In my hour-and-a-half discussion with Grant Sinclair, it’s clear that the GamerCard creator has drive. Despite his polite demeanour, the nephew of iconic British entrepreneur Clive Sinclair has the same fire for invention that’s bled through each member of the Sinclair family. 

Growing up alongside the 1970s explosion of the family’s iconic tech enterprise and witnessing first-hand the high of bringing a product to market, the modern inventor has inherited the buzz of designing. Across the years, Grant Sinclair saw a number of projects that kicked off and a number that flopped, but the hit of bringing a product to market is unlike any other. 

“The drive is, really, the high,” Sinclair told me. “It’s like an addiction, gambling or drugs, whatever it is. Once you get the initial high, once you get the hit, you just want hit after hit after hit. I think that’s what the drive is, actually.”

Sinclair’s current project is the GamerCard, available here, a gift-card sized handheld that’s just started shipping. It’s really a successor to a previous project, the POCO, a build-it-yourself kit similar to a ClockWork Pi that was powered by a Raspberry Pi. There are clear differences: this one is pre-built, it looks substantially more premium, and it’s tiny. 

One of the early influences for Grant Sinclair was the Sinclair Executive, the slimline pocket calculator from 1972. At the time, his uncle Clive had found a way to take the massive, bulky Texas Instruments calculators and shrink them into a 7mm chassis, and that race to create thin, reliable and affordable tech has stuck with him. 

“It’s always been the race to do the thinnest possible product,” he said. “And, with the computers, I think the first really thin one we did was the ZX80, which was the first computer in the world to cost £99… a lot of my father’s designs [Iain Sinclair] were the thinnest. He did the first thin torch flashlight.”

With GamerCard, the idea is to, one day, have the device available on a Gift Card stand in supermarkets or airports, allowing people to simply pick up and play a wealth of games. With a D-pad, four face buttons and two rear buttons, the card-thin device has more than enough buttons to play with. Additionally, the device comes with built-in arcade-style games, support for PICO-8 games and the ability to run emulators of classic titles. 

Originally, Sinclair’s GamerCard wasn’t even a gift card at all, it was a landscape form handheld that’s development was butchered by the COVID lockdown and the global chip shortage. At the time, it was hard to create anything. POCO was shipping and parts were scarce, but Grant was already proud of what he was working on, proud enough to show his uncle. 

“That was going to be the follow-up project,” he said. “I got a prototype in my pocket to take it to see Clive, whereas I hadn’t got the confidence from POCO to show Clive. I didn’t think it was good enough to really show him, whereas the landscape product that I got in development was easily good enough to show him. That day, I got it in my pocket, scheduled to jump on a train… my dad phoned up and said, “Oh, Clive’s just died”. So, he never got to see it, but I think he would’ve, I think he would’ve loved the GamerCard, what it evolved into.”

Looking at the GamerCard, anyone would be sceptical. It looks impossibly thin and a little confusing, but in our chat I was able to see the device in action. First and foremost, it works, and the device’s 4-inch IPS display looks gorgeously crisp. Despite its miniscule size, the device crams in 128GB of internal storage and even has HDMI output on the edge of its thin frame. 

It’s extremely low power as well with a battery that can last for hours despite two powerful speakers, a backlit screen, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support. If this came out ten years ago, it would feel like otherworldly sci-fi. Coming out today, it still feels a little bit magical, no matter how many times you read about its “patented, sealed PCB sandwich construction with Zytel layer” manufacturing.

Just like civilians in the 1970s reacting to the slimline calculator, seeing the GamerCard in action rewired my brain. In a world where Analogue Pockets, Playdates and countless retro gaming handhelds have taken off with their own niche audiences, I definitely see a place for GamerCard. For once in the gaming space, it feels like an actual invention, even if the insides are a modified Raspberry Pi. 

As with any device, everyone wonders what the barometer of success is, and for GamerCard it seems to just be that some people end up getting it. In our chat, Grant didn’t boast lofty goals of millions of units across the world or a de facto statement that the device will be the highest performing buzzword of 2025. Instead, he just hopes it does well enough. 

“I’d obviously love it to be a success and I’d love to see it alongside, you know, brands like Bose, Samsung, Apple and things in its own right,” he explained. “But at the same time, I’m happy to just see people be the early adopters. What excites me is seeing the early adopters taking it up.” 

The dream goal, of course, is to be able to fulfil the supermarket gift card dream, to be in a place where anyone can simply pick up a GamerCard, download a game on crappy airport Wi-Fi and always have it in their pocket. However, if the device does end up being a failure, whatever the barometer for that label is, there’s already ideas for what to do next. 

“As soon as I get product shipping, I’m already working on the next version of it anyway,” Sinclair told me. “If it didn’t get mainstream for whatever reason, or it didn’t sell through in the stores, when it gets into the stores, I’ll be, ‘right, well, the next one will’, you know? I’m more interested in developing the next thing.

“Obviously, I’d love to see my product be successful, and the more success the better, but it gets a bit silly. It gets to the point where [you’re like] ‘what is success?’ I’ve seen this before when you as soon as you hit a million units, had it in the past where when we hit a million units with another product, and we were so tired. 

“By the time we hit million units, one of my family brought in champagne and we were just so exhausted we just literally didn’t even pick [it] up. We just just carried on working, and it doesn’t get to the point where [you’re like] ‘Yeah, you made it. You hit a million units.’ Because as soon as you hit a million units, you’re like, ‘No, you want to hit 10 million units.’ And so really what most interests me is the fact that people want the product, which clearly people love the GamerCard And I don’t know quite why.”

It took an hour for me to become a believer in GamerCard, and I don’t really know why either. Grant Sinclair has thoughts: maybe it’s the sleek style of the device, maybe it’s got a strong personality, or maybe it’s just interesting. I do believe Sinclair has more work to do: people need to see this thing in action, something he admits that he simply hasn’t done yet. However, once I saw this miniscule device in action, I was smitten. 

GamerCard is available to purchase now for £125 with deliveries starting now. Time will tell how successful it is in the long run but, in the short, at least its unique.