The other day I was digging through a box of old electronics in my garage—you know how it is, looking for one thing and finding three things you forgot you even owned—when my fingers hit the familiar bulk of a Sega Game Gear. That unmistakable weight, like holding a brick wrapped in plastic that somehow promised adventure. I pulled it out, blew the dust off the screen, and immediately remembered why my mum used to call it "that battery vampire."
Funny thing about Sega's portable efforts. They never quite got the love they deserved, did they? Everyone bangs on about the Game Boy like it was the second coming, and fair enough—that grey brick conquered the world. But Sega? They were out there making handhelds that looked like they'd fallen through a time portal from 2005, back when the rest of us were still figuring out how to make a D-pad that didn't leave thumbprints on our souls.
I remember the exact moment I first saw a Game Gear in action. Summer of '91, on holiday in Blackpool—because of course it was Blackpool—and this kid on the beach was playing Sonic. Not just any Sonic, mind you, but proper full-color, backlit Sonic that looked better than half the stuff we had plugged into our TVs back home. My Game Boy suddenly felt like a cave painting. The kid's dad was feeding it batteries like it was a hungry pet, but nobody cared. We were watching the future happen in real-time, powered by six AAs and pure optimism.
The Game Gear was mental, really. Sega looked at Nintendo's sensible, economical approach to portable gaming and said, "Hold my beer." They crammed a Master System into a handheld shell, gave it a color screen that could blind pilots, and then acted surprised when it ate batteries faster than I eat biscuits during a difficult boss fight. But God, when it worked—and it worked brilliantly most of the time—it was like carrying a window into arcade heaven in your school bag.
The library was proper mad, too. You had your obvious winners: Sonic was there, obviously, and it felt like playing the real thing, not some compromised handheld version. Columns made Tetris look monochrome and boring. Streets of Rage 2 on a tiny screen shouldn't have worked, but somehow Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack made even the Game Gear's speakers sound like they meant business. And don't get me started on Shinobi—that game made me feel like a tiny ninja wizard every lunch break.
But then Sega went and did something absolutely bonkers. The Nomad. Sweet mother of Moore's law, the Nomad. They took a Mega Drive—sorry, Genesis for the Americans reading this—and basically said, "What if we made this portable?" It was like watching someone strap wheels to a sofa and calling it a car. Technically impressive, completely mad, and somehow it actually worked.
I managed to get my hands on one years later, long after they'd stopped making them. Cost me more than I care to admit, and my missus still brings it up during arguments about "unnecessary purchases." But picking up that chunky controller, feeling the weight of a proper 16-bit console in your palms… it was like holding concentrated childhood. The screen was tiny, sure, and you needed a magnifying glass if you wanted to read any text, but you were playing actual Mega Drive games. On a bus. In 1995. NASA was probably taking notes.
The battery situation was even worse than the Game Gear, if you can believe that. Six AAs would give you maybe two hours if you were lucky and the gaming gods were smiling. But there was something beautiful about its complete disregard for practicality. This wasn't compromise gaming—this was Sega saying, "If you want portable Streets of Rage, you're going to carry the entire Mega Drive sound chip in your rucksack, and you're going to like it."
Playing Sonic 2 on the Nomad was a religious experience, though. That music, pumping through tinny speakers while you're sitting in the back of your dad's Ford Escort, trying not to car sick yourself into oblivion during the Chemical Plant Zone. The screen was so small that Sonic looked like a blue pixel with attitude, but every loop, every ring, every perfectly timed jump felt exactly like the living room version. No compromises, no "handheld adaptations"—just pure, undiluted Mega Drive madness crammed into a form factor that defied all common sense.
Both systems had this wonderful Sega quality where they felt simultaneously ahead of their time and completely mental. The Game Gear had features that wouldn't become standard until years later—that backlit color screen was basically magic in 1990. The Nomad was playing full console games on the go before anyone else even thought that was possible. But they also both had this charming tendency to murder batteries and make your arms ache after an hour.
I've still got that Game Gear, by the way. Recapped the board a few years back—those old capacitors were leaking like a broken tap, which explains why half the ones you find on eBay look like they've been through a small war. Got it working again, and the screen still looks gorgeous when it's not busy draining every battery in a five-mile radius. Sometimes I fire up Psychic World or Land of Illusion just to remember what portable gaming felt like when it was trying to be impossible rather than practical.
The thing about Sega's portables is they never played it safe. Nintendo made the Game Boy practical, reliable, and utterly dominant. Sega made machines that were basically handheld arcade cabinets powered by wishful thinking and spare change. They failed commercially, sure, but they failed while swinging for the fences, and there's something magnificent about that kind of beautiful madness.
These days, when my Switch can run games that would have made the Nomad weep with envy while lasting eight hours on a charge, I sometimes miss that wild optimism. That sense that someone at Sega looked at the impossible and said, "Right then, let's have a go." Portable gaming is better now, obviously. More practical, more efficient, more everything. But it's also a bit more boring, isn't it? Sometimes I miss the days when playing games on the bus required actual commitment.
