Handhelds continued, Sega Game Gear tries to compete with the Game Boy.

Sega took its own bid for the handheld gaming market with its own version, the Game Gear. It released in Japan in 1990, North America and Europe in 1991 and Australia in '92.

It used the same processor as the Sega Genesis, and unlike the Game Boy, the Game Gear was actually in color!

Despite this great advancement, the Game Gear didn't do so well. 

For starters, the price was much higher than the Game Boy, and Sega was behind Nintendo's release by 2 years.

Another downside to the Game Gear was that it ate batteries. Whereas the Game Boy ran on 4 AA batteries for upwards of 30 hours of life, the Game Gear took 6 batteries and would generally run out of charge within ~5 hours. All that processing power and color graphics came at a high power consumption cost.

Another set back was that Nintendo did not stagnate during this, and released their Game Boy Pocket, which was a smaller version of the original in order to further compete with their competition.

Sega's corporate tactics also signed the Game Gears failure. Sega was at the same time frame concentrating on its next-generation of consoles, the Sega CD and 32X consoles, and the Game Gear took a back-burner to this endeavor. Without the full support of corporate funding, the Game Gear couldn't keep up with the efforts of Nintendo.

Despite this early demise, Sega's Game Gear did have ~300 games produced for it, and sold 11 million units worldwide, however that wasn't even one-tenth the sales of their rival.