historyofhandheldconsoles

[historyofhandheldconsoles]

Welcome to the website! This website centres on the History of Handheld Games through the Lens of Nintendo, and uses three handheld consoles (the Game Boy, the Nintendo DS, and the Nintendo Switch) as a framework to move through the 1980s to the 2010s. Here on the home page will be the three major posts covering these three consoles and their respective time periods:

The Game Boy: 80s and 90s

The Nintendo DS: 2000s

The Nintendo Switch: 2010s

On the left, you will see further explanatory material on the topic (What are Handheld Consoles, Who is Nintendo, Notable Mentions) as well as a bibliography of all sources covered. 

I hope you enjoy reading and learning about handheld video game consoles!

[historyofhandheldconsoles]

The Game Boy: 80s and 90s

Released in 1989 as the successor to the Game and Watch, the Game Boy defined portable gaming back when the market had not yet realised the potential of games that could be played outside of home. 

The Game Boy was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, a legendary Nintendo designer who had created the Game and Watch. He and his team, having already created the best-selling games Metroid and Kid Icarus for the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) were tasked with creating a new step forward for Nintendo. The team created what was essentially a hybrid of the Game and Watch and the NES, the Game Boy, and at first, it seemed worse than everything else on the market13.

Technologically Worse?

Running off an 8-bit Sharp LR3590214 as the CPU, it was obvious that the Game Boy was not as good as its closest competitors in the fourth generation of video game consoles (such as the Atari Lynx and the SEGA Game Gear) as it had inferior processing power.

Furthermore, the Game Boy could only manage a monochrome green colour palette, while its competitors could do far more vibrant and varied colour palettes. It also had a smaller screen (2.6 inches diagonally) than the Lynx (3.5 inches diagonally) and the Game Gear (3.2 inches diagonally).

While these technological failings appeared damning, Yokoi had done them for a reason. The small screen, worse CPU and monochrome palette meant that the system could be downsized to be half the size of its competitors. This also meant that the console was not using precious power on enhanced technology, allowing 15 hours of battery life versus the 4-5 of the Lynx and Game Gear. The Game Boy also could output stereo sound from its headphone jack, something that no other handheld console at the time was capable of. As such, the portability of the device and enhanced sound were revolutionary.

Combined with the massively popular game and 'killer app' Tetris that was bundled with the Game Boy16, the Game Boy sold 64.42 million units17 by mid-1998.

Revisions to the Technology

Later versions of the Game Boy were revised, most notably the Game Boy Pocket released on July 1996. The Game Boy Pocket was smaller, lighter and took two AAA batteries to run (versus the regular one requiring four AA batteries), giving it ten hours of battery life18 which (although diminished) was still superior to its competitors.

Another later system was the Game Boy Color, released in 1998. A sequel to the Game Boy, it was technologically similar to its forerunner, but shone in its pioneering use of backwards compatibility (the ability of a system to run games from older predecessors on its new hardware). Together with a colour screen, combined with the Game Boy, it sold over 118.69 million units to date, making it the third best-selling console of all time19.

Ultimately, over seven different versions of the Game Boy were released, each with slightly different technical specifications and designed to appeal to different groups of people. They are the Game Boy (1989), Game Boy Pocket (1996), Game Boy Light (1998), Game Boy Color (1998), Game Boy Advance (2001), Game Boy Advance SP (2003), and Game Boy Micro (2005). The flexibility and variation of each of these handheld consoles meant that although they would never be as technologically good as their rivals of the 80s and 90s, they consistently outsold them.

As such, the success of the Game Boy was very much dependent on innovation. While it appeared to be lacking in many departments, strategic moves by designers allowed it to pull ahead of the competition through common sense design and multiple variations catered to many different groups.

The Game Boy’s innovations in small, portable game consoles led to the creation of a market for handhelds. Nintendo’s domination of the handheld market directly led to the inception of the Sony line of handheld consoles (the PlayStation Portable and Vita) and the creation of technologies focusing on smaller devices. As the Game Boy developed from 1989-2005, Nintendo’s expertise in creating smaller handheld consoles directly lead to its successor, the Nintendo DS. The DS would incorporate similar technologies, and most importantly, a touchscreen that heralded the arrival of the 2000s and touchscreen technology. 

Footnotes:

13: Beuscher, Dave. “Game Boy.” Game Boy Overview. allgame. Accessed November 12, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20141212112812/http://www.allgame.com/platform.php?id=20.

14: Nintendods. “解体新書。初代GBをバラしてみる。.” 帰ってきた Nintendo 3DS ブログ. エキサイトブログ, September 28, 2004. https://nintendods.exblog.jp/381307/.

