GameGadget: The iPod of retro gaming

For some time now, Blaze Europe has been the go-to company for Sega retro handhelds, its array of hardware slowly becoming smaller, more powerful and packed with more features as the years have progressed.

Now, though, Blaze hopes to launch its gaming technology to a far higher level, leaving behind its traditional role as an Argos stocking-filler and going straight for the jugular of the likes of Apple. In terms of portable, low-cost gaming potential, the highly ambitious GameGadget handheld will cover, Blaze says, far more formats than just the Mega Drive. However, the truly unique feature is the company’s plan to introduce an iTunes-style interface to download games, with full DRM, from its own bespoke servers.

“We’d say the growth of the retro game is through the iPod, and the download of Sonic and Street Fighter and that sort of proliferation,” says Blaze Europe general manager Mark Garrett. “But ultimately, the iPod isn’t the greatest gaming device in the world. Most of the games that were originally developed weren’t developed with touch screen in mind, so that whole gaming experience, of not being able to feel because of the buttons, is sorely lacking.”

Blaze hopes to cover all areas of the market in this way, its premium-priced £99 hardware shamelessly resembling the bottom half of a Nintendo DS (“Well, they do know how to build handhelds!” laughs Garrett). The aim is to provide the tactility of a D-pad and buttons (though no touch screen as yet), while jumping on the back of the app craze with a convenient, microtransaction-based download service. “[It’s] completely legitimising the ROM scene,” says Garrett, “and the emulation scene, and providing people access to the original games, in the original format, on a device that is built specifically to play games with.”

The aim, says Garrett – apart from neatly (and profitably) legalising the current activities of many hardcore retro fans – is also to introduce younger audiences who may already be attracted to modern mobile devices to the enormous back catalogue of games that already exists.

“That’s where we start to grow outside of the traditional retro gaming fan, who’s a lot more technically adept and is aware of emulation, and aware of how to go about it,” explains Garrett. “What we’ve developed is the cloud-based solution, where you’re able to store the content that you purchase, download to your device or PC, and it’s through that that we think we can start to open up into a much broader market, where you’ve got a younger audience that have pretty much grown up in the last couple of years playing Angry Birds, who haven’t necessarily experienced Space Invaders or Pac-Man, or played any of the simple retro instant experience games rather than the more drawn-out extended experiences you get with the current handheld market.”

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