The Handheld Hall

The glass

The handheld that defined this hall, released in 1989, had a reflective liquid-crystal screen 160 dots wide and 144 high. It showed four shades, from a pale olive to a dark green-black, and it had no light of its own. You played by daylight or lamplight, tilting the screen to catch it, and in a dim car the picture disappeared. It sounds like a poor bargain. But it meant that four ordinary AA batteries lasted for many hours of play, and that the machine was cheap enough to give as a present.

Liquid crystal is slow. Each dot takes a moment to change from light to dark, so anything that moved quickly left a faint smear behind it. Designers learned to avoid thin, fast objects and to make their characters chunky and high in contrast. Some turned the slowness into a tool: flicker a sprite on and off every other frame and, instead of a flashing mess, the slow screen showed a ghostly half-tone. Text was drawn in bold little fonts, and the most important thing on the screen was usually the darkest.

Light, at a price

Rival handhelds arrived within a year or so with backlit colour screens and palettes of 4,096 colours. They were lovely to look at, and they were hungry. Six AA batteries gave a few hours of play, and the machines were bigger and cost more. Many players found the choice simple: a grey-green screen that lasted all weekend beat a bright one that went flat on the way to the beach. Battery life, not graphics, decided which handheld this period remembers.

Accessories filled the gap: clip-on lamps, magnifying lenses and battery packs. A slimmer model in 1996 sharpened the screen to true greys, and a colour model in 1998 could show 56 colours at once while keeping the unlit screen and the long battery life. The successor of 2001 was wider, at 240 by 160 dots, with thousands of colours, but it was still unlit, and its dark screen was the most common complaint about it. A folding model with a built-in front light and a rechargeable battery followed in 2003, and the problem of the dark screen was solved at last.

Sound in your pocket

The 1989 handheld had four sound channels and one small speaker, with a headphone socket that played in stereo. Composers wrote for the headphones and hoped for the best on the speaker. The music was thin, bright and very catchy, and many people who heard it on a long journey can still hum it. You can hear the same kind of square wave in the Chip Synth.

The input

The handheld gave the cross-shaped directional pad its widest audience. The pad had been designed for an earlier line of pocket electronic games, and it solved a pocket problem: a joystick snaps off in a bag, and a flat cross does not. Under the right thumb sat two buttons, A and B, and between the hands two small ones for Start and Select. That was the whole vocabulary. Designers learned to give each button one clear job, often jump on one and act on the other, and to put everything else in a menu.

Later machines added shoulder buttons, one under each forefinger, and in 2004 a second screen that answered to a stylus. Some cartridges carried their own senses: one tipped the game when you tipped the console, one had a sunlight sensor and asked you to play outdoors, and a little camera that plugged in where a cartridge would go took grainy pictures of your friends. The hardware was simple enough that a cartridge could add a new sense to it.

The cable

The most important control was not on the console at all. A link cable joined two handhelds, and two players could play one game, each on their own screen. The falling-block puzzle that came in the box in many countries became a different game over the cable: clear several lines at once and rows of rubbish appeared at the bottom of your friend’s well. In 1996 a creature-collecting game was released in two versions and made trading over the cable part of the design. Some creatures appeared only in one version, so finishing the collection meant finding a friend with the other.

Pausing mattered just as much. A handheld game had to survive being put down in the middle of play for a parent, a teacher or an arriving bus. Short levels, frequent saves, passwords and a small battery inside the cartridge to keep a save file all served the same need: stop whenever you have to and pick up where you were.

The room

The room was anywhere. The back seat of the car on a long journey, with the screen tipped toward the window. The school bus. A waiting room, a queue, a caravan on a wet holiday, a grandparent’s sofa. Phones would later turn all of that waiting into play; handhelds did it first, with the difference that you had to choose to bring one.

Because the machine was small and personal, the game became personal too. A console under the television belonged to the household. A handheld belonged to you, and so did your save file. Your cartridges lived in a pencil case or a plastic carry case, and lending one for a week was an act of trust.

Playgrounds became swap meets and rumour mills. Two children side by side with a cable between them was an everyday sight, and a rumour about a hidden creature or a secret move travelled from school to school faster than any magazine could print it. Guides and magazines did well, but the most valued source was a friend who had got further than you.

Battery worry was part of the experience. A small red power light dimmed as the batteries ran down, and a game with no save could be lost to a flat battery in the last minutes of a long session. Players kept spares in coat pockets and glove boxes, and rechargeable packs sold well. The power light was the first thing you checked and the last thing you forgot.

Handhelds also reached people that consoles did not. They were cheap enough for families without a games console, simple enough for adults who did not think of themselves as players, and tough enough to survive being dropped. For a great many people, a handheld was the first games machine they ever owned, and the falling-block puzzle the first game.

Three design ideas we borrowed

1. Send trouble down the cable

   Stack Duel is two wells side by side. Clear two or more rows at once and junk rows rise in the other well, which is exactly what made the falling-block puzzle a different game over a link cable. Play the seeded computer for a ranked run, or choose two players on one keyboard or one screen. The cable is gone; the nudge in the ribs is not.

   Stack Duel, 1995 Play Stack Duel

2. Short, pausable, endless

   A falling-jewel puzzle needs no story and no tutorial, and you can put it down at any moment and lose nothing but your train of thought. Gemfall is built for that kind of play: three jewels at a time, lines in any direction, chains that keep falling, and a seeded order, so a daily run is the same fall for everyone. It would have fitted on a cartridge.

   Gemfall, 1991 Play Gemfall

3. Readable in poor light

   On a small screen with four shades, a game has to be legible before it can be clever. Tidepool Tactics keeps to a pool of squares, crabs and shells, with one rule that changes everything every few moves: the tide shuffles the loose pieces. Big shapes, few kinds of thing and a steady rhythm of plan and surprise are handheld design at its most honest.

   Tidepool Tactics, 1994 Play Tidepool Tactics

What ended the era

The hall closes in 2004. That year a new handheld arrived with two screens, a stylus, a microphone and wireless play that needed no cable, and a rival arrived with a wide, bright screen built for 3D and films. Both had lit screens, and both made the unlit green screen look like a fossil. The link cable gave way to radio, and two players no longer needed to sit side by side.

A few years later the phone took over the pocket, and the One-Tap Hall tells that story. The handheld’s lessons travelled with it: design for a small screen and a short session, give each button one job, let the player stop at any moment, and make playing together as easy as sitting next to someone. Many of the best phone games of the next decade were handheld games with the buttons taken away.

Further reading

These links are general, stable and free to read. They are the best places to go next.

• Handheld game console (Wikipedia) The whole family of pocket machines, from the earliest to the latest.
• Game Boy (Wikipedia) The 1989 handheld at the centre of this hall: screen, sound and batteries.
• Liquid-crystal display (Wikipedia) Why simple LCD screens are slow, and why some need no backlight.
• D-pad (Wikipedia) Where the cross-shaped pad came from.
• Nintendo DS (Wikipedia) The two-screen handheld that closes this hall.