The Black System Named After a Gray Planet

The Game Gear's development began under the name "Project Mercury", with a sketch called the "Micro Drive". It was basically a small Genesis, thanks to the similarities in the controls. In addition, it was to have a tuner built in, so you could watch TV on it.

















The Game Gear was made to be a portable Master System that would compete with Nintendo's Game Boy. In some ways, Sega's handheld was actually superior. For example, it featured a backlit LCD screen with full color (which Nintendo wouldn't replicate in a handheld for 13 years), while the Game Boy was monochrome and only had a dot matrix display. The Game Gear was built slightly heavier and with a wider and curvier casing to make it more comfortable in the hands. Third, its color palette was the second power of the Master System's 64 color palette, using 4,096. Unfortunately, the slightly more advanced technology used in the system came at the expense of decent battery life. While the Game Boy could run for about 30 hours on 4 AA batteries, the Game Gear ran about 5 hours on 6 AAs.


An actual prototype, while not changed too much before release, was unveiled and had a few differences. Most notably, while the early logo had the three ovals, there were two big G's under it, on top of a smaller text that reads the compound word "Gamegear". In addition, the two main face buttons had the numbers "1" and "2" printed directly on them. Lastly, the "START" button was labeled "PAUSE" in black instead of white.













Later, another prototype was unveiled, looking 95% like the release. The two buttons now have their respective numbers printed above them, with a line pointing at the buttons.

Gotta Go (Come) Fast

But since Sega was 1 1/2 years late in getting a handheld into the video game market, they lost 1 1/2 years worth of sales to the Game Boy, so they sort of rushed the Game Gear's development. One thing they did was port some Master System games to the Game Gear as the hardware between the two was similar. In the end, they released it on October 6, 1990.

Gotta Go (Leave) Fast

When the Game Gear was losing too much ground to the Game Boy, Sega discontinued it in 1994 to focus on their home consoles, namely their new 32-bit Sega Saturn. The handheld sold 10,620,000 units by March 1996.