11 Facts About Game Gear

The Game Gear primarily competed with Nintendo's Game Boy, the Atari Lynx, and NEC's TurboExpress.

Sega positioned the Game Gear, which had a full-color backlit screen with a landscape format, as a technologically superior handheld to the Game Boy.

Reception of the Game Gear was mixed, with praise for its full-color backlit screen and processing power for its time, criticisms over its large size and short battery life, and questions over the quality of its game library.

The console had been designed as a portable version of the Master System, and featured more powerful systems than the Game Gear Boy, including a full-color screen, in contrast to the monochromatic screen of its rival.

In North America, marketing for the Game Gear included side-by-side comparisons of Sega's new handheld with the Game Boy and likened Game Boy players to the obese and uneducated.

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Plans for a 16-bit successor to the Game Gear were made to bring Sega's handheld systems into the fifth generation of video games, but a new handheld system never materialized for Sega, leaving only the Genesis Nomad, a portable version of the Genesis, to take its place.

Handheld game console, the Game Gear was designed to be played while being held horizontally.

Also released was the Car Gear adapter that plugs into cars or cigarette lighters to power the system while traveling, and the Gear to Gear Cable that establishes a data connection between two Game Gear systems using the same multiplayer game and let users play against each other.

Likewise, because of this, the Game Gear library contained many games that were not available on other handhelds, pulling sales away from the Atari Lynx and NEC TurboExpress and helping to establish the Game Gear's position in the market.

Several Game Gear games were released years later on the Nintendo 3DS's Virtual Console service on the Nintendo eShop.

Game Gear surpassed the Atari Lynx and NEC TurboExpress, but lagged far behind the Game Boy in the handheld marketplace.