15: “Technical Data of the Game Boy, Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Pocket.” Nintendo of Europe. Nintendo. Accessed November 12, 2019. https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Support/Game-Boy-Pocket-Color/Product-information/Technical-data/Technical-data-619585.html.

16: Maher, Jimmy. “A Time of Endings, Part 2: Epyx.” The Digital Antiquarian, December 22, 2016. https://www.filfre.net/2016/12/a-time-of-endings-part-2-epyx/.

17: "Historical Data: Consolidated Sales Transition by Region" (xlsx). Nintendo. April 27, 2017. Archived from the original on October 26, 2017. Retrieved April 27, 2017

18: "The Incredible Shrinking Game Boy Pocket". Electronic Gaming Monthly. No. 84. Ziff Davis. July 1996. p. 16.

19: Edwards, Benj, and Utc. “Happy 30th B-Day, Game Boy: Here Are Six Reasons Why You're #1.” Ars Technica, April 21, 2019. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/game-boy-20th-anniversary/.

[historyofhandheldconsoles]

The Nintendo DS: 2000s

Released in 2004, the ‘DS’ in Nintendo DS stood for ‘double-screen’ or ‘dual-screen’, the main feature of the handheld console.

The console began development in 2002 after a suggestion by Hiroshi Yamauchi, a Nintendo former president, to create a console featuring two screens20. The DS launched in 2004, and featured the titular dual screens in a clamshell design with one screen on each side of the 'shell'. There are two TFT LCD (thin-film-transistor liquid film display) screens, with the bottom one being overlaid with a touchscreen that the user can interact with to play games via a stylus bundled with the console.

Touchscreen and technology

Touchscreens (defined as ‘a display screen on which the user selects options as from a menu by touching the screen’ according to Merriam-Webster) as a technology were typical of gadgets of the 2000s. The earliest known use of touchscreen technology was a capacitive touchscreen invented as early as 1965 by EA Johnson21. Capacitive touchscreens utilised an insulator for the outermost layer (in most cases glass) coated with a conductor that was transparent (such as indium tin oxide). The electrical conductor interacting with the screen would normally be a human finger22.

Later devices would use resistive touchscreens instead of capacitive touchscreens, however, as they were much more affordable to produce. The Nintendo DS would use a resistive touchscreen as well.

Mass popular use of the technology available to the general public did not catch on until the 1990s, where smart phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) were introduced in the form of devices like the Apple Newton (1998), the first device to utilise handwriting recognition with its touchscreen23 rather than simple movements and shapes.

Gaming hardware also attempted to integrate this touchscreen technology as well in the 1990s, such as the SEGA Pico's 'Magic Pen' and drawing pad (1993) and the Game.com's stylus and monochrome touchscreen (1997)24, but these systems were commercial failures. While pioneers, they were not very good and thus touchscreen technology was essentially abandoned until the DS' introduction almost ten years later in 2004.

The ability of a touchscreen and stylus to add much more precise control than controls buttons was considered to be the system's largest draw, and it brought opportunities to the world of gaming that had not been seen yet in the mainstream gaming market25. Its closest competitor, the PlayStation Portable (PSP) by Sony released in 2004, sold well but sales paled in comparison with the new ideas that the DS brought, selling roughly 80 million units as compared to the DS' 154.02 million (making it the best selling handheld console and second-best-selling video game console of all time).

Many widely acclaimed DS games made use of the touchscreen as part of the core gameplay loop and being integral to the games themselves, such as The World Ends With You26 (using the touchscreen to multitask with activities while focusing on the upper screen) and Nintendogs27 (utilising the touchscreen to interact with the virtual dog). Some DS games relied solely on the touchscreen, like the WarioWare series, and these features combined with the sleek design and capability for voice recognition led to the Nintendo DS and the industry as a whole 'pushing toward innovative gameplay and away from hyper-realism'28.

Later versions of the DS were released after 2004, namely the Nintendo DS Lite in 2006, the DSi in 2008, and the DSi XL (or DSi LL in Japan) in 2009. They were largely the same console as the DS but featured cleaner designs, better battery life, and larger screens.

Like the Game Boy and its rivals, the DS did not have processing power that could compete with its own competitors (having two ARM processors compared to multiple 32-bit MIPS32 R4k-based CPUs in the PSP), but where it made up for that were its industry-pioneering features of the dual-screen and lower touchscreen29. According to NintendoLife, 'The DS was a genuine game-changer for the industry, perhaps even the most drastic innovation the market had ever seen up until this point'30. Furthermore, the Nintendo DS was most people's first interaction with a touch screen device. Three years after the launch of the DS, the Apple iPhone was released on June 29, 2007, and with it an Application Store that opened the dam to a flood of games that could be played portably while also functioning as a phone.

