My first handheld gaming device was a Sega GameGear. It was a Christmas present and it was, I believe, a compromise. I so badly wanted a Sega Genesis like my older cousin, so I could play Sonic on the TV, but my mother insisted it would leave burn-in on the tube. At any rate, I was thrilled about the GameGear and I loved it.
It famously sucked up 6 AA batteries in a few hours, but it was COLOR, unlike those GameBoy plebeians, and having Sonic on the go was pretty awesome. Sonic 1 and 2, plus Sonic Triple Trouble and Sonic Chaos all graced the lovely gaming slab from Sega. At one point I believe I obtained the wall adapter, and more lengthy gaming sessions became easier.
One day, at Toys-R-Us, I wandered through the electronics section and saw the Sega NOMAD — it looked similar to the GameGear but it played actual Genesis games on the go. Incredible! It too, had a color screen, but equipped with six buttons, and you could connect it straight to your TV if you wanted to. For a while I dreamed about this interesting device, wondering what other magical mobile gaming experiences might come about.
Then, everything changed the year Pokemon arrived. Suddenly kids at school were whipping out their ancient grey GameBoys bricks to get in on the latest trend.
There would be no Pokemon on the GameGear, as Nintendo clearly controlled this franchise, making Pokemon and Nintendo almost synonymous overnight.
And despite the monochrome graphics of the GameBoy, the sophistication of Pokemon took me by surprise. I had never seen anything like it on the GameGear, and never thought so much ‘game’ could be packed into a mobile gaming device.
Now, convincing your parents that your 10 year old self requires another gaming device is a bit of a hurdle. It was hard enough to get Santa to deliver the GameGear — however, in the fall of 1998 the GameBoy Color arrived, and in the summer of 1999, as promised if I scored at least 80% on my NY State Math Regents, my folks would buy me the GameBoy Color with Pokemon — conveniently bundled together at Costco. I did, in fact, score exactly an 80%, and my sister and I were awarded our treasure at the end of the school year and the start of summer. Thus, the summer of ‘99 became the summer of Pokemon, and a whole lot more.
But I digress — you see — because even at 10 years old, while every day at school kids were talking about Pokemon, bringing in their GameBoys, trading their Pokemon, etc… I was on a mission to find out if you could play Pokemon on something other than a GameBoy. I had to get in on this, one way or another, even if it meant playing only at home.
I didn’t understand too much but I figured there was more than enough power in a computer to do what a GameBoy does. And so, off to the Internet I went, searching things like “Play Pokemon on Computer” and “PC GameBoy” and “GameBoy on PC” and on and on it went until I stumbled upon the solution: emulators.
If it wasn’t for Pokemon, I probably wouldn’t have discovered emulators until I was much older.
Ok, so emulators — easy to get. Found many sites with downloads. But ROMs? Oh! What’s this? The actual game on the cart is called a ROM. OK, then — a bit more Googling around and finally found it — some innocuous .zip files for RED and BLUE. (Google was brand spanking new at the time and considered one of the best new search engines around, it did not disappoint.)
So there I was, with my Pokemon ROMs, my GameBoy emulators and Windows 95 — it was time to play Pokemon on my PC. And boy did I. Each day at school, while my buddies talked about their actual Pokemon, I puffed up my chest and talked about how I’m playing it on my PC and the screen is bigger and it colorizes it too! (These were the SuperGameboy pallets but I didn’t know that yet.)
At the very least I got to participate and know what everyone was talking about and experience it all at the same time without missing out — even though I couldn’t trade and I still didn’t have a GameBoy.
At any rate, fast forward to the future. Dave wields Pokemon Blue with a Lime-Green GameBoy Color, and Dave is very very happy. What’s more, I’m having this surreal experience because I played through most of Pokemon Blue already on my computer, and now I’m doing it again, untethered, on the couch. Tiny screen, yes, but — this is it, the true Pokemon experience — a wonderfully fun complex mobile game that will go anywhere I go.
OK, so needless to say, emulators intrigued me, and parallel to loving Pokemon I slowly uncovered that I could emulate consoles like the NES, SuperNES and the famous Genesis — wait, so all these games could be on my computer now? At no cost to my parents? At no cost to me?
Legal issues of ROMs aside, my obsession with mobile devices is what lead me down the path of emulation, and now, it’s still the predominate way I like to play video games. Especially if it’s mobile.
If you’re not hip to the gaming scene right now, the latest trend is handheld mobile PCs and Android gaming devices. The amount of power you can pack into these things is incredible, and most consoles from around 2005 and older can be emulated with absolute ease. And for older game devices, any console’s library of games can be contained in very little space. Every original GameBoy game takes up less than 800MBs of space — that’s a little more than a CD-ROM typically holds.
So now it’s 2024 and Dave has a SteamDeck, and an Analogue Pocket, and I just wanna go back to talk to Kid Dave and say “Buddy, in the future, all your wildest dreams will come true.”
My obsession with mobile games did evolve past the GameBoy — later in 2001, I bought a Palm Pilot IIIc with all my birthday money. I bought it at a Staples, and I think the person at the register made a funny comment about a kid needing a Palm Pilot. But — look, aside from the e-mails and the organizer, there was a world of apps and games to explore.
The Palm Pilot was a different beast than most other handheld devices I’ve had — it could play back video, highly compressed, but could also hold a nice selection of pictures. While emulation was not something it could do well (it only had so many buttons, too) it had its own library of colorful games, including Space Trader. (If you don’t know, just look it up.)
