Handheld gaming is the future — again

theverge.com:

By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

In 1989, ancient history in the gaming era, Nintendo released a three-and-a-half-minute commercial for its new device. A kid shouts angrily because he has to stop playing games so the family can leave on vacation; the car sags, and its tire deflates when his dad shoves a giant CRT TV into the back seat. “The secret to Nintendo’s success lies in bringing arcade games forward, into the home,” says the jaunty narrator. “Taking it out of the home is another story.”

And then, the grand reveal: the Game Boy! The gaming system you can take with you. After that comes a song I’d rank somewhere in the range of “unaired musical SNL sketch” in which our emcee narrates the Game Boy going to the lake, on a date, a movie theater, a baseball diamond, a plane, and more.

The song is horrific, the commercial is spectacular, and the point is this: the people who make game consoles have understood for decades that the best console is the one you can have with you. That used to require huge compromises, though: mobile consoles were clumsy and underpowered; they needed their own games; and they were always at least a few generations behind the best of the in-home gaming systems.

There have been a few moments in gaming history when the industry has thought it solved this problem. When PlayStation launched the PSP and Nintendo dropped the first DS, almost 20 years ago now, both companies made big promises about the wireless revolution and how it might change gaming. Then, everybody spent the next decade or so being distracted by the rise of the smartphone and still treating