Game.com

~ the last words ~

in 1997 i was 13, on a 33.6k modem at home in ankara, with a dial-up bill that nobody at home let me run too high. game.com was an american toy-aisle product i did not see in person until years later in retrospective write-ups. tiger electronics, the company that had spent the early 90s shipping single-game lcd handhelds shaped like cookies, decided in 1997 that their next move was a full cartridge-based console with a touchscreen and a stylus, plus a 14.4k modem in the box. it shipped that september for $69. it sold fewer than three hundred thousand units across its full life.

the pitch on the box was that game.com would be the first handheld you could browse the web on. the modem cable plugged into a phone jack and the device dialed into a tiger-run gateway that handed back stripped-down text pages. the screen was monochrome at 200 by 160 and not backlit. frame rates in any action game suffered visibly. the dual cartridge slots were a marketing line, in practice the second slot mostly held a pda software card with a calendar and a phone book.

the timing was bad in a way the company did not survive. the game boy color landed in october 1998 with a full color screen and a software library that already covered pokemon. internet pretensions were not part of its pitch. game.com had no equivalent flagship game and no path to one. tiger electronics tried the game.com pocket pro in 1999 at a $29.99 price point with the modem removed, which is to say the device's only differentiator was deleted from the device. discontinuation followed in 2000.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

the touchscreen was the more interesting bet. tiger had quietly shipped the first stylus-driven handheld with a game library a full seven years before the nintendo ds made the same idea work commercially. the stylus drove menus and a few games that used it for puzzle input. the underlying screen was too slow for anything that needed real-time reaction. if game.com had been a calmer pda with games attached instead of a hopeful game console with a modem attached, it might have lived longer in the palm-pilot adjacent niche.

~ the actual end ~

tiger had been bought by hasbro for $335 million in early 1998, which gave the game.com line a wealthy parent but no actual rescue plan. when the pocket pro failed to find an audience, hasbro folded the device back into the broader tiger product line and let it expire quietly in 2000. the last commercial cartridge was a wheel of fortune licensed title. internet support was already dead by then because the tiger gateway server had been turned off.

~ what got buried with it ~

game.com is mostly remembered for what it was first at, not for what it actually shipped. first handheld with a touchscreen and first handheld with an internet connection. neither of those features mattered in 1997 the way they mattered in 2004, by which point the form factor and the carrier model were both completely different products with completely different teams behind them.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »