TurboExpress

The TurboExpress was, when it launched in 1990, the most technologically impressive handheld on the planet, and almost nobody bought one. Its trick was extraordinary: it was a genuinely portable version of the TurboGrafx-16 home console, and it played the exact same HuCard game cartridges, the slim, credit-card-shaped media of NEC's console, with no conversions required. Whatever you owned for the home system, you could take with you.

The hardware was a marvel for its time. Its color LCD screen boasted a high resolution and could display a vast palette, producing images far sharper and more detailed than anything the Game Boy, Game Gear, or Lynx could manage. An optional tuner accessory even turned it into a portable color television. For a brief window, holding a TurboExpress felt like holding the future.

The future, however, was ruinously expensive. The TurboExpress launched at a price several times that of a Game Boy, positioning it as a luxury item in a market driven by affordability and pocket money. It shared the era's other curse, too, an appetite for batteries that limited real-world play to a couple of hours, and its screen was prone to visual imperfections that could mar the otherwise gorgeous picture.

Because it played the home library, its software fortunes were tied to the TurboGrafx-16, which itself struggled badly against Nintendo and Sega in Western markets, leaving the handheld with limited visibility despite the excellent games, like Bonk's Adventure and various acclaimed shooters, that it could run beautifully.

It sold only a modest number of units before fading in the mid-1990s, a commercial non-event overshadowed entirely by the humble Game Boy.

The TurboExpress's legacy is that of the ultimate example of a recurring lesson in portable gaming, that power and fidelity count for little against price and battery life. Prized today by collectors as a beautiful, obscure piece of hardware, it stands as a monument to overreach, the machine that offered console-grade portable gaming years ahead of schedule, at a cost the market simply would not bear.