In part two of Binge Gamer's brief retrospective on the evolution of handheld gaming, Nintendo finally joins the colored age with the Game Boy Color, the Neo Geo Pocket and Gunpei Yokoi's WonderSwan challenge the Game Boy for dominance... in Japan... and the Nokia N-Gage finally gets a little bit of credit for trying something new.

Even if it crashed and burned faster than the Virtual Boy.

So what ultimately drove Nintendo to begin work on a colored unit? Game developers who felt the Game Boy’s tech was insufficient for what they wanted to do. In 1995 Nintendo began work on a new handheld that would include a 32-bit ARM RISC processor. Unfortunately the graphical performance never lived up to Nintendo’s standards and the project was scrapped and started over from scratch.

Nintendo had an interesting dilemma on their hands: How do they keep the developers happy while also not risking the alienation of their userbase? The answer lied with, of all people, Atari.

MaximusPaynicus via bingegamer.net »