Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This ad has a professor character showing off the Game Gear's full color screen, then pulling out a row of colored Game Boys as the punchline, and the joke lands hard. Because Nintendo's whole idea of color was the plastic shell. The screen inside stayed the exact same four shades of green. Sega had an actual full color backlit display, a palette of over four thousand colors with dozens on screen at once, and they never got tired of rubbing it in.
If that sounds familiar, it should. A few years later Nintendo's real answer to everyone begging for a color Game Boy was the Play It Loud line, the same monochrome machine sold in red, yellow, black and clear plastic. Same green screen, new colors on the outside. So Sega had a point, even if the joke aged in a funny direction.
Here is something most people do not know though, and it is the reason you almost never see a working Game Gear anymore. Sega used cheap capacitors inside, and after twenty plus years they leak and fail on basically every single unit. A Game Gear with bad caps will flick on and off, lose all its sound, or show a black screen. So the very first thing any collector does today is recap it, replacing all the capacitors just to make it power on. There is a whole industry of repair services and modern replacement screens built entirely around bringing these things back to life. A clean working one is a genuine find.
For the record, the Game Gear was basically a Master System you could hold, and it had its own exclusive Sonic games made just for it. It still lost to the Game Boy by about ten to one, but it was swinging for the future the whole time.
Did you have a Game Gear, and does yours still even turn on? Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#gamegear #sega #gameboy #playitloud #segavsnintendo #consolewars #handheldgaming #retrohandheld #recap #retrocommercial #vintagead #90sgaming #gaminghistory #retrogaming #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
This ad has a professor character showing off the Game Gear's full color screen, then pulling out a row of colored Game Boys as the punchline, and the joke lands hard. Because Nintendo's whole idea of color was the plastic shell. The screen inside stayed the exact same four shades of green. Sega had an actual full color backlit display, a palette of over four thousand colors with dozens on screen at once, and they never got tired of rubbing it in.
If that sounds familiar, it should. A few years later Nintendo's real answer to everyone begging for a color Game Boy was the Play It Loud line, the same monochrome machine sold in red, yellow, black and clear plastic. Same green screen, new colors on the outside. So Sega had a point, even if the joke aged in a funny direction.
Here is something most people do not know though, and it is the reason you almost never see a working Game Gear anymore. Sega used cheap capacitors inside, and after twenty plus years they leak and fail on basically every single unit. A Game Gear with bad caps will flick on and off, lose all its sound, or show a black screen. So the very first thing any collector does today is recap it, replacing all the capacitors just to make it power on. There is a whole industry of repair services and modern replacement screens built entirely around bringing these things back to life. A clean working one is a genuine find.
For the record, the Game Gear was basically a Master System you could hold, and it had its own exclusive Sonic games made just for it. It still lost to the Game Boy by about ten to one, but it was swinging for the future the whole time.
Did you have a Game Gear, and does yours still even turn on? Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#gamegear #sega #gameboy #playitloud #segavsnintendo #consolewars #handheldgaming #retrohandheld #recap #retrocommercial #vintagead #90sgaming #gaminghistory #retrogaming #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
