If you showed this little piece of tech to practically anyone on the street today, I can pretty much guarantee they would not know what in the hell it is.
Well, at least you readers know what it is, right?
..Right?
Allow me to explain.
This is Bandai's WonderSwan.
Originally released in 1999, solely in Japan, the WonderSwan was a huge leap forwards in handheld video gaming technology. With graphics almost up to the par of the Gameboy Advance in its later days and prominent third-party support from many video gaming giants such as Capcom and Squaresoft, it truly is a pity that the system was never released outside of glorious nippon.
The system was designed by the late Gunpei Yokoi. Does that name sound familiar? Well of course it does, Yokoi happened to be the creator of the original Game Boy and the commercial bomb we know as the Virtual Boy. Apparently he fell out with Nintendo and decided to make his own system to compete with the Game Boy.
Squaresoft even went as far as to release updated ports of Final Fantasies I, II and IV, the former two eventually being ported to the Playstation in the form of Final Fantasy Origins.
Yes, those snazzy, new versions of the first two Final Fantasy games that many people thought were exclusive to the Playstation at the time were in fact released two years earlier, on a handheld no less.
In addition to ports of their beloved franchise, Square and Bandai also collaborated on creating two special edition WonderSwan Colour consoles, bundled with either Final Fantasy I or II.
However, the main thing that set the WonderSwan out from its competitors, as you've probably already noticed, was the addition of a second D-pad. This allowed the system to be held horizontally or tilted vertically for some games, giving arcade or puzzle games a more authentic feel on the system's wide (or tall, depending on which way you're holding it) screen.
On top of all of that, the WonderSwan takes just one AA battery and manages to squeeze an impressive 15 hour lifespan out of it. Some of this can be credited to the lack of a backlit screen, but this omission can be expected as this was not the industry standard at the time.
The WonderSwan really deserves more credit today. It helped progress the power and design of handheld gaming systems and provided a pretty damn fun experience while doing so. If it were ever released outside of Japan, it would be a wonder that this swan never took off.
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