The Power of Portable Gaming

1up has up a piece on Handheld Heroes, portable games that have (despite their small size) make herculean changes in the face of gaming as a whole. From the article: "Tetris is, quite possibly, the most important portable game of all. While the drama surrounding its NES incarnation gets the most attention, the Game Boy version quietly sold millions and millions of handheld systems to people who were instantly addicted to its simple, intuitive, challenging gameplay. It's no exaggeration to say that Tetris single-handedly created the portable market, helped the Game Boy conquer its competition, and gave Nintendo an enduring source of income that's still going strong."

Comments

Re:Did I miss something?

[kevin.fowler]

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:QbW3Mr2ZYfQJ:w ww.nesplayer.com/features/lawsuits/tetris.htm+tege n+tetris+history&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3/(Google Cache of Article)

Tegen put out their own version of Tetris without consent from Nintendo to make games for the system. It got ugly.

Re:Did I miss something?

[ParnBR]

Wikipedia knows something about this drama. Its short account is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#History_and_le gal_issues

Re:Did I miss something?

[Zediker]

Actualy I dont think Tengen had anything to do with the interesting history behind Tetris. It was the fact that Nintendo initialy didnt have any rights to publish it from the then Russian developer of the game. Essentialy it broke down into two corporations who thought they had the rights to publish the game. Nintendo eventualy came out 'victorious' even suposedly with the KGB involved. This was all covered in a short hour long documentary the Discovery channel had on videogames.

I found a link that makes mention of the history here: http://www.videogames.co.nz/showfeature.php?id=78