The Nintendo handheld experience: at risk of being forgotten?

For many years, it seemed that Nintendo could do no wrong in the handheld space. Back in the early days of gaming, the company’s Game & Watch devices absolutely wiped the floor with similar LCD handheld games from companies like Tiger; as technology advanced, the humble Game Boy comfortably saw off opposition from the likes of Sega, Atari and NEC with the Game Gear, Lynx and PC Engine GT, and in subsequent generations the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS led the way in handheld gaming.

Today, of course, we have the Switch, which I guess you can call a “handheld” of sorts, even if it’s even less practical to put in a pocket than an Atari Lynx, but it feels very much like the glory days of Nintendo dominating the handheld space are over. And, in general, it feels like the era of handhelds is declining — though the upcoming Evercade EXP may, of course, have something to say about that.

Super Mario Land (Game Boy)

Now, for most retro systems, the original hardware becoming obsolete, increasingly hard to find and/or impractically expensive isn’t necessarily a problem thanks to widespread emulation solutions. But in the case of Nintendo handhelds, there’s absolutely something distinctive and unique about playing these games as originally intended — particularly in the case of the dual-screen DS and 3DS systems. Sure, you can fake the dual-screen display with a split-screen view on a single monitor, but it’s just not quite the same.

On top of that, the earlier Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance systems don’t get nearly the love and attention they deserve, because despite their immense popularity at the time of their original release, they’re seemingly regarded as less worthy of preservation and celebration than the more high-profile TV-connected platforms.

“High-profile” perhaps isn’t the right term, though, when you look at the sales figures, because these handhelds were absolutely some of Nintendo’s top performers. As of June 30, 2022, the Nintendo Switch was sitting comfortably at 111.08 million units sold worldwide, which is an astronomical success by anyone’s measurements. But the Game Boy and Game Boy Color sold a cumulative 118.69 million units across their lifespan, at a time when the overall market was considerably smaller. And the DS sold 154.02 million units, with a gigantic 948.76 million units of software sold.

Metroid II (Game Boy)

For context and comparison, the Famicom and NES sold 61.91 million units worldwide (with 500 million units of software), the Super Famicom/SNES sold 49.10 million units (with 379.06 million units of software), the N64 sold 32.93 million units (with 224.97 million units of software), the Gamecube sold 21.74 million units (with 208.57 million units of software), with only the Wii and Switch coming close to the dizzy heights of the DS, with the former selling 101.63 million hardware units and 921.85 million units of software.

It should be clear from those numbers that there was a lot of love for the classic Nintendo handhelds out there — particularly the Game Boy and the DS — and yet the efforts to preserve and celebrate these games in an official capacity today are woefully limited. Outside of occasional releases such as Konami’s excellent Castlevania Advance Collection, Limited Run Games’ resurrection of the original Shantae for Game Boy Colour, the few Game Boy games in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection and the odd Game Boy game showing up on Evercade, it’s looking like we’re at risk of losing several generations of worthwhile gaming experiences without resorting to more… unofficial means of preservation.

That’s a real shame, because not only are there some great games that are exclusive to Nintendo handheld platforms, there are also some thoroughly interesting versions of multi-platform games on Nintendo handhelds, too. Sure, at the time of release many of these were thought of as “inferior” versions of games that you might as well play on the “big” consoles, but looking back on a lot of these titles today, it’s clear that they were designed as distinctive handheld experiences rather than attempts to cram a TV-connected console game into a tiny handheld.

Henry Hatsworth (Nintendo DS)

So what is there to do? Hard to say, really. Nintendo obviously owns the rights to its own first-party releases, which means us ever seeing them again depends on whether or not they ever decide to do something like a Game Boy app for the Nintendo Switch Online service. I suspect we may well see that at some point — Nintendo did previously release some GBA and DS games on the Wii U and 3DS eShops, after all — but that still leaves vast amounts of software from third-party developers and publishers.

You can probably forget ever seeing anything from big publishers like EA and Ubisoft ever again, since they doubtless don’t feel like there’s any real value in reissuing their handheld games in any form. But smaller scale outfits are a distinct possibility. As already noted, we’re already seeing some reissues of Game Boy games — as well as new games for the platform — through Limited Run Games and the Evercade platform. But that still leaves some notable questions, particularly with regard to the dual-screen games of the DS and 3DS era.

Right now, it feels like the only really practical answer is to try and snap up as many of those games for those platforms as you can — along with something to play them on — while they’re still reasonably priced. Because we’re already starting to see both DS and 3DS games getting into “stupid retro collector prices” territory — I hope you didn’t want a boxed copy of Etrian Odyssey any time soon, for example.

And, on top of that, it’s worth supporting official rereleases when they do happen. These games deserve to be remembered just as much as those found on the big TV-connected consoles. Millions of people across the world grew up gaming on that low-resolution, unlit, dot-matrix, black-on-yellowy-green display — and they deserve to be catered to just as much as those people who have been playing Super Mario Bros. 3 and Sonic the Hedgehog on umpteen generations of hardware for the last 20+ years.

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Pete Davison
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