By the late 2000s, as other electronics companies began to introduce mobile phones with touchscreens, the mobile revolution was coming fast and smartphones were getting cheaper and more accessible. While Nintendo had pioneered touchscreens in gaming, it would need to update to compete with the mobile gaming market fast encroaching on a gaming industry that until the late 2000s had been separate from mobile phones. Touchscreens were now increasingly integrated, and finding a way to combine mobile gaming with the home console experience (also traditionally separate domains) would have to be Nintendo’s next move. 

Footnotes

20: Yamauchi, Hiroshi. "Nintendo DS Invented by Advisor Yamauchi - Interview". February 13, 2004 Game Online citing Nikkei Shimbun. https://web.archive.org/web/20040405140350/http://gameonline.jp:80/news/2004/02/13013.html

21: Bellis, Mary. “What's the History of Touch Screen Technology?” ThoughtCo. ThoughtCo, July 12, 2018. https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-touch-screen-technology-1992535.

22: Ion, Florence. “From Touch Displays to the Surface: A Brief History of Touchscreen Technology.” Ars Technica, April 4, 2013. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/from-touch-displays-to-the-surface-a-brief-history-of-touchscreen-technology/.

23: Silfverberg, Miika. “Handwriting Recognition.” Handwriting Recognition - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics, 2007. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/handwriting-recognition.

24: “Touch Controls (Concept).” Giant Bomb. Accessed November 13, 2019. https://www.giantbomb.com/touch-controls/3015-2256/.

25: Harris, Craig. “DS Touch Screen Innovation.” IGN. IGN, June 18, 2012. http://ign.com/articles/2004/03/24/ds-touch-screen-innovation.

26: Bozon. “The World Ends With You Review.” IGN. IGN, May 12, 2012. https://www.ign.com/articles/2008/04/16/the-world-ends-with-you-review.

27: Massimilla, Bethany. “Nintendogs Review.” GameSpot. GameSpot, August 19, 2005. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nintendogs-review/1900-6131604/.

28: Wright, Jason. “How Nintendo DS Works.” HowStuffWorks. HowStuffWorks, September 14, 2004. https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/nintendo-ds2.htm.

29: Roper, Chris. “Sony PSP vs. Nintendo DS.” IGN. IGN, October 22, 2011. https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/03/29/sony-psp-vs-nintendo-ds.

30: McFerran, Damien. “Retrospective: The Awkward Birth of the DS, Nintendo's Most Successful System.” Nintendo Life, May 19, 2017. http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/05/retrospective_the_awkward_birth_of_the_ds_nintendos_most_successful_system.

[historyofhandheldconsoles]

The Nintendo Switch: 2010s

On March 3, 2017, the Nintendo Switch was released worldwide (excluding India and China) alongside The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as a launch title31. The system proceeded to sell 41 million units in two and a half years32, bringing with it multiple innovative concepts that brought together the best of handheld and home console gaming, as well as the more recent addition of mobile markets, in the first-ever hybrid console.

Between 2004 and 2017

The Switch was preceded by two other consoles made by Nintendo. One was the Nintendo 3DS (2011), which was a handheld game console and successor to the Nintendo DS. The 3DS was a greatly improved DS (with a similar clamshell design and lower touchscreen) featuring improved graphics, a larger screen and a Circle Pad located above the D-Pad that allowed for analog input and more delicate directional controls33. The console was a moderate success, and was designed as a portable complement to Nintendo’s then home console, the Wii U.

The Wii U was released in 2012 and was intended to serve the home gaming market. Its GamePad controller served as a second screen while the main hardware was connected to a television output, and on certain games could be used entirely separately so the television could be displaying one programme while the GamePad could be playing something completely different34. Parallels can be drawn to the DS, with the GamePad’s use of two different screens on one console and a resistive touchscreen on the bottom, and to its successor the Switch, with its design being visually very similar. 

The Wii U would fail as a console, only achieving 13.56 million units sold by 201635 and having the worst sales of any Nintendo console. Despite this setback, the Wii U would sow the seeds for the Switch five years later. Reggie Fils-Aimé, the then-President of Nintendo of America, even considered the Wii U to be a ‘necessary step in order to get to Nintendo Switch’36. 

Innovations 

When the Switch (codenamed the NX) launched after its 5-year gestation period, the failures of the most recent console were the foremost drivers in creating a system that would take these failures and clarify them so that the mistakes wouldn’t happen again37. With this in mind, new features were added, with the most obvious one being the ability for the Switch to change from Handheld to Tabletop to TV mode.

The ability for the individual controllers (referred to as Joy-Cons) to detach from the unit is how the Handheld, Tabletop and TV modes exist and are the greatest innovations utilised for the Switch. They can be used paired as a single control system, but can also function as two separate controllers when re-oriented to their sides, thus enabling multiplayer functionality with a single system.

