When the portable game industry exploded in the late 1980s, there were only two real players in this space: Sega’s Game Gear and Nintendo’s Game Boy. Orbiting above the pair were a gaggle of smaller electronic manufacturers attempting to grab their slice of the portable gaming pie. One handheld is remembered as one of the more obscure (and bizarre) pieces of gaming hardware ever created: the Mega Duck (or Cougar Boy, or Super Junior Computer, among other names).
Released in 1993, the Mega Duck was developed by Creatronic and Timlex, European electronics manufacturers who specialized in budget consumer products. Manufacturing was handled in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with each of the regional distributors handling the branding and distribution separately.
From a hardware perspective, the Mega Duck was similar to the Game Boy’s distinct design, but with a more bubbly aesthetic. It utilized a monochrome LCD display, took 4 AA batteries, and had an identical button layout. The cartridges were even uncannily similar. The Mega Duck also ran on a Z80 chip, not dissimilar to the Watara Supervision, another Game Boy clone, and a story for another column.
The Duck launched with a small group of games developed by a Taiwanese studio called Commin. Most were simplistic but functional 8-bit fare (platformers, shooters, sports, and puzzlers), none of them were particularly memorable. The cartridges were typically sold in pairs, and were characterized by minimalistic artwork and generic titles like Trap & Turn and Magic Tower.
The system had no “killer app”, and most of its library felt more suited to the Commodore 64 era than that of games like Super Mario Land 2. All told, there were about 40 officially released games, most of which were clones of better, more popular games, like Tetris and Bomberman.
In Latin America and some European markets, the Mega Duck was sold as the Cougar Boy and often came bundled with an educational keyboard add-on, branded as the Cougar Boy Computer. In other territories, it was sold as the Game Duck, the Mini Computer 2000, the VideoJet, the Ultimate Duck, and so many other names. They were all effectively identical to the Mega Duck, down to the cartridge slot, which was fully cross-compatible.
From the start, it faced an uphill battle. The Game Boy was already a global cultural phenomenon, the Game Gear offered color graphics, and even the Atari Lynx and TurboExpress were nibbling at the market scraps. Against that backdrop, a no-name handheld with anonymous visuals and a handful of shovelware stood no chance.
Reviews at the time were scarce and tepid. Small electronics magazines in Germany and the Netherlands noted that it was “a decent budget alternative” but criticized the library and screen quality. Interestingly, modern retrospectives seem more positive about the display. Retailers sometimes sold it as an “educational handheld” to parents, though it offered nothing of real educational value beyond the optional keyboard gimmick.
The early 1990s handheld market was littered with similar, short-lived systems: the Watara Supervision, Hartung Game Master, the Lexibook Cyber Arcade, not to mention the myriad of Tiger Electronics portables. Most were technically functional but creatively bankrupt, relying on generic games that couldn’t compete with Nintendo’s character-driven juggernauts.
The Mega Duck and its many aliases disappeared quickly and quietly, leaving not even a cult following, thanks to its brand identity crisis. It remains a beloved oddity among retro collectors to this day, with its squat gray body, clicky buttons, and surprisingly robust homebrew scene. The Duck embodies a moment in gaming history when anyone thought they could dethrone Nintendo. They couldn’t, natch, but in trying, they gave us a handheld so strange it refuses to be forgotten.
In hindsight, the Mega Duck never stood a chance. In a market defined by giants, the Mega Duck waddled proudly, if briefly, across the pond of gaming history, and that, perhaps, is legacy enough.
Featured Image Source: Flickr
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