Sega Game Gear

Sega began working on the handheld console in 1989. It was originally codenamed "Project Mercury". The system was released in North America and Europe in 1991 and in Japan in 1990. The Game Gear was Sega's competition with Nintendo's Game Boy.

For all intents and purposes the Game Gear was simply a handheld Master System. The only difference being that the Game Gear supported a larger color palette, which led to the development of potentially better looking games. The Game Gear's controls were less cramped than the Game Boy's making the System easier to play. Probably the most famous, yet rare, peripheral for the Game Gear was the "Tv Tuner". This addon plugged into the systems game cartridge slot and allowed you to watch TV on the Game Gear. Among others,the Game Gear also had a magnifying glass addon to help make up for the small size of the Game Gears screen.

Since the Game Gear and Master System were nearly identical in hardware specs it made for easy game conversion from Master System to Game Gear. Master System games could simply be written onto Game Gear cartridges and play without any other modification. The Master Gear (another addon periphreal) allowed players to plug Master System Carts in to the Game Gear, however the opposite (Playing Game Gear games on Master System) was not possible because most Game Gear games took adanvantage of the Game Gears larger color palette.

Although technically supperior to the Game Boy, the Game Gear did not have great commercial success due to the fact that Sega did not have alot of third pary support or key games. The Game Gear also was viewed as being bulky and a battery hog, consuming 6AA batteries in about 3-5 hours. To help combat the battery life problem Sega also released rechargable and external power supplies. This did little to compensate when the Game Boy could last 8-12 hours on only 4 AA batteries.

Two other editions of the Game Gear were released. The first (Released in 1993) was the Blue Sports Edition, which was the same as the original except it was blue and came bundled with the game World Series Baseball. The second edition was known as the "Red Coca-Cola" themed Game Gear. This Coca-Cola Game Gear was only released in Japan and came bundled with the game Coca-Cola Kid.

All in all the Game Gear was a moderatly popular handheld console. It easily out did the Atari Lynx handheld, but was not able to top the Game Boy. Game Gear in the end had about 240 games released before it lost support in 1997.

Technical Specs:

CPU: 8-bit Zilog Z80 (3.58MHz)
RAM: 8KB, 16KB Video RAM
Colors Available: 4096 (32 on screen)
Sprites: 64
Sprite Size: 8x8 or 8X16 pixels
Resolution: 160x146 pixels
Screen: 3.2inch (81mm) backlit LCD
Sound: 4 channel stereo