To say the bottom of page 10 of the May 1983 issue of Video Games magazine is interesting is an understatement.

Notice anything familiar? Yep, it looks an awful lot like the Nintendo DS Lite (2006) and today’s Nintendo 3DS handhelds:

Evan Amos’s photo of the Nintendo DS Lite from Wikipedia.

Much like many of the artist renderings from back in the day, the final design of the released version of the PVS was not quite the same. In fact, it looked quite a bit different as you can see here and here (Bonus: Here’s a video of one of its relatively impressive games in action!). Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to note that what we think of as a relatively modern design had its roots relatively long ago. Of course, Nintendo clearly didn’t take inspiration from Palmtex’s rendering as they had their own Game & Watch handheld, shown below, with actual dual screens well before, but the similarities with the PVS rendering, despite its lack of a second screen, are still more striking.

Nintendo’s Oil Panic Game & Watch handheld, released May 28, 1982. Source: Wikipedia.

As always, there’s a lot to love about videogame history!

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