Meet The "Playboy" Handheld, Rare's Unreleased Game Boy Rival
"UK company Rare was one of the most prolific supporters of Nintendo's NES and Game Boy consoles, even before Nintendo bought a stake in the studio. However, it's important to remember that the company held a very keen interest in hardware around this time; Rare's founders, the Stamper brothers, famously reverse-engineered the Famicom in order to convince Nintendo to give it the opportunity to make games for it, and Rare was very hands-on when it came to creating the tech which powered the Killer Instinct arcade hardware with Midway. Indeed, the Stampers were involved in arcade games prior to founding Ashby Computers and Graphics Limited (which traded as Ultimate Play The Game), the company which preceded Rare; hardware was in their DNA, you could say.
One hardware project which never came to fruition was the RAZZ arcade board. Developed around 1988, it apparently used a Zilog Z80 processor and could display thousands of on-screen colours and handle complex sprite rotation. It would ultimately be cancelled, but not before it made its way into another ill-fated hardware venture: the "Playboy" handheld. This full-colour portable would have gone toe-to-toe with the likes of the Atari Lynx and Nintendo Game Boy, had Rare's bosses not decided to ally with Nintendo and make a fortune via software instead."
"UK company Rare was one of the most prolific supporters of Nintendo's NES and Game Boy consoles, even before Nintendo bought a stake in the studio. However, it's important to remember that the company held a very keen interest in hardware around this time; Rare's founders, the Stamper brothers, famously reverse-engineered the Famicom in order to convince Nintendo to give it the opportunity to make games for it, and Rare was very hands-on when it came to creating the tech which powered the Killer Instinct arcade hardware with Midway. Indeed, the Stampers were involved in arcade games prior to founding Ashby Computers and Graphics Limited (which traded as Ultimate Play The Game), the company which preceded Rare; hardware was in their DNA, you could say.
One hardware project which never came to fruition was the RAZZ arcade board. Developed around 1988, it apparently used a Zilog Z80 processor and could display thousands of on-screen colours and handle complex sprite rotation. It would ultimately be cancelled, but not before it made its way into another ill-fated hardware venture: the "Playboy" handheld. This full-colour portable would have gone toe-to-toe with the likes of the Atari Lynx and Nintendo Game Boy, had Rare's bosses not decided to ally with Nintendo and make a fortune via software instead."
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