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.

Recap, and game library lists of the great systems we've covered so far!

As the title states, this is just a recap of the systems we've touched base on, as well as links to the vast libraries of games which came out on all of these systems during their multi-year reigns.

First off, we have the original Arcade games, there really are too many to include all of them, so I will just post the VAPS (Vintage Arcade Preservation Society) top-100 ranked games list URL:

http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/statistics/most-collected-videogames.php

Then came Magnavox Odyssey, which flopped before it really got started, but still should have a game library listed too. However, it was responsible for Pong's release to the masses, and the craze that followed:

http://www.videogameconsolelibrary.com/pg70-odyssey.htm#page=games

The Odyssey only had 28 games released on it before it flopped.

Next we go to the Atari 2600:

http://www.listal.com/list/complete-atari-2600-game-library

This link also provides great little tidbits of information on a few of the games.

Next, to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) (Famicom) I know this list is Wikipedia, but is a very complete list complete with release dates and developers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games

Then under 16-bit revolution we had the Sega Genesis and Super NES:

Sega Genesis titles, which totaled a staggering 986 titles!

http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Sega_Genesis_games

Super NES games, there are some overlaps as developers for the first time began developing games for two consoles at once, 725 SNES games released in North America, according to GameFAQs:

http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Super_Nintendo_games

The 16-bit revolution

Sega Genesis proved to be the first main competitor to Nintendo's stranglehold on the market. While Nintendo still was focused almost primarily on keeping their NES developers on board, Sega Genesis took the chance to upgrade the market's expectations.

NES was a rather good 8-bit system, but the Genesis boasted 16-bit technology as well as a staggering 7.2 MHz processing power. In 1989 they launched, and quickly gobbled up Nintendo's former market share wresting Nintendo's 7-year dominance over the video game console market.

Here's a very in-depth article about the rise of the Sega Genesis:

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=ConsoleMuseum.Detail&id=36&game=11

Nintendo finally answered the 16-bit demand with their release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in late 1991, almost two years after Sega Genesis's emergence. The SNES was slow to gather developers of games for their new system, and Sega continued its dominance in the 16-bit realm for another 2 years.  In 1993, Nintendo finally closed the gap in regards to developers for their system, but not soon enough to weaken Sega's hold on the market.

Through 1994-97, there was a huge battle between both video game superpowers over dominance, with Sega retaining the upper-hand for the greater portion of the Genesis's almost eight year existence.


Other resources found during research:

http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Super_NES