Sega Game Gear
Released in 1990/1991, the Sega Game Gear is Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s immensely popular handheld, the Game Boy. Also competing with the Atari Lynx and TurboExpress, the Game Gear is a full-colour, backlit, handheld console.
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About The Sega Game Gear
Positioned as a much technically superior system to the Game Boy, the Game Gear is essentially viewed as a portable Master System in terms of its power. Sega Game Gear games are often very close ports of Master System versions, making it a very attractive system.
There was a significant downside to all of these superior technical benefits, the battery life. Powered by 6 AA batteries, the Game Gear only runs for around 3-4 hours. Compared to the Game Boy running over 30 hours on 4 AA batteries, Nintendo ultimately won the handheld war.
This did not stop the Game Gear from being an extremely popular system though. Selling over 10 million units and enjoying a game library of over 300 games worldwide. Unfortunately, developers were restricted by Nintendo’s tight contracts meaning they could not make games for rival systems. The Game Gear outperformed the Atari Lynx and NEC TurboExpress, making it the best colour handheld console of the era.
The system was on sale until 1997.
A lifelong avid gamer and computing enthusiast, Matt has decades of Retro Gaming experience. Now over 40 years old, Matt now even considers himself retro, but fortunately, nobody has developed a Matt emulator (not yet at least!).