The Game.com cometh: The rise and fall of the Game Boy’s weirdest rivals

There was a time—from roughly April of 1989 until the mobile revolution of the last 10 years—when “mobile gaming” meant something very different to the vast majority of people. Specifically, it meant Nintendo. Even as the Console Wars raged at home, the Japanese giant’s iron-fingered, battery-powered grip on the handheld market remained unshakable, from its venerable Game Boy line down through that plucky gray workhorse’s various descendants, two of which—the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo 3DS—are facing major decade milestones this month. (Twentieth and 10th, for those keeping track.)
Sega, Hudson, Sony, and especially the bargain-rate, endlessly industrious LCD hucksters over at Tiger Electronics—they all tried to take on the king on its away-from-home home turf at one point or another, and almost all of them came away from the effort bruised. That’s to say nothing of the even stranger names, the ones not so much bumped as broken by their attempts to topple the Game Boy from its monochromatic throne: Cell phone companies on the make. Homebrew open-source pioneers. Members of the Swedish mafia. It wasn’t that people couldn’t see that there was a future in gaming on the go. It’s just that no one could ever figure out how to beat Nintendo at what was, very literally, its own game.
If the measure of a company is in the enemies it leaves in its wake, then the history of Nintendo’s handheld systems is an exceptionally strange one. And that’s the history we’re hoping to tell here: An examination of Nintendo’s 30-year domination of the mobile gaming market, as told through many of the bizarre competitors it steamrolled past. Some were available only in foreign markets. Many were ahead of their time. At least one added the unfortunate term “sidetalking” to the cultural lexicon. But they all had one thing in common: The Game Boy, and its children, devoured them.
This is how.