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Submitted by Stephen G, Project Mercury team leader.
Sega’s Game Gear was the 3rd commercially available hand-held video game console that featured a color screen. I definitely remember logging some Sonic The Hedgehog hours on a Game Gear. What about you? Favorite games? Do you miss the Game Gear, or are you content with your iPod Touches and PSPs?
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YES! I loved this thing… Super battery hog though, lol
I remember reading a quote in a comic book that referred to a electronic location device as “eating batteries faster than a gamegear.”
Still have a working one sonic the hedgehog and tails adventure being the only games though. the main reason why this device went through fresh batteries in 6 hours is due to the fluorescent tube that acts as the backlight. the genesis ac/dc adapter work for it as well XD
No, the real reason it blew through them so fast was that batteries in the early 90’s sucked! Everything chowed them, unless it was quite low powered. My RC cars never seemed to last more than 10-15 minutes on an overnight charge, and they weren’t exactly high-end racers. I like to think that the GG (and RCs!) was one of the reasons that manufacturers started to compete a bit harder and improve their products. Particularly rechargables – but alkalines too.
1990, you had a choice of zinc-carbon or a couple lacklustre types of alkaline (duracell, everready silver, or generic – energisers hadn’t even come along), and memory-effect-tacular Ni Cad rechargables in the range of 500~650mAh for AAs (about the same as the primary cells). So a GG would have about 4.3Wh of useful power even before we consider the poor voltage drop curves. Not a great deal for something with a backlight rated somewhere distinctly north of 1w.
Nowadays even a base level energiser is probably much better than an original, bunny powering duracell, and there’s Ultras, M3s, Lithium Photo Power… memory-less NiMHs with 2000+ mAh capacity (upto 2800 last time I checked… maybe 3000?) not to mention the rise of Lithium-Ion (though not available as AA? could make a plug-in long-life battery pack of similar size/weight though). So there’s probably 3-4x the runtime easily on tap.
I haven’t noticed any ultra-short-life problems having resurrected mine with modern power cells… but to be honest a lot of the time you run it off the 9v adaptor anyway (our biggest problem originally was that getting damaged!), as it’s intended to be more of a “portable” system than a “pocket” one, unlike the Gameboy and Lynx. There are netbooks almost as small as it nowadays.
I would like to replace the lamp in my broken (burnt bulb) GG with white LEDs though, and see how much of the battery suck was due to it basically being a mechanic’s utility lamp with an LCD and some low-end ICs bolted on.
I remember playing my gameboy for days on a fresh set of batteries even longer after getting a battery pack so it is the GG fault it ate batteries like a fat kid on hamburgers not batteries in the 90s
*sigh* I miss the nineties lol
The GG munched batteries down like a kit-kat ‘cos it had a colour screen and the original gameboy was in black-and -white LCD so it lasted longer but was rubbish picture quality compared to the sega
We still have a couple of them. We even have the TV tuner to watch TV on it. Sadly, since the digital transition, the tuner is pretty much worthless.
I wanted one of these as a kid for exactly that reason.
Couldn’t possibly be worse than the dedicated analogue portable TV I picked up for about the same price as the GG tuner…
Still, I still have it and it still works… the little battery guzzler… and we still have analogue here for a couple years yet. I’d better make use of it. Maybe see if there’s some way to hybridise it with one of those DVB-T chips that’s small (and low power) enough to fit inside a cheap USB dongle… or at least use it as a secondary monitor to a digital receiver, slaved off the RF output (given that all our kit is connected via SCART or S-Video these days)
Miss it? I still have mine. I mostly used it on car trips, since I had a car adapter and 6 batteries only got you like 2 hours of play time. I think my favorite game was Sonic Triple Trouble, though I remember asking for Sonic Chaos for Christmas for YEARS before I finally got it. I even remember trading a holographic Pokemon card for a couple of games. How’s THAT for nostalgia? XD
i still have mine and works perfectly i love it down with psp!
I remember when my mother hid mine because I was playing it all the time and eating up all the AA batteries… only to forget about it and make me think it had been stolen or lost. I went out and bought ANOTHER ONE and about a month later we found mine in the wine glass cabinet >.<
I remember buying mine at KMart and how giddy I was about bringing it home. Never bought too many games other than Echo the Dolphin and Joe Montana Football. But having a portable Sonic the Hedgehog was the most amazing thing at the time. I miss mine. : (
I used to have one, it was great. Of course, for a kid it was a pretty heavy gadget. I used to play Sonic Chaos a lot. Sometime before I was out of elementary school the screen got cracked.
The commercials for these things were the most insufferably smug bits of TV I’ve probably ever seen. Having a game gear made you *sooooooo* cool, much better than all those normals who didn’t have one or, even worse, had a **GASP** gameboy! That alone ensured that I would never have purchased one even if I had been into handheld video games.
Now you know why I have a Nintendo DS Lite.
It was certainly a bit of ahead of its time. Then again the same could be said a lot about Sega. But like most of Sega’s ventures, it had a fatal flaw. This being lack of developer support.
