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Why did the Gameboy beat the Gamegear and how did Mario win out over Sonic the Hedgehog and is history set to repeat itself? All these questions seem to be answered in an excellent and insightful article on the Toronto Star website, written by someone who is obviously a long time Nintendo fan:

Game Gear should have kicked the crap out of Nintendo's Gameboy. It came in colour. It had better graphics and a sexier design.

And yet the market — as dictated by millions of video-game addled North American school kids in the mid-`90s — thumbed its nose at Sonic the Hedgehog's bright blue racing ways. We liked pretending to be fat Italian plumbers. We liked saving Princess Peach and we liked doing it on a screen that was two inches tall and two shades of green.

Why?

Two reasons: The Sega tech was ahead of itself. The colour screen killed six batteries in five hours in an era when rechargeables were pre-Lithium-Ion.

Oh, and the Sega guys were pricks.

Their marketing campaigns were smug and superior. Anybody who picked Nintendo over Sega's handheld was either dumb or colourblind.

We didn't like that.

So we stuck with Gameboy.

It looks like Sony is going to repeat Sega's mistakes.

Source: Toronto Star