Sega · 1995–1999 · ~1,000,000
A full Sega Genesis you could hold in your hands, released in North America only — arriving just as Sega abandoned the Genesis, and drinking six AA batteries in under three hours.
The Nomad was, on paper, the handheld everyone had asked for: a genuine Genesis in portable form, playing the existing cartridge library at full fidelity with no compromises, and outputting to a television when docked. It was released in October 1995 in North America and nowhere else. The problem was not the machine but the moment. Sega CEO Hayao Nakayama had already committed the company to the Saturn, and support for the Genesis and every Genesis-derived product was winding down as the Nomad reached shelves — Sega had built a portable version of a platform it was in the process of abandoning. The hardware also carried a brutal power cost: the backlit colour screen and full Genesis chipset drew roughly twice the current of a Game Gear, and six AA batteries bought only two to three hours of play. Around a million units sold, enough for GamePro to later rank it among the ten worst-selling handhelds ever made.