Mobile Gaming – Generation 5

Nintendo dominates the handheld market throughout the 1990s. Despite the competition with its coloured displays, the Game Boy has established graphics in greyscales as a standard. Bandai and SNK release comparable but more powerful handhelds, but they are hopeless when Nintendo releases the Game Boy Color. Beyond the colored graphics, it is technically without improvements to the original, but overcomes the actually stronger competition with ease. Bandai and SNK then take off their recently released consoles and instead offer versions with colored graphics – in vain.

The fact that Game Boy’s brand power persists many years after its release is due not least to the Japanese game Pocket Monsters, which in the West becomes one of the biggest franchises in video game history from 1998 under the name Pokémon.