Remember how awesome Game Boy was when it first came out? I know that I do. While it was simplistic it was really pretty wild to have a portable gaming console even if it did have to be in just the right light in order for you to be able to see it.
Once they sold like a hundred trillion of those things - and it is still one of the best-selling consoles of all time, Sega wanted in on the action so they did what they always do: They tried to one up Nintendo by releasing a superior machine.
The Game Gear definitely was better than Game Boy but Sega did something that they always do and that was to have critical design flaws in their product.
This friggin monster of a machine was vastly superior to the Game Boy. It had stereo sound, a full color backlit display and a far better graphics engine. It was advertised as being technologically superior to the Game Boy and there was no denying that it was definitely that.
It shared a lot of the same technology as the Sega Master system and this is why Sega was able to rush it to market. It was pretty cool that you could play all of the Master System games on it via an adaptor although this would prove problematic for a lot of games because of the screen being much smaller than a television, which is what all the original games were designed to be played on.
With it being so much better than the Game Boy, we were all kind of surprised that the release price of the system was a mere $150. This positioned it to easily outsell the only color competitors they had at the time which was the Atari Lynx and the TurboGrafx Express.
Perhaps it was the decision to rush it to market in 1991 that lead to two very major issues for the system that for me and other gamers meant it was a dead in the water product
- There weren't very many games available on it at all
- The batteries would drain in a record pace
The second one was the worst part because back in the early 90's, I don't think lithium batteries even existed yet and rechargeable batteries were expensive and unreliable. The Game Gear required a full 6 AA batteries and this would only get you around 3-5 hours of gameplay. Now I am not going to play a handheld console for 5 hours in a row or anything, but the expense of new batteries became troublesome for the already limited number of people that bought this thing. In order to enjoy your Game Gear experience, you needed to be plugged in to an outlet, which kind of defeats the purpose of a mobile gaming device now doesn't it?
Sega either had terrible management or they simply didn't care because they must have known this was going to be an issue with users. Unfortunately they addressed the problem entirely too late when they released a rechargeable battery pack which was also extremely huge. So if you wanted to play your "portable" full-color game system you either needed to sit near an outlet or you had to have a monstrous battery pack on your lap.
When Sega managed to only sell 1/10 as many of these as the Game Boy they abandoned it and moved onto other projects, all of which ironically would sell even worse than the Game Gear.
I know that I didn't stay interested in my Game Gear for very long and at one point in time owning one resulted in me getting busted for shoplifting batteries as a pre-teen. I got grounded for a while after that.
Sega had a real opportunity to be a player in the console war but their greatest enemy in the industry turned out to be Sega. In the beginning of the 90's they were positioned to overtake Nintendo as the number one console producer in the world. By the beginning of the 2000's they were facing insolvency. The Game Gear wasn't the reason for the failure, but it was a sign of a string of things to come that would eventually result in this once great company completely exiting the industry as a hardware manufacturer.
If you owned one of these, let's talk. For your sake though, I sincerely hope you didn't own one