Within the Joy-Cons are an accelerometre and a gyroscope, allowing for the use of motion controls in different games, as well as haptic feedback. The technology behind the haptic feedback is very precise, ‘enough for you to feel the difference between one, two and three ice cubes rattling in a glass’38 and utilises Linear Resonant Actuators (LRAs)39 in order to achieve this ‘rumble’ effect (referred to as HD Rumble). Similar technology had not been used before this in any other console, making it a first in the industry.

All in all, the system’s main draw was its status as a fully-fledged home console that could be taken out of the home and used as a portable handheld console40. This hybridity is especially of note, as in order to run processing-intensive games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Outer Worlds, the system is required to have a CPU that is up to the task while also keeping the unit portable and not decimating battery life. As such, the Switch utilises four ARM Cortex A57 cores as its CPU41. As we have seen in a trend across the Nintendo Game Boy and DS, the CPU is nowhere near as powerful as its competitors the PlayStation PS4 (running two x86-64 quad-core modules for a total of eight cores) and the Microsoft XBox One (running Custom 1.75 GHz AMD 8-core APU (2 quad-core Jaguar modules), but the fact that games previously locked to the home can be taken out and about is a powerful draw to the system. 

The innovations present in the Switch have led to a marked change in the handheld gaming industry and to the gaming industry as a whole. No other consoles currently in the market are capable of this hybrid, home-handheld concept. While other companies appear to have wound down production of handheld consoles in favour of focusing on home consoles42, the fact that Nintendo is currently attempting to challenge the mobile gaming market is certainly of note.

The future of handheld gaming is up in the air as the Switch shows no signs of stopping and other companies aside Nintendo appear to have no more interest in handhelds, but with Nintendo’s excellent track record in handheld game consoles, whatever comes next will be the product of pure innovation, creativity and a genuine wish to improve gaming.

Footnotes

31: O'Brien, Lucy. “Zelda Wii U Delayed to 2017, Also Coming to NX.” IGN Southeast Asia, April 27, 2016. https://sea.ign.com/the-legend-of-zelda-hd-wii-u-wii-u/104103/news/zelda-wii-u-delayed-to-2017-also-coming-to-nx.

32: Grubb, Jeff. “Nintendo Switch Sales Surpass 41 Million.” VentureBeat. VentureBeat, November 1, 2019. https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/31/nintendo-switch-sales/.

33: Cangeloso, Sal. “Video: Nintendo 3DS Compared to the DS Lite.” Geek.com, March 24, 2011. https://www.geek.com/games/video-nintendo-3ds-compared-to-the-ds-lite-1331371/.

34: Caoili, Eric. “Nintendo Reveals Wii U's Miiverse, New Hardware Specifics.” Gamasutra Article. Accessed November 13, 2019. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171695/Nintendo_reveals_Wii_Us_Miiverse_new_hardware_specifics.php.

35: “IR Information: Sales Data - Dedicated Video Game Sales Units.” Nintendo Co., Ltd. Accessed November 13, 2019. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html.

36: Peckham, Matt. “Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime On the Switch.” Time. Time, January 15, 2017. https://time.com/4635415/nintendo-switch-online-reggie-fils-amie/.

37: Yurieff, Kaya. “Nintendo Exec: Failed Wii U Is Responsible for Switch's Success.” CNNMoney. Cable News Network. Accessed November 13, 2019. https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/09/technology/nintendo-switch-wii-u/index.html.

38: Van Boom, Daniel. “Nintendo's Joy-Con Controllers Are Insane.” CNET. CNET, January 13, 2017. https://www.cnet.com/news/nintendo-joy-con-switch-controllers-announced/.

39: Porter, Jon. “Meet the Minds behind Nintendo Switch's HD Rumble Tech.” TechRadar. TechRadar, February 7, 2017. https://www.techradar.com/news/meet-the-minds-behind-nintendo-switchs-hd-rumble-tech.

40: Statt, Nick. “Why the Nintendo Switch Is the Most Innovative Game Console in Years.” The Verge. The Verge, December 21, 2017. https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/21/16804406/nintendo-switch-console-business-saved-zelda-mario.

41: Walton, Mark. “Nintendo Switch Uses Nvidia Tegra X1 SoC, Clock Speeds Outed.” Ars Technica, December 20, 2016. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/12/nintendo-switch-nvidia-tegra-x1-specs-speed/.

42: Romano, Sal. “PS Vita Production Ended in Japan.” Gematsu, March 7, 2019. https://gematsu.com/2019/03/ps-vita-production-ended-in-japan.