This handheld console was released in 1991 so for most of you, this is well before your time. However, i was around when "mobile gaming" was in its infancy and this was truly an awesome machine.... but it had many flaws that lead to it losing to Game Boy badly.
Game Boy was, and likely always will be, the king of hand-held gaming. Sure the games were in black and white and pixelated as crap, but back then, Game Boy was already fully entrenched and dominated the industry. Also, Game Boy had a 2 year head start on Sega, so they really had their work cut out for them.
Game Gear was a superior machine. The screen was in color and it was backlit (yeah that's right, the Game Boy could only originally be used in direct light if you actually wanted to see the screen.) I recall one day when a friend was spending the night and the power went out that one of us would hold the flashlight and the other person would play a game - god we were nerds.
You could play the Game Gear in complete darkness if you wanted to. Also, since it shared a vast majority of its interior workings with the Master System, it was possible to play the entire library of games you may already own on your handheld. Of course this involved and adapter and the end result was the size of a standard brick, but whatever! We had low expectations back then.
There were some critical problems though
As I mentioned, the Game Boy had a 2 year head start and even at launch Game Boy sold for $90. By 1991 this price, as you would imagine, had dropped to around $60 or eve $50. The Game Gear premiered at $150 and it was very easy for Game Boy to counter this simply by dropping their already far-more-attractive price a few bucks.
The Game Gear also had very little in the way of exclusive titles and relied very heavily on its already existing library of Master System games as a selling point. However, they didn't include the adapter in the purchase and this was quite irritating to have to shell out another 20-30 dollars on a system that was already twice as expensive as the competitor's system.
I think the biggest nail in the coffin for Sega as far as this console was concerned is that it consumed a tremendous amount of "juice" in a time when lithium batteries, for the most part, didn't exist. The Game Gear required 6 "AA" batteries and it would drink all that electrical goodness in about 3 hours. Rechargeable batteries, which were all the rage in my frugal family at the time, would get you about an hour of game time. So mostly you needed to be near an electrical outlet to use this friggin thing and I think that kind of defeats the purpose of it being mobile in the first place.
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you could watch TV with a "bunny ears" attachment because well, some people still didn't have cable back in the early 90's
It was an 8-bit system that was released AFTER the 16 bit Genesis so it was actually pretty bittersweet to have a color handheld with inferior games to what you could get at home. Also, despite the adapter, not many people actually owned a Sega Master System and therefore any Master System games - which would severely limit your possibilities for game choice.
They ended up selling a disappointing 10 million units worldwide compared to the nearly 120 million Game Boy units that were sold. I feel as though the release of this failed system began a slippery slope that eventually lead to Sega failing entirely as a console producer. Things would only get worse for them once Playstation entered the market a few years later.
Haha, I had one of these. I wanted a Gameboy so badly, but I got one of these instead. I am guessing my parents saw that it was color and they figured that was the better option. I am not going to lie though, I played the crap out of it. I only had a handful of games, but I played them over and over. I had the Sonic game that came with it and then I had golf, Joe Montanta Football, and Golden Axe I think. I might have had one or two others, but they don't really jump out at me. I probably played football the most. It was an awesome game.
I owned a Game Gear and spent many hours on Sonic, Columns, Space Harrier and the few other games I had for it. I sold it a few years back though. The screen, while vastly superior to the Game Boy still doesn't hold up very well today.
I don't think including the Master Gear converter would have made much difference in North America because the Sega Master System was never really that popular here. In places like Europe and South America it was much more popular though and it might have helped in those places.
The Atari Lynx was another superior system that suffered from the same obstacles (price, relatively short battery life and relatively few games.) Then there was the Turbo Express of course but same problems (it had more games but still far fewer than game boy and it was the most expensive of the portable systems). To this day no one has managed to really compete with Nintendo in the portable market unless you count the phone market.
all great points. The Turbo Express was awesome. It was essentially the same thing as the Turbo Grafx16. I just generally loved that system and the little credit card games were appealing to me as well.
I remember the Atari Lynx. I think that between me and my super nerd neighbor that it was the only portable system that neither one of us ever bought - we didn't get the Jaguar either. I really wanted to like those 2 systems and I wish they had done better, because I hated to see Atari leave the gaming realm for purely patriotic reasons.
I had a Turbo Express for a while (long after it was gone from the market though). I got rid of it too because of the low quality screen. By the standards of the day it was an incredible screen but I just find the screens of all those old portable systems hard to look at now. I would rather play the games via emulation on a screen that is larger, has no motion blur and better contrast. I still have a Lynx but I haven't played it in ages.
I had an Atari Jaguar but got rid of that too. I kind of wish I had kept that one though. There weren't many good games for that system but there were a few.
Speaking of Atari, this looks interesting: https://atarivcs.com/
Had one. With the TV adapter and a Sega CDX connected in it. So I could play my Genesis/CD/32x games on it.
Wait...I'm not understanding how that would be possible. You must have carried a lot of gear around to pull that off
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I would set it up while on fire guard duty at my advanced training (AIT) in the army. Yeah, it was a lot of stuff, but the expressions I would get when people would see me with a gamegear in my hands, a pair of headphones on (only one ear), and a Genesis controller in my hand was priceless. Beat Popful Mail, Phantasy star III and IV, and all the sonic games for the Genesis on it that way. Only way I could survive 8-hour hall guard duty.
well that is a great list of reasons to have owned one. I bet you had to have really good eyesight to play the phantasy star games on it. :)
It wasn't easy, but yeah.