Sega Game Gear

Sega · 1990 – 1997

The Game Gear was Sega's answer to the Game Boy: a backlit colour portable with hardware based on the Master System. Technically superior to Nintendo's handheld, it was undermined by poor battery life (six AA batteries for four hours) and a software library that lacked the Game Boy's depth of exclusives.

Launched in Japan in 1990 and globally in 1991, the Game Gear used essentially the same hardware as the Sega Master System — an 8-bit Z80 CPU and a colour display capable of showing 32 colours simultaneously from a palette of 4,096. Its backlit screen was a genuine advantage over the Game Boy's passive LCD, making it far easier to play in low-light conditions, and an optional TV tuner add-on allowed it to receive television signals. The Game Gear sold approximately 10-11 million units — a respectable figure, but one that pales against the Game Boy's 118 million. The battery problem was genuine: where the Game Boy ran for about 30 hours on four AA batteries, the Game Gear's colour backlit display drained six batteries in three to five hours. Its library, strong in ports of arcade and Master System titles, lacked the Game Boy-exclusive franchises — Pokémon, Mario Land, Zelda — that drove hardware sales.