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Nearly two years before the release of the Nintendo Game Boy in 1989, the Ninja Gaiden and Klonoa: Door to Phantomile director Hideo Yoshizawa came up with his own pitch for what the future of handheld gaming might look like, and it's pretty remarkable how closely it resembles the Nintendo device that would end up taking the world by storm.
Yoshizawa shared the illustration of the device, which he referred to as the "Pocket TV Game", on Twitter/X last month on May 27th, 2026, writing that he found the document while tidying his room and that it was among a bunch of other materials from his time at Tecmo.
Rather incredibly, the image is dated April 24th, 1987, which would have put it just under two years before the Game Boy's initial release in Japan on April 21st, 1989, and 17 months before the console's January 1989 announcement, but despite that, it features a vertical look that's not a million miles removed from the Game Boy's.
That's not the only similarity, either. The drawing of the handheld also features the B + A buttons, Start and Select, and the directional pad, all situated in roughly the same positions as on the Nintendo Game Boy (though the on/off button is on the face, as opposed to the top of the device) and it also has roughly the same overall shape, albeit with much sharper edges than the Game Boy's ergonomic curves.
As for the differences, there are two major ones, to speak of. The first is that the device was planned to feature a colour screen (as opposed to adopting the Game Boy's monochromatic look), while the second is that it would have taken cards instead of cartridges, for a greater degree of portability (similar to the PC Engine GT/TurboExpress, which would release in 1990).
If you're wondering why the device was never released, according to Yoshizawa, it all had to do with Tecmo being ill-equipped to develop anything other than games, with the director stating, "It was impossible for Tecmo to release hardware" at the time. As a result, it simply remained a pie-in-the-sky idea, one that has remained buried among his other artifacts accumulated from his time working at the Japanese developer.
He even states that if he did somehow manage to bring it to life, he believes "it would have sold as well as Nintendo’s version," calling Nintendo's decision to go with a black-and-white console (as opposed to a colour one as he had conceived) a sign of the company's "genius".