How do we measure the success of an entertainment product? By how much money it make? By how many people it touched? By how much longevity it endured?
Well, I like the underrated stuff so I like to believe anything was successful as long as it left a little mark on history. As long as you remember things, how people will remember it even if it's still a niche product.
For example, I know the Game Gear never sold as much as the Game Boy, but I just found out how long the Game Gear actually lasted not long ago, after getting my hands on The Lost World for the SGG, a port of a 1997 game I remember playing on the Sega Saturn/PSX.
See, the Game Boy was launched in 1989 with Super Mario Land and Tetris, the Game Gear was then launched in 1990 with Pengo, Super Monaco GP and Columns. But while the Game Boy was replaced by updated revisions and other handheld systems, Sega never put out new versions of the Game Gear (just a parallel system, the Nomad which was just an handheld Mega Drive/Genesis). But Nintendo replaced the GB with the Game Boy Pocket in 1996, the Game Boy Color in 1998 and then the more powerful Game Boy Advance in 2001. Meanwhile the Game Gear would get few sporadic releases and only be officially discontinued in 2001.
So that means the SGG was technically still Sega's handheld while Sega was producing Dreancast games.
Case in point, I finally got my hands on Super Battletank. Pretty cheap actually, seems like they made a lot of copies of this one. Still sealed, as new. The game was released in 2001 for the Game Gear!!! I mean the GBA port was released in 2003, 2 years later.
Super Battletank was the last title officially released for the SGG. (Not counting post-releases of homebrew titles in the following years.)
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Well, the game's just a tank sim, and not one of the better ones. There was other Super Battletank games, on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Snes, etc. But I like how this one came out around the same time as Panzer Front on the Dreamcast, so I kinda consider this a port of that game.
That's it for a little bit of retro gaming & Sega history.
Oh, and the Game Gear outlasted the Game Boy. Ha!
(But it didn't outsold it, yes, we both know it.)
