After the Atari era, western gaming on the American side became mostly about 1) dem graphicz, 2) edge, 3) famous licenses. Consoles and arcades ruled, and their tech and interface required a type of gameplay that was ideal for those 3 elements. It’s no wonder than on the other side of the ocean, European devs were making completely different games, because they were developing mainly on home computers.
The American school wasn’t making games that would fit well and make the desired impact on the inferior tech of handhelds. This is why a lot of western games on handhelds were movie tie-ins, licensed games, and sports games. They would usually cram the best graphics they could get out of a Game Boy or Lynx into the limited space of a ROM cartridge, and be left with very little memory for any kind of significant gameplay. Many of those games would also lag horribly and play pretty badly. When a game was ridiculously big they’d put in the effort to shrink it down and that’s why Mortal Kombat somehow appeared on the GB. But everyone knew this wasn’t what the devs wanted. Nobody in America would start planning a game and worry about how it’d run on a handheld. Nobody.
You would see a bunch of typically European games being made specifically for handhelds, but those were invariably games that relied on simpler graphics and less hectic gameplay. Some of them are obscure gems, but none made a sensation at the time.
Everyone wanted a piece of the Nintendo handheld cake, but it’s unquestionable that Japan always ruled the handheld space from a very, very high place. Western games on the GBA were still mostly an afterthought, poorly made copycats of much better Japanese templates or shrunk-down versions of something made for infinitely beefier hardware. The metric ton of shovelware published on the DS has a high percentage of western stuff.
The scalability of modern games and the high intercompatibility of today’s hardware are the main reasons the west jumped on the Switch bandwagon. When Nintendo made non-portable, vastly inferior hardware than the competition with the WiiU, nobody bothered. And many western devs and publishers only supported the Wii because of its install base, while still making lots of game according to the same philosophy they made handheld games with.
It’s always been pretty obvious that Japan understands that portable gaming has its own identity, its own audience and its own space. Everyday life in Japan lends itself to portable gaming in a way everyday life in the west never could. Western devs and publishers always saw handhelds as the poor kid’s consoles, or machines for playground gaming. They never took it seriously.
Today’s indies are the heirs of those 80s and 90s British and European home computer devs. Many of them make games that are either tailored to portable hardware, or can be played on it without heavy compromises.
Now that Switch opened the gates to dedicated portable gaming PCs the perspective has changed a little. But those are still PCs, and will still be considered a compromise vs the “real” gaming on high-end PCs and current-gen consoles. In the west, vidya gamez are cool shit that must showcase the best tech available. Everything that isn’t meant to be displayed on the biggest screen available is peasant stuff. Even gaming enthusiasts scoff at indies - “I didn’t buy a PS5 to play indie shit” has been stated on GAF by more than one user.