It was nothing compared to an Atari Lynx.
a friend of mine let me have his. He was chinese and his family used to regulary import goods from china/hong kong through thier bussiness. They also managed to get a device, don’t think it was offically liscensed or anything, that allowed you play sega master system on the game gear. They both used the same engine and processers so it was great. Now that i think about it thier whole import bussiness was dodgy and probaly illegal, they brought mobile phones that people had “found” in a car and things like that, they also had a truck load of portable dvd players with screens in 2000 they were selling for ultra cheap, like $100
I still own my old Game Gear and several games. It was heavy and ackward but I played games on it until my fingers cramped.
I still have mine hiding somewhere I do believe. Works still too.
Nomad was the bomb but game gear was good too.
i still have it, along with sonic the hedgehog 1,2,and3
I don’t know where mine is, but I never ended Sonic the Hedgehog.
I also had The Power Rangers game. It was pretty cool, actually!!
YES!
One of the best Xmas gifts ever, even if it was shared between me & my brother (looking back, my family must have been more poor than we realised as kids). Managed to eventually slog our way to the end of Sonic 1, which seemed quite a trek at the time (can ace it in about 20 minutes now) and got further fun out of Monaco GP (damn it was crap!), the legendary 4-in-1 cartridge (complete with a better driving game), Micro Machines (2 people on one GG – do THAT with your DS!), Streets of Rage (got the music on my computer somewhere, amazing what a bit of talent can do with a 3-way PSG plus noise), Mortal Kombat (shockingly faithful rendering) and a few others… plus the stack I bought off a friend in the last year of school for a pittance when the machine was about 8 years old….. landing us, for one, the inexplicably addictive Defenders of Oasis RPG, even though its a rather thin imitation of Final Fantasy.
Still ticking. Runs quite well on six modern batteries. Took it with me on vacation in 2008 for its 18th birthday, still gave some siesta-time fun. Got a few funny looks in the airport though. Switched back to the (merely 10 year old but more battered) GB Pocket for 2009 – as I went by a budget airline, hand luggage only, had to travel light!
Sort of shows that for a bit of portable enjoyment you don’t really need anything high end. Tetris (or Columns) still fills the need quite well, when Sonic or Mario aren’t around…
Gah! I looked around for EVER to find a copy of Mortal Kombat for mine. I didn’t even think they’d ported it, I could never find one anywhere. Granted, I was all of like 6 or 7 at the time, so it wasn’t like they’d be just handing the cart over if they did have a copy…
Even without the ultra-violence of MK, I did have a lot of fun with the old girl. Just seeing the G-Loc cart in the pic makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
I got mine free from my neighbor, who gave it to me at his yard sale after his kid decided to play ecco the dolphin in the bathtub. It worked fine after a short blowdry, and he even included 8 games, 2 sonics and a few sports ones among them, and it has the tv tuner too! Talk about lucky, huh?
I have one and still play it from time to time, mainly for Columns or Sonic. I also have an Atari Lynx – now THAT’S an oversized handheld. What I really wanted as a kid was a Sega Nomad – the handheld that played Genesis carts. I asked and asked and asked and my parents still said now despite the fact that I told them it played the same games I already had and they wouldn’t need to buy new games. They just don’t understand. Nowadays I can’t find one for cheaper than $115 (although it’s been a long time since I’ve actively searched) so I still haven’t added it to my collection.
Oh well. The fact that I have one is all that matter to me now.
I’m kicking myself in the ass though, because when Ames was going out of business in the early 2000s they still had brand-new GameGears and were selling them and cartridges for mad-cheap. I waited it out a bit then totally forgot all about it and then the store was empty. Then a couple years later I bought one on eBay w/a case and 4 games for $40. I could’ve had a brand-new factory sealed GameGear for $10-$20 but forgot and ended up w/a used one and some games for $40
PS: why is there two copies of Columns in the picture?
Oh man, I love this handheld, and it’s still my favorite handheld system. Sonic the Hedgheog 2 is know as one of the hardest games for this. It’s also one of the first handhelds with a lighted screen in back. And remember: this handheld was in competition with the original nintendo handheld.
I don’t remember this version, but I have a Nomad. It was the Sega handheld that played the Genesis games (no more buying the same game twice as with Nintendo at that time). It also took 6 batteries, or a car/home adapter, or the optional rechargeable battery box. Good stuff, Maynard.
Super Columns, Shinobi (beat that sucker repeatedly), NBA Jam TE, Sonic 2, Aerial Assault, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I even had a copy of Chuck Rock at one point. Big problem with the Game Gear, though, is that it had a nasty tendency for the backlight to fail. Whether it was the fluorescent tube itself or the electronic ballast crapping out, once the backlight failed, it wouldn’t even turn on anymore. You’d get a hum and the red power light for a moment, then nothing. I’m planning on eventually picking up a first gen PSP, putting hacked firmware on it, and dropping a GameGear emulator the sucker.
Winnest portable game system until the PSP and maybe even then. wewt, God I miss it.
I remember back when I was about 8 or 9 having very bad asthma attacks and having to go regularly to the hospital.
At the hospital, the only real form of entertainment for youngsters were Sega Game Gears. I would clock up huge hours play Sonic the Hedgehog while strapped to a machine helping me breathe.
One of my first real introductions into the world of computer games.
does anyone else remember when you could get these things at Perkins and play them while you had to wait for your food??? i remember begging my parents to go to Perkins for dinner so i could play with one