Today, April 21st, 2024 marks a 35-year anniversary of one the worlds most famous handheld consoles, the Game Boy. Introduction
On this day in 1989, Japanese gamers got their hands on the Game Boy. And while it was hardly the first handheld on the market, the first being Microvision in 1979, a whole 10 years earlier, the Game Boy took the market by storm and quickly became the most popular handheld in the World.
Let’s go through a little bit of history and remember why the Game Boy was such an incredible success.
It was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the same gentleman who introduced the World to Game & Watch consoles and the famous D-Pad (the directional cross-shaped button, used to this very day in almost every gamepad on the market).
As we can see Yokoi had a head full of great ideas (not mentioning the Virtual Boy, that’s a story for a different post). Interestingly, the Game Boy was not the best-performing handheld on the market. It had a small monochrome screen with a green background and no backlight, which did not look great. Both Atari and Sega produced consoles with much better screens.
But Game Boy was using just four AA batteries instead of six, like the Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx, the biggest Nintendo competitors on the handheld market. Plus it lasted twice as long.
Other reasons for its popularity were the lower price and the games of course. Nintendo had Mario, enough said, haha. The handheld was released with Super Mario Land, a short and fun game starring the most famous Italian plumber ever, and Tetris. How the second game got to be on the Game Boy is another interesting story, covered by the movie Tetris made for the Apple TV+ streaming service.
Game Boy dominated the World for years. It was discontinued in 2003, which is simply crazy. The original Game Boy had a few additional models added, like the Game Boy Pocket (a smaller, sleeker version of the original) and the Game Boy Light (with a backlit screen).
The original console was followed by the Game Boy Color, which added color to the screen, as the name implies, and was running at just two AA batteries, which was very convenient. The Pocket runs on two batteries as well. Game Boy Color was an evolution, with the revolution to come in the form of Game Boy Advance.
The games were the cherry on top. Many gamers remember their childhood with the Game Boy, playing Pokémon on a road trip. We also got Zelda, Kirby, Donkey Kong, and many, many others.
Game Boy had killer games, a good price, and great battery life. All the ingredients for a success. Plus, I really respect Nintendo for sticking with handheld gaming while all the competition back out of it. Thanks to them we now have a rebirth of fully-fledged handheld gaming with more and more hardware coming out.
Game Boy will always have a special place in my heart and I’m glad I could celebrate its anniversary with you in this article.
