The machine that won the handheld wars was the one with the worst screen. Nintendo’s Game Boy of 1989 had a yellow-tinged monochrome screen of 160 by 144 pixels, and it beat the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear, which had backlit colour screens. The reason was batteries. Four AAs kept a Game Boy going, Edge wrote, for “more than 30 hours of play”; the Lynx “needed a new set of batteries every five hours — imagine trying to complete Pokémon on that.” The same arithmetic, power against playing time, decided most of what followed.
Fast facts
- First handhelds: Mattel’s LED games from 1976; Milton Bradley’s Microvision, with interchangeable cartridges, from 1979.
- LCD games: Nintendo’s Game & Watch, 1980–1991.
- The long reign: Game Boy (1989), Game Boy Color (1998), Game Boy Advance (2001).
- Rivals: Atari Lynx, Sega Game Gear, NEC’s PC Engine GT, SNK’s Neo Geo Pocket, Bandai’s WonderSwan.
- 2004: Nintendo DS and Sony’s PSP.
- 2017: Nintendo Switch, a hybrid of home console and handheld.
LEDs and LCDs
Edge’s history of the handheld, published in 2001, begins in 1976 with a calculator-sized game from the toy company Mattel. “The first electronic handheld game went on sale in August 1976 via the Sears catalogue.” It was Missile Attack, a game of missiles falling on a city, whose New York skyline cost it television advertising: NBC refused the commercials. Mattel followed it with Auto Race and Football, and Edge reported that Football sold more than two million copies in two years. A Sega Visions profile of the executive Michael Katz in 1990 gave the credit for the first to Auto Race instead; both put Mattel at the start.
Milton Bradley’s Microvision of 1979 added interchangeable cartridges. Edge called it “the first ever LCD cart-based system” and said it grossed $8 million in its first year but “suffered largely from a lack of support”.
Nintendo’s Game & Watch range put one game and a clock in each unit, from Ball in April 1980 to Mario the Juggler in 1991, and sold 43.4 million by Nintendo’s count. These were built from calculator parts by Gunpei Yokoi’s team, and the multi-screen Donkey Kong introduced the cross-shaped pad that Nintendo moved onto the NES and the Game Boy. In the playground, Edge wrote, children “could whip Astro Wars or Caveman out of their satchels at playtime and become instant celebs”.
The Game Boy and its rivals
The Game Boy went on sale in Japan on 21 April 1989. Outside Japan it came with Tetris, and its link cable let two players compete. Its programming manual told developers to halt the processor whenever a game had nothing to do, to save the batteries. Edge saw its limits as a strength: the weak processor “forced developers to concentrate on raw game design”, and the small monochrome screen “invited really cute, innovative 2D art”.
The rivals had better hardware and worse batteries. Epyx designed the Lynx, which Atari sold from 1989 with a backlit colour screen and a chip that scaled sprites, at twice the price of a Game Boy. Sega’s Game Gear (1990) was a Master System in a handheld case, and its six AA batteries lasted a few hours. NEC’s PC Engine GT played the console’s HuCard games on a bright screen, but it cost ¥49,000, and Edge judged that neither it nor the laptop-style PC Engine LT was “particularly practical as portables”. “Portability,” Edge concluded, “was, unfortunately, the last consideration for too many handheld console designers.”
Nintendo kept refining the formula instead. The smaller Game Boy Pocket arrived in 1996, a backlit Game Boy Light in Japan in 1998, and the Game Boy Color the same year. SNK’s Neo Geo Pocket Color of 1999 had a screen reviewers admired and a 40-hour battery life, but SNK was sold in January 2000 and withdrew the machine from the West that June. Gunpei Yokoi, who had left Nintendo, designed the WonderSwan for Bandai with a monochrome screen chosen to save power; it came out in Japan in 1999, after his death. Pokémon (1996), sold in two editions so that players had to trade through the link cable, kept the old machine selling. “The presence of Pokémon and the full stable of Nintendo characters has continued to attract kids into gaming,” the developer Ian Baverstock of Kuju Entertainment told Edge in 2001. The Game Boy line reached 118.69 million units, by Nintendo’s count.
The Game Boy Advance (2001) had a 32-bit processor and played the old cartridges. It still had no backlight, which Edge called “a compromise worth making”.
Phones, and two screens against one
By 2001 mobile phones carried simple games such as Nokia’s Snake, and one developer of phone games described their players’ habits to Edge as “very much as snacking for ten to 15 minutes at a time”. Nintendo and Sony both launched new handhelds in Japan at the end of 2004. The DS, with two screens, the lower one a touchscreen, cost ¥15,000. Sony’s PSP cost ¥19,800 and stored its games on Sony’s own small optical format, UMD; it went on sale on 12 December 2004, and Edge reported that 171,963 were sold on the first day, about 85 per cent of the first shipment. The DS went on to sell 154.02 million units.
Nintendo’s 3DS (2011) began badly, with a price cut of more than £80 soon after launch, and still sold almost 76 million. By 2017 Nintendo had launched the Switch, which Wireframe called “its nimble hybrid of handheld and under-the-telly console” and a consolidation of the company’s two strands of hardware. When 3DS production ended in 2020, the Switch and the handheld-only Switch Lite filled its place. By 30 June 2026 the Switch had sold 156.59 million units, more than the DS, and its successor, the Switch 2, had sold 23.68 million.
Sources
- Edge issue 104, December 2001, pp. 54–57: history of handheld games (Mattel’s Missile Attack, the Sears catalogue, Auto Race and Football; the Microvision; Game & Watch in the playground; the Game Boy’s batteries, processor and screen; the Lynx’s batteries; the PC Engine GT; Game Boy Pocket, Light and Color; the Game Boy Advance and its backlight; mobile phone games).
- Sega Visions issue 1, June 1990: profile of Michael Katz, “the first electronic hand held, Auto Race”.
- Edge issue 144, January 2005: the DS at ¥15,000, the PSP at ¥19,800, and the PSP’s UMD format.
- Edge issue 146, February 2005, p. 8: the PSP’s Japanese launch on 12 December 2004 and first-day sales of 171,963.
- Wireframe issue 44, October 2020, pp. 84–86: system profile of the Nintendo 3DS (the post-launch price cut, sales of almost 76 million, the Switch as a hybrid, the end of 3DS production in 2020 and the Switch Lite).
- See the Game & Watch, Game Boy, Atari Lynx, Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, link cable and Gunpei Yokoi entries for those machines’ dates, prices and sales.
- Nintendo, “Dedicated Video Game Sales Units”, investor relations (figures as of 30 June 2026) (web): Nintendo Switch 156.59 million, Nintendo Switch 2 23.68 million, Nintendo DS 154.02 million, Game Boy 118.69 million, Game Boy Advance 81.51 million. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html