Pocket Dream Console

Lore & Background

The Pocket Dream Console (PDC) is a closed system with 100 built-in games, mostly unofficial clones of other popular titles. These include clones of Lode Runner, Arkanoid, Puzz Loop, Sokoban, Bomberman, and Nintendogs. One clone, Joe Ma (a clone of Puzz Loop), was later directly licensed by Mitchell Corporation, likely out of fear of a lawsuit. The advertised line-up includes categories: Action, Venture, Sport, Relax, Puzzle, and Table.

The system uses a Sunplus 16-bit SPG 240 Series chipset. It features a D-pad; A, B and menu buttons; two shoulder pads; and a volume control. It has a 2-inch or 2.5-inch backlit TFT LCD screen (manufactured by AU Optronics) with a resolution of 320x240 and delta pixel positioning. The backlight is available in blue, red, purple, orange, pink, and white. The console can be connected to a TV or other equipment via a custom cable (sold separately) that uses a mini USB B connector for composite video and mono audio. It also has a 2.5 mm mini headphone jack and one built-in speaker. Power is supplied by 3 AAA batteries.

The system was available in different colors. Models of the system have between 30, 40, 50, 100, and 200 games.

Reader's Guide

The Pocket Dream Console occupies a niche in the handheld market as a low-cost, multi-game device that thrived on unlicensed clones of well-known titles. Its release by multiple companies across Japan, France, the United States, and Germany (under a rebranded name) shows a broad distribution strategy that kept it on shelves until 2011. The direct licensing of the Joe Ma clone by Mitchell Corporation highlights the legal grey area such systems often operated in. The console's use of a Sunplus chipset and a custom A/V cable for TV output reflects the era's trend of bridging handheld and home play. While not a major commercial or critical success, the PDC is notable for its longevity and the sheer variety of built-in games across different model variants, making it a curious artifact of the early 2000s handheld landscape.

Did You Know?

• The Pocket Dream Console was created by Conny in 2004.
• It was sold until 2011, contrary to popular belief that it was only sold in Japan.
• One of its built-in clones, Joe Ma, was later directly licensed by Mitchell Corporation.

The Leap into Three Dimensions

The defining transformation of the fifth generation was the industry's full embrace of three-dimensional polygon graphics. While earlier titles like Star Fox on the Super NES or arcade classics such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter had already experimented with 3D environments, those were isolated experiments rather than a platform-wide standard. The 32X add-on for the Genesis and the Super FX chip for the Super NES offered only rudimentary three-dimensional capabilities to 16-bit hardware. The real inflection point arrived in 1996, when a wave of landmark releases—Virtua Fighter 2 on the Saturn, Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation, Tekken 2, and Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64—demonstrated what dedicated 3D hardware could achieve. These titles were heavily marketed for their polygonal worlds and effectively redirected the industry's creative energy away from side-scrolling and rail-style gameplay. Designers suddenly had the tools to build open, explorable spaces, which in turn unlocked entirely new genres and far more complex game structures that had been impossible on the flat, sprite-based systems of the previous generation.

The Format Wars: Discs Versus Cartridges

After two failed CD-based console partnerships—first with Sony, then with Philips—Nintendo made the controversial choice to keep the Nintendo 64 on the cartridge format it had used for decades. The company publicly justified the decision by pointing to faster load times and a built-in anti-piracy chip, but critics within the industry suspected a more financial motive: cartridge manufacturing was far costlier than pressing a disc, which allowed Nintendo to collect steeper licensing fees from third-party publishers. Developers such as EA Sports openly viewed the move as a revenue play, and many grew reluctant to commit their titles to the N64. The practical advantages of the CD-ROM were substantial—up to 650 MB of storage, dramatically lower production costs, cheaper retail pricing, and faster turnaround from manufacturing to shelf. The drawbacks were equally real: longer load times, an inability to stream data on the fly, and pricier optical drives that pushed console prices higher. Nintendo even ran a Nintendo Power advertisement likening cartridges to a Space Shuttle and discs to a snail. The most consequential casualty of the format split was the Final Fantasy franchise, which leapt from Nintendo hardware to the PlayStation starting with Final Fantasy VII, a title whose scope simply could not fit on a cartridge.

A Fractured Handheld Landscape

Unlike the home-console side of the fifth generation, which was dominated by a handful of major players, the handheld market was defined by rapid turnover and fragmentation. The Sega Nomad, the generation's first dedicated handheld, managed only a two-year commercial life before being pulled from shelves. Nintendo's own Virtual Boy fared even worse, lasting less than a year on the market. Both systems were discontinued before the next wave of handhelds even reached stores. SNK entered the fray with the Neo Geo Pocket in late October 1998, but the company abandoned it roughly a year later in favor of the fully backward-compatible Neo Geo Pocket Color. Nintendo, by contrast, enjoyed clear dominance of the portable space: the Game Boy Color, released in 1998, became the era's most successful handheld by a wide margin. Two smaller refreshes of the original Game Boy also appeared—the Game Boy Pocket and the Japan-only Game Boy Light—but neither threatened the Color's market position. The net effect was a handheld landscape in which one platform captured the vast majority of players while every competitor either vanished quickly or was superseded by its own maker within a single year.

Bridging Two Generations

The fifth generation occupied an unusually long and overlapping window, stretching from February 20, 1993, all the way to March 23, 2006. The Sony PlayStation stood as the era's best-selling home console, followed by the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. Sony later introduced a re-engineered, smaller version of the PlayStation called the PSone on July 7, 2000, and it was the discontinuation of that PSone model in 2006 that officially closed the generation's book. The era also marked the first time internet connectivity appeared in home consoles: the Sega Saturn could connect through the Sega Net Link add-on, and the Apple Pippin—ultimately a commercial failure—was the first system to include on-board internet hardware. The overlap with the sixth generation was significant; Sega's Dreamcast launched on November 27, 1998, while the PlayStation and N64 were still selling. By the time the PSone was retired, the seventh generation had already been on the market for a full year. In hindsight, the fifth generation served as the critical bridge that carried the entire industry from two-dimensional sprites into the three-dimensional, disc-based, network-connected world that would define every console that followed.

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