• JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    There is a reason the Game Gear and Lynx failed to catch on despite being way more powerful than the Game Boy.

    As a teenager during those years I cannot emphasize just how much more of a juggernaut reputation Nintendo had than any other home or portable consoles at the time. Nintendo/Gameboy was synonymous with console and portable gaming. Like yeah, Sega was finally making headway in the home market with Genesis but the Lynx/Jaguar era was kinda the deathnell for Atari iirc. And that’s despite Atari working with Time Warner Cable to package Jaguars with their Full Service Network Interactive TV that let you download games for it. Part marketing, part name recognition, part IP exclusivity; Nintendo just owned the market for years.

    Fun note: when I was a kid I used to go dumpster diving behind Time Warner’s Network Operation Center, along with a bunch of other tech companies in that commerce park.