Game.Com

After having produced LCD games for several years, the American toy company Tiger decided that they wanted to compete with the obsolete, but still very popular, Game Boy. Tiger produced a handheld console and rode the Dot Com wave, by calling their console Game.com. However, there were more to the console than games. As the name implies, it could also surf the internet and check mails. It even had a row of PDA-like functions, including a calendar. However, as many outsiders had predicted, the Game.com never became a success, and disappeared from the market a few years later.

Technically the Game.com was on one side just as obsolete as the Game Boy, but on the other side it was very innovative. The obsolete part consisted in the old fashioned Sharp 8 bit CPU, capable of showing only four shades of grey in 200x160 - not much different than the 10 years older Game Boy. The innovative part consisted in the access to the internet, and the pressure sensitive screen, which Nintendo has now adapted in their DS.

One of the main problems for the Game.com was that there simply wasn't a lot of games available. Several large companies were interested, and even Sega delivered a handful of games, and titles such as Duke Nuke'm and Resident Evil 2 were very good names to have on board. Even a conversion of Konamis Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night was under development, but the project was scrapped as the console flopped out of business.