> Gunpei Yokoi's team was facing significant incredulity. Why play games when you're on the bus, or on the toilet? > That team single handedly started mobile g

> Gunpei Yokoi's team was facing significant incredulity. Why play games when you're on the bus, or on the toilet? > That team single handedly started mobile gaming. No. This is revisionist history. Us kids in the 70s already had portable LED games by Mattel that we played on the bus and toilet. I had at least 6 of these, maybe 8. Here’s the earliest one, from 1976: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel_Auto_Race https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel_Auto_Race The more popular ones were sports like football, baseball, basketball, etc and they had much more complex rule sets than Auto Race: https://www.ebay.com/p/2255363696 https://www.ebay.com/p/2255363696 Then in the early 80s we had a slew of portable LCD games like Dungeons and Dragons: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Computer_Fantasy_Game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Compute... (1981) “Mattel stated that the game immediately sold out.” None used cartridges but they were so cheap and small (esp. the LCD games), it didn’t matter. You could own a bunch without breaking the bank. Such games are now called “handhelds” to distinguish them from the GameBoy generation of portables, but we did not call them handhelds back then as I recall. My point is a successful market already existed in the 70s and early 80s. Nintendo didn’t do that. They evolved what already existed by shrinking cartridge-based consoles into a portable form factor. Both were already successful, established markets before.