Recently I started listening to Retrocity, a retro gaming podcast, and Sega and the game gear were mentioned. Back when the Game Gear was released, I already owned a Gameboy (which I had bought with my own money), and I was vacationing with my dad. My ‘goal’ was to own an Atari Lynx, a Gameboy and a Game Gear. In order to get a day closer to the goal I asked my dad to buy me a Game Gear for my name day that summer.

The unit, as far as I remember, cost about $150. I was absolutely in love with the device! I only had two or three games for it, but by the time I donated it, I had amassed a whopping 7 games! The love goggles did muddy up my perception of the unit by a lot! While the colors were great, something that the Gameboy did not have, the thing ate up battery power like there was no tomorrow! The unit took six AA batteries, and that would give you an hour and a half to two hours of play time.

In order to make the unit worth while you needed to get a power adapter to hood directly into the car’s cigarette lighter port, or your home’s electrical outlet. The Game Gear went mostly unplayed before I bought the adapter (3 years after I got the unit!!!) simply because batteries were an expensive proposition, and in retrospect not environmentally safe. In the end I donated my Game Gear so it could find a good home with people who would play it a lot.

The Game Gear did have several different attachments one could buy, like a television tuner (I craved one of these since I did not have a TV in my bedroom – but never got one), and a Master System cartridge converter (also cool but in those days there was no ebay, so I could not get my hands on any cheap games)

In retrospect, for the money I paid for the Game Gear, Adapter, and all the batteries I went through, I maybe should have bought some more Gameboy games, and one of those magnifier/illuminator gadgets to play games in the dark. Oh well! This is what happens to early adopters, sometimes!