I have several game gears so have some first hand experience.
90s batteries didn’t last long. Regular batteries are 1.5V, rechargeable are 1.2V. When freshly charged they can be around 1.4V, but the game gear will quickly “detect” the voltage dropping and start indicating low battery.
Older batteries didn’t hold as much charge as modern batteries do. You can go hours now with rechargeable batteries, but it used to be different.
As a kid, I had a game gear fanny pack that held the device, some games and all the batteries I could cram in there, which was a lot.
DannyMac@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
I got one for xmas one year, probably it’s last year when Sega was clearing inventory, because I didn’t ask for it. All I ever had was the pack-in Sonic title. I wish I kept it so that I could modernize it, but who would have seen that coming? I remember playing it and then seeing the battery light flash and I was like, “I wonder what that means, that can’t mean a low battery since I’ve not been playing it all that long!” Yep, it was a low battery :(
It probably wouldn’t have been a big deal IF Sega bundled a damn AC adapter with it instead of charging separately for it. It was hard to convince my parents to get me video game stuff as a kid.