Watara Supervision

The Supervision was what happened when a lesser-known manufacturer looked at Nintendo's Game Boy juggernaut and decided to undercut it. Produced by Watara, a company operating out of Asia and better known in budget-electronics circles than as a games brand, it appeared around 1992 and was sold worldwide under a bewildering array of names and rebadges, turning up in catalogs and discount stores under labels that had little to do with Watara itself.

Mechanically it was a clear Game Boy imitator: a chunky handheld with a monochrome dot-matrix screen, a directional pad, action buttons, and cartridge slots for its library of games. In a couple of respects it even tried to one-up its target — its screen was slightly larger, and a later hardware quirk allowed it to output to a television via a link accessory. Its greatest selling point, though, was simply that it was cheaper than a Game Boy.

Everything else worked against it. The screen, for all its size, suffered from heavy blurring on moving images, its library was small and consisted mostly of unremarkable clones of familiar arcade and puzzle concepts, and it enjoyed essentially no support from the major software publishers who flocked to Nintendo. Where the Game Boy had Tetris and Pokémon and a bottomless catalog, the Supervision had generic filler that few remember.

It limped along until the mid-1990s before quietly disappearing, having never posed the slightest real threat to Nintendo's dominance. The Supervision is now a connoisseur's curio, collected precisely because it is so obscure and because tracking down its scattered, rebranded variants is a hunt in itself. It endures as a textbook example of the many cheap handhelds that tried to ride the Game Boy's coattails and discovered that low price alone could never overcome a poverty of great games.