Released in 1976, Mattel's Auto Race is credited as the first handheld game. But it wasn't until Nintendo released the Game & Watch series that handheld gaming really took off. Since then the company has dominated the handheld market, firstly with the Game Boy, and latterly with the DS, dispatching rival consoles as calmly and efficiently as a Terminator.
The list of pretenders to Nintendo's handheld throne is long. Some were noble failures, a couple may have given Nintendo’s executives a few sleepless nights, and one or two were outright abominations.
Over-ambitious design proved to be the undoing of many machines, their battery-hungry innovations later adopted by the big N. Check out the key players as we look at the evolution of handheld consoles.