The screen was small, the graphics were limited to gray tones on a dull green background, but the Nintendo Game Boy was a revolution when it launched in Japan three decades ago. The original version may seem desperately thick these days, but back then it was unimaginably slim, a console suitable for gaming anywhere.
What made this console so popular and sold so many units?
The funny thing is that the Game Boy was not actually the first portable game machine with interchangeable cartridges: that was the Microvision, released in 1979 and described as a “programmable electronic gaming system” by its manufacturer, the toy giant Milton. Bradley. Interestingly, the console itself was just a container with a small screen, each game had its own central processor and memory chip.
Being a portable machine, practically a pocket console, was his great success. The console was designed by Nintendo’s Research and Development 1 team, led by legendary engineer Gunpei Yokoi, the genius behind the company’s Game & Watch series of portable LCD games. Impose portability over performance. So while rival handheld consoles like the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear boasted expensive hardware and color screens that wiped out the battery, the Game Boy was comparatively cheap thanks to its antiquated Z80-based CPU. And while the 2.5-inch screen could barely display four different shades of gray, the console promised up to 30 hours of gameplay on four AA batteries, which made it that much more useful. And it is that the appearance is not everything.
The eight-way D-pad controller (originally designed by Yokoi for the Game & Watch series), and four buttons: A, B, Start and Select was very familiar to gamers, which meant that it was also easy for developers to convert games from the hit NES to Nintendo’s handheld machine.
When it landed in Japan on April 21, 1989, at a price of 12,500 yen, it immediately sold its initial print run of 300,000 units (it did not arrive in the UK until September 1990). It literally swept away. At the time, the must-have game was Super Mario Land, a typically quirky and enjoyable platformer that reproduced many features of the classic Super Mario Bros. series. It would go on to sell more than 18 million copies.
With the passage of time, the Nintendo 3DS became the fabulous successor to the Game Boy, also reaping many successes.
