The Most Bizarre Gaming Handhelds Of All Time

If you were a kid in the '90s, odds are good that you either owned a Game Boy or wished that you did. It was undeniably the toy du jour among video game fans for years and its success ushered in the age of the handheld gaming console, which is still going strong today.

Nintendo carved an enduring space for themselves in the handheld market — the Game Boy was the best-selling handheld of all time for twenty-one years, from its release in 1989 until 2010 when it was dethroned by the Nintendo DS (via Destructoid) — but others haven't been so lucky. Scores of handheld gaming devices have been manufactured and released over the last several decades, many of which predate the release of the Game Boy, most of which you've probably never heard of.

Along the way, some game companies wandered off the beaten path and created some handheld gaming machines which are as cool as they are weird.

Two years after the Microvision hit store shelves, Entex got in on the action with their first handheld, the Select-A-Game. It worked on a similar principle as the Microvision, relying on a central hub housing a pixelated display screen, with the rest of the hardware in the game itself.

Upon opening a game box, consumers would find a game cartridge similar in size and shape to those used for the Game Boy Advance, as well as a corresponding overlay to augment the display with a game-specific layout (via Internet Archive). Six games are confirmed to have been released, half of which are sports games, nearly all of which were direct rip-offs of existing properties like "Pac-Man." At the time, Namco had given Coleco the handheld license for the title and Entex ultimately stopped selling their version after a settlement with Coleco (via Handheld Museum).

The thing that earns the Select-A-Game its place in handheld history, however, is its unique button layout. Despite being a handheld, the Select-A-Game kept multiplayer functionality in mind in its design. The device had two sets of controls, one on each side of the screen, allowing two players to enjoy a game at the same time.

[Featured image by Jarkof01 via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | Public domain]

In the annals of video game history, Tiger Electronics is known for two things. They made a lot of games and most of them weren't very good. They were good at getting through road trips but not much else. The Game.com handheld console was supposed to fix that and make Tiger a legitimate player in the handheld space. That obviously didn't happen, but the Game.com is an interesting gadget, nonetheless.

Released in 1997, the Game.com was certainly a gaming device but it was so much more. When you turned it on, you were greeted with six icons. The first icon let you play a game cartridge, another let you see high scores, and another was Solitaire, which came standard on the device. The rest took you to a phone book, calendar, and calculator. The Game.com device glimpsed the digital future coming down the pipe and attempted to position itself favorably. In addition to its offline features, the device could connect to the internet with a modem connection (via Siloconera). It also had a touch screen and stylus, something which wouldn't hit the mainstream handheld gaming devices until the Nintendo DS.

Despite all of its bells and whistles, not to mention an impressive games lineup including "Mortal Kombat" and "Resident Evil 2" the device had severe graphical limitations and a slow refresh rate (via Video Game Critic) which was a detriment to gameplay. Ultimately, only about 300,000 units were sold and the Game.com was largely forgotten.

[Featured image by Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | Public domain]

In the late '90s and early 2000s Nokia practically owned the mobile phone market. As the technology advanced, they made a move to expand their empire into gaming while still maintaining a stranglehold on cell phones. The result was the N-Gage, marketed as the first truly hybrid cell phone and gaming handheld.

Sometimes, when you combine two things both of them are enhanced, like chocolate and peanut butter. Other times, both things are diminished. That was the case with the N-Gage, released in 2003. The gameplay involved using cell phone-style buttons. Those buttons are fine for keying in a phone number but aren't optimized for navigating sprites around digital landscapes. There were also issues with the call experience, making it difficult to hear the other party. In its attempts to be both a good phone and a good handheld, the N-Gage failed to achieve either. Worse, inserting games was hugely inconvenient. Swapping a game card required pulling the back off your phone and removing the battery. Even a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign wasn't enough to overcome the N-Gage's shortcomings.

According to Cnet, Nokia fixed many of the device's problems in the second version, but they needed a knockout exclusive title to really capture market interest, something that never really materialized. Shortly thereafter, Sony announced the PlayStation Portable and any hope for the N-Gage fizzled away.

[Featured image by Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC0]

Released in 2005, The Gizmondo attempted to succeed where so many other handhelds had failed, by producing something more than a gaming device. The device was produced by Swedish company Tiger Telematics — not the same as Tiger Electronics — and pulled quadruple duty as a handheld, PDA, GPS, and digital camera (via Inverse).

It had a promising start, including a buffet of early 2000s celebrities attending its launch, including Busta Rhymes and Sting. Despite its ambitions and the fanfare surrounding its launch, the Gizmondo was destined for failure for totally unexpected reasons. The device was the brainchild of Stefan Eriksson, a former car thief and arms dealer turned toy manufacturer. It turns out Eriksson and other high-ups at the company had connections to the Swedish mafia. Shortly thereafter, the company filed for bankruptcy with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. Then Eriksson wrecked a car worth almost a million dollars and ended up in jail.

The company later emerged with a teaser for a new and improved Gizmondo, planned for release in 2008 but those dreams crashed almost as hard as Eriksson's Ferrari and career prospects.

The Pandora was an objectively cool device that might have been widely adopted in another universe. In our own reality, however, it suffered from a delayed launch which probably caused it to miss the boat.

Before Kickstarter became the independent funding platform of choice, the folks behind Pandora crowdfunded their device from among a community of dedicated handheld gaming fans (via SemiAccurate). The device itself looked an awful lot like a Nintendo 3DS, with a QWERTY keyboard where the touchscreen should be. Users could play games by way of emulation, playing virtual systems from the Commodore 64 through the Nintendo 64 (via Pandora). They could also watch movies, listen to music, surf the web, and use the Office suite of software.

Had it launched on time, things might have gone differently but it didn't ship until 2012, roughly four years after it was announced. That obviously eroded goodwill and interest in the product. It's hard to stay excited for a year about something you already paid for, and you can't generate word of mouth when there's nothing to talk about. By the time the Pandora hit consumers, their window of opportunity was closed.

[Featured image by Michael Mrozek via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | Public domain]

The Playdate is a late addition to the handheld gaming pantheon, having launched in April of 2022, and attempts to reimagine the way we interact with handheld gaming devices. At first glance, you could mistake it for a Game Boy Advance SP but on closer inspection, you'd realize there's something different about this little machine. It has the usual buttons, but it also has a little hand crank attached to the side. You'll use that crank to play some of the games.

Speaking of games, you won't find the latest Mario game on the Playdate and the games you will find, you can't buy at your local brick-and-mortar. Instead of heading to the mall or an online play store to pick up games, new independent games are delivered to your Playdate intermittently, via Wi-Fi. The designers relate their games lineup to a season of television, with new games coming out twice every week over a twelve-week period (via Playdate).

Once you get through the initial offerings, Playdate promises more new games in the future. In the meantime, you can also make your own games using the free software provided by the manufacturer. When you're not playing, your Playdate can slide into a stereo dock that charges the device, plays audio, and has a handy pen holder just for kicks.