8 Retro Gaming Handhelds That Are Cooler Than Your Phone

Your smartphone is a supercomputer that can emulate three decades of gaming history. And yet. The coolest gadgets on any table right now are chunky little handhelds with actual buttons, because the retro handheld scene has quietly become one of gaming’s most delightful corners. We’ve rounded up eight devices with more charm per cubic inch than any slab of glass. Let’s kick things off small.

The Original Game Boy, Modded

The 1989 brick, resurrected with a backlit screen, a rechargeable battery and a shell in a color Nintendo never dreamed of. Playing Tetris on hardware older than most of the people playing it is a genuinely spiritual experience.

The Miyoo Mini

A palm-sized rectangle that plays basically everything from the cartridge era and fits in the small pocket of your jeans. You know the one. The pocket nobody has ever used for anything. It has waited its whole life for this moment.

The Anbernic Brick Collection

Anbernic releases new handhelds at a pace normally associated with rabbit populations, and every one looks like it fell out of an alternate 1997. Choosing just one is the community’s favorite impossible task, which is why nobody actually chooses just one.

The Playdate

Bright yellow, black-and-white screen, and a crank. An actual hand crank. It shouldn’t work and it completely works, which is what happens when a gadget gets designed by people who smile a lot. Games arrive in weekly “seasons” like tiny surprise deliveries, and at least one of them is played entirely by cranking. We showed it to a ten-year-old, who asked what it charges. The answer, kid, is your heart.

The Steam Deck

The stretch entry, since “handheld” here means “forearm workout.” But nothing beats the absurd luxury of playing a AAA blockbuster in bed and falling asleep on it. Achievement unlocked.

The Transparent Anything

Any handheld in a clear shell is automatically 40 percent cooler. This was true in 1998 with the atomic purple Game Boy Color and it is true now. Some laws of the universe hold. Physicists refuse to study why. Cowards.

The Watch That Plays DOOM

The community’s other favorite pastime is making DOOM run on things. Watches, calculators, pregnancy tests. The watch version technically becomes a handheld if you take it off, and yes, we’re counting it.

The Homemade CardPuter

Tiny DIY kits with keyboards, built by hobbyists at kitchen tables. Half games console, half business card, all conversation starter. Assembly takes an evening, a soldering iron and the humility to discover which joint you botched, and the finished thing runs for days on a battery smaller than a stamp. Handing one to a coworker instead of a business card has, in our experience, a 100 percent callback rate.

Your phone will always be more powerful. Power was never the point. The point is clicking a D-pad in a waiting room while a stranger asks “is that a Game Boy?” with unmistakable respect in their voice. It happens every single time. We have witnesses.