> According to Epyx, Sega still got it wrong and produced a crappy design in comparison. To be fair, the Lynx was a far more capable system.
Making the Game Gear more-or-less a portable Master System was probably the right decision though. It enabled easy porting of existing Master System games, and development of new games to run on both platforms. Although the SMS was dead in Japan and North America before the Game Gear's release, it was still going strong in Europe and other markets.
It also made possible the Game Gear's SMS mode, in which the machine behaves exactly like a Master System. This allowed backwards compatibility with existing SMS games via an adapter (which seems to have been important to Sega - the Genesis has a similar capability), and enabled an even simpler method of porting SMS games: a few Game Gear games [1] are really SMS games with a built-in adapter.
The Game Gear therefore had a stronger software library than the Lynx, despite being technically inferior. And, ultimately, the overwhelming success of the Game Boy showed that it is the games (and battery life) that really matter.
Making the Game Gear more-or-less a portable Master System was probably the right decision though. It enabled easy porting of existing Master System games, and development of new games to run on both platforms. Although the SMS was dead in Japan and North America before the Game Gear's release, it was still going strong in Europe and other markets.
It also made possible the Game Gear's SMS mode, in which the machine behaves exactly like a Master System. This allowed backwards compatibility with existing SMS games via an adapter (which seems to have been important to Sega - the Genesis has a similar capability), and enabled an even simpler method of porting SMS games: a few Game Gear games [1] are really SMS games with a built-in adapter.
The Game Gear therefore had a stronger software library than the Lynx, despite being technically inferior. And, ultimately, the overwhelming success of the Game Boy showed that it is the games (and battery life) that really matter.
[1] http://www.smspower.org/Tags/SMS-GG