: some of the Mario games because those were really popular too,
Speaker 1: but but Tetris is the one. I mean, anyone I
Speaker 1: knew who had a game Boy that was in heavy rotation,
Speaker 1: no matter what other games they owned, so incredibly uh
Speaker 1: forward thinking on that part too. It was also relatively inexpensive.
Speaker 1: It retailed for a D nine dollars, so you know,
Speaker 1: not not chump change. But still we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about some game systems that came out, you know, either
Speaker 1: around this time or shortly thereafter that were much more
Speaker 1: expensive and not nearly as popular for multiple reasons, but
Speaker 1: one of them is that you know, they cost more.
Speaker 1: So uh yeah, game Boy ends up being a huge hit.
Speaker 1: It's it's, you know, compared to today's systems, not the
Speaker 1: most powerful one. But uh, you know, they made some
Speaker 1: great decisions. They they went with the cartridge based game systems,
Speaker 1: which load instantly so you don't have to worry about
Speaker 1: you know, if you're used to an optical drive and
Speaker 1: you have to wait for a game to load spin up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one thing, but if you're used to cartridge based systems,
Speaker 1: you don't even know what load time means. So it
Speaker 1: was really really fast, and um yeah, it got a
Speaker 1: couple of updates, actually, probably half a dozen or so
Speaker 1: updates before we get to the next true version of
Speaker 1: the game Boy. Right. Over the next several years, there
Speaker 1: would be a slimmer version that had a true gray
Speaker 1: scale screen called the game Boy Pocket, and in Japan
Speaker 1: there was a version called the game Boy Light that
Speaker 1: had a backlit screen. Yeah, so it's l I g
Speaker 1: h T not l I T right, but yeah, we um.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't see a color screen update to the game
Speaker 1: Boy for almost a decade, which gave a bunch of
Speaker 1: its competitors a really good into the market. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: at least it appeared that way for some of them.
Speaker 1: They did a pretty good job. Others, like the one
Speaker 1: we're about to talk about, had a rougher start. So
Speaker 1: that same year that the game Boy comes out for Nintendo,
Speaker 1: Atari releases their first handheld gaming system their first like
Speaker 1: handheld cartridge based gaming systems ye L Y n X.
Speaker 1: And so it's the first color handheld portable video games system,
Speaker 1: and it also had multiplayer functionality. Now, this thing, if
Speaker 1: you looked at it was very wide, the screen was
Speaker 1: in the center, the controls were off to either side. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was originally actually called the Handy or sometimes called
Speaker 1: the Handy Boy, depending upon who you ask, were the
Speaker 1: Handy Pack. That's because it was developed by this other
Speaker 1: company called Epics. Yeah, and Epics started shopping it around.
Speaker 1: They went to ce S way back in nine and
Speaker 1: started to UH to meet with other companies and say, look,
Speaker 1: we've developed this hardware. Are you interested. Nintendo said, you know,
Speaker 1: we've got our own thing. We're gonna pass. But Atari said,
Speaker 1: you know, we really want to get back into this market,
Speaker 1: and this is this looks like it's a great way
Speaker 1: of doing it. So they partnered together and they launched this.
Speaker 1: Now they were billing it as being much more powerful
Speaker 1: than the game Boy. It had had that color screen,
Speaker 1: so that alone made it appear, at least on the surface,
Speaker 1: to be a better system. But there were a couple
Speaker 1: of things against it. Yeah, it was it was heavier,
Speaker 1: it 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 was about but that was
Speaker 1: too little, too late because the game Boy had had
Speaker 1: such trounced it. Yeah, they had already had such a
Speaker 1: big initial push. They were ahead of the game, and
Speaker 1: they were. They would try one more time with the
Speaker 1: with the links to in 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 vicarious 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 it 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 I did have a color display. Um,
Speaker 1: it had a similar to the Nintendo model, the directional
Speaker 1: pad in two yeah, very very much the standard game control.
Speaker 1: And also, for an additional price, if you wanted to
Speaker 1: spend more than the two fifty dollars plus the hundred
Speaker 1: dollars or so in batteries to keep it going, you
Speaker 1: could get a optional television tuner and turn it into
Speaker 1: a portable TV. So I mean it was it was
Speaker 1: interesting to me and that this was the first attempt
Speaker 1: to build a a handheld video game system that could
Speaker 1: play video game consoles like a television console games and
Speaker 1: and not a port. I mean, I'm talking about the
Speaker 1: exact same game that to me was really phenomenal. Was
Speaker 1: also the year that the first serious competitor to the
Speaker 1: Game Boy came out. And by serious competitor, I mean
Speaker 1: they did a decent job. They didn't. It wasn't that
Speaker 1: Game Boy was in danger, but they didn't just appear
Speaker 1: and then disappear, certainly not. This is the Sega Game Gear,
Speaker 1: and at the time, the Second Genesis was the leading consoles,
Speaker 1: so so it had some serious firepower behind it. Now,
Speaker 1: originally it was it was when it was top secret,
Speaker 1: it was still in development. It was not called the
Speaker 1: game Gear. I know, it was called the Project Mercury. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At the time, Sega was naming all of its different
Speaker 1: projects after planets, which shouldn't come as a surprise if
Speaker 1: you owned a Sega Saturn. Oh right, yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: a lot of yeah, yeah, it's kind of cool. I
Speaker 1: mean it's I love finding out like Apple calls all
Speaker 1: their stuff after cats, are used to. But okay, so
Speaker 1: this one cost less than the Turbo Express. It was
Speaker 1: not trying to They were trying really hard to kind
Speaker 1: of be competitive in that same space as the as
Speaker 1: the game Boy. It was more expensive than a game
Speaker 1: Boy because it was at a hundred 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 I had
Speaker 1: a single single speaker, so very similar in some ways
Speaker 1: to the game Boy, and it was a good competitor
Speaker 1: against the game Boy. However, the game Boy eventually just
Speaker 1: wins out, or the fact that it had an incredible
Speaker 1: library of games that just grew year over year, and
Speaker 1: just uh again, that price point seemed to be a
Speaker 1: magic spot. Now, speaking of magic spots, we're gonna wrap
Speaker 1: up this particular episode right here because we've got so
Speaker 1: much more to talk about. I mean, we just got
Speaker 1: into the ninety nineties and uh, we've got a lot
Speaker 1: of different amazing video game consoles and a couple of
Speaker 1: phenomenal flops that we're going to be talking about in
Speaker 1: the next episode. But if you guys have any suggestions
Speaker 1: for future episodes, whether it be about a specific game
Speaker 1: system or some other piece of technology, or a person
Speaker 1: that you really want to hear more about. Certainly, if
Speaker 1: if any of these have piped your interest and you
Speaker 1: really want an entire episode about just that thing, let
Speaker 1: us know, send us an email or address is tech
Speaker 1: stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line
Speaker 1: on the numerous social networks where we make ourselves at
Speaker 1: home and kick off our shoes and say come on
Speaker 1: over and see us. Well, that would include Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and tell are a handle at all. Three is tech stuff,
Speaker 1: hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Does it how staff works dot com