Between Space Trader, some Tetris and Bust-a-Move type clones, and a few other tap-based games, I felt like the boss. I would take notes, write little stories, doodle, I even learned you could get a keyboard for the device, alongside a modem. Those devices never came for me, but in 2004, I acquired a PocketPC, and that had basic NES and GameBoy emulation (not great but it did it), plus it had WiFi — now we were cooking. Frankly browsing the web was more interesting than playing games at that point in my life, but it could be done.
As I approached college at the end of 2005, my PC gaming obsession eclipsed all others, and off I went to school with an Alienware laptop. That’s a sad story is for another day. But, I also had my iPod, and was starting to enjoy Mac OS X more than Windows. It was a new time for all things.
In 2007 the iPhone was announced and it seemed like the mobile device I had actually been waiting for my whole life. Web, videos, music, pictures, games, maps, yadda yadda, yep, it checked all the boxes and had a crazy price tag to boot. I couldn’t cut enough lawns that summer to ever buy one, but eventually, I owned my first iPhone in 2010.
A new era of mobile gaming emerged. Gone were the tropes of GameBoys past — now was the time of touchable games, games that took advantage of accelerometers, games that saved your place, games that were stupid but fun. But unlike its Android counter-part, Apple never allowed emulators on the app store, even as developers tried to sneak them in behind silly flashlight applications and other similar ‘tool’ based apps. So it was up to devs to make some quality games worth playing. It wasn’t long before the guts of an iPhone were powerful enough to provide gorgeous 3D graphics and AAA titles started to be released — in 2011 GTA 3 was released for iOS — a game originally for PS2 and PC in 2000 — and it played better than it ever did when I last tried it on my gaming computer way back when. It was truly the future (at the time.)
OK Kid Dave, it’s 2011 and you have a magical pocket computer that can play GTA3 — amazing, right?
Well. Technically, yes. Practically — maybe no?
AAA games like GTA 3 and similar ‘modern’ games require a bit of a time sync. Sure, I would boot up GTA 3 and just drive around like a lunatic, shooting and crashing, but to sink into a game, to really get into it, it was hard. Not because the game wasn’t there, but because of time and life. Whereas 10-20 minutes of Pokemon I could do something, 10-20 minutes of a more modern title wasn’t going to cut it — either it’s not enough time to do something useful in the game, or it’s going to be mid-mission and no chance to save, you’ll have wasted your time.
So as games increased in complexity, so too did the time required to enjoy them on the go. A plane trip was one thing but a doctor’s office was another. But — OK — it’s cool, it’s the future, I got PC-quality games in my pocket.
As an aside: Before the iPhone but after my PocketPC, was my Sony PSP. This device supported suspending the game anywhere but the trade-off was a lackluster library of games (at the time) alongside a paltry battery. So while this was an effective and powerful mobile gaming device (Liberty City Stories was a mini GTA 3!) it ultimately became my SNES emulator at college, and then I sold it for a DS Lite, which I later regretted. (But I now own multiple PSPs today so we fixed that.)
After the untimely death of my Alienware, college turned into gaming on my PS3, while I moved over to a Mac for everything else. I went full Apple fanboy after graduation and it propelled me into my first 4 years as a professional blogger. Needless to say, not a lot of ‘complex’ mobile gaming went on, but I did enjoy my PS3 plenty, right alongside Angry Birds and Cut the Rope.
Somewhere around 2015 and onwards, I became aware of these customized Android devices that had built in buttons and controls — ready to go purpose-built emulator machines. And while I had returned to PC gaming, I couldn’t help but think about how all those games from my childhood would be perfect mobile games, now with save states and so much more.
It seems like these older games had the sweet spot between complexity and involvement, something modern mobile games lacked — where they were either completely uninvolved or required constant attention, and needless to say, no save states in sight.
In May of 2021, I acquired the GPD XD Plus, one such Android device which looked very similar to the 3DS of yore. And from that moment on, I knew — the collection in hand, on the go, with save states — this is the way. This device was a great stepping stone, but alas, its hinge lost its tension and —while it is pocketable — has some caveats with battery life and suspend, plus it’s stuck on Android 7.
Meanwhile, the Steam Deck promises AAA PC Gaming on the go — and it delivers. But now, one year since owning a Steam Deck, I find myself asking — how much AAA gaming do I really do and how much of it is on the go anyway?
The answer is very little. A testament to the fact I dual boot my Steam Deck now with Batocera Linux and my Analogue Pocket is my nightly driver.
Anyway, where the Steam Deck falls short is simply on size. It’s not a bad size, it’s really the perfect size for PC games on the go, but for most of the games I’m looking to play, it does feel a bit — big.
And where the Analogue Pocket falters, isn’t so much on size (though it’s a bit too large to fit comfortably in any normal pocket) — it only has so many consoles can it emulate (ahem, I mean FPGA-ize), and not all consoles allow save states. Still, it’s the closest one yet in terms of size, comfort, quality and features.
It seems like every day there’s a new handheld Android gaming device hitting the market, in a variety of form factors and sizes that would’ve made Kid Dave’s head explode 10 times over.
And so now, in 2024 I’m still reflecting on what perfect device will fit in my pocket, carry all my games, and let the little moments of time we need to kill between doctors and hair appointments and waiting on line feel fun again, without actually wasting the effort I put into the game.
Will there ever be a perfect device? In 10 years time, who knows what I’ll be able to fit in my pocket. Maybe I’ll even be able to build it myself.
For now, I’m sticking with my VMU and Chao Adventure — because hey, Sonic Adventure still holds up!