Game Boy

The Game Boy is an 8-bit fourth-generation handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo, first released in Japan on April 21, 1989, in North America later the same year, and in Europe in late 1990.¹⁴ It was Nintendo’s first handheld to use interchangeable ROM cartridges, and its combination of low cost, long battery life, and a deep software library made it the dominant portable system for roughly a decade.¹⁵¹⁶ The system was designed by the team that had developed the Game & Watch series of handheld electronic games and several games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES): Satoru Okada, Gunpei Yokoi, and Nintendo Research & Development 1.¹⁴

The original hardware carried the internal product code DMG-01, standing for “Dot Matrix Game” in reference to its display.⁷⁹ It used a custom 8-bit CMOS processor with a 2.2 MHz clock speed and 64 kilobits of static RAM, and its screen was an STN-type dot-matrix LCD of 160 × 144 pixels rendering four shades of gray.¹⁷ The unit measured 90 mm × 148 mm × 32 mm, weighed roughly 300 grams with batteries, ran on four AA batteries for approximately 15 hours, and produced four-channel FM stereo sound.¹⁷ To offset the LCD’s indigo hue, its background was tinted green, a look that became a signature of the system.¹⁵ The console was initially sold only in gray casing before a set of new colors arrived in the early 1990s.¹⁷

Origins and design

The Game Boy grew directly out of Nintendo’s Game & Watch line, the single-game LCD handhelds conceived by Gunpei Yokoi, reportedly after he watched a commuter idly playing with a pocket calculator on a train.¹⁵¹⁶ Yokoi’s Game & Watch design used custom-printed LCD segments to display characters and objects rather than pixels, allowing whimsical action games on very limited hardware; the 59 unique titles sold over 40 million units and pioneered the d-pad and, in later multi-screen models, a dual-screen layout.¹⁵ A further, more distant antecedent was Milton Bradley’s Microvision, released in 1979 as the first programmable handheld with interchangeable cartridges — an LCD matrix screen, cartridges, and decent battery life whose technology was not yet ready to satisfy the ambition.¹⁵

Satoru Okada, who had directed Metroid and Kid Icarus under Yokoi at Nintendo’s R&D1 studio, recalled that the Microvision was in fact a formative influence, admiring its Breakout clone but faulting its bulk and the sameness of its cartridges, which led Nintendo first toward the single-game Game & Watch.⁴ For the Game Boy, Yokoi and Okada divided the work as they had before: Yokoi handled the physical design while Okada designed the internal hardware.¹⁵ Okada has said the two clashed over the machine’s ambition — Yokoi envisioned a cheap toy in the mold of the Game & Watch, expected to last only a season or two and indifferent to third-party support, whereas Okada wanted a durable platform closer to the Famicom, capable of running a variety of quality titles and supported by a real development kit for outside publishers.⁴ Okada ultimately took over the project after Yokoi relented, and by his account the finished Game Boy resembled the Famicom far more than the Game & Watch.⁴ To reach the mass market, Nintendo needed to price the system under 13,000 yen, and Okada was forced to scale down his design considerably, settling on a custom Z80-variant CPU and a small monochrome screen.¹⁵

Software and success

Nintendo bundled the Soviet puzzle game Tetris with the Game Boy in the United States, and the game proved central to the system’s breakthrough, appealing to players well outside the traditional gaming audience.¹⁵¹⁹ Tetris went on to sell 35 million copies, the best-selling Game Boy title.¹⁹ The launch also carried Super Mario Land, a 2D side-scroller developed by Yokoi and Okada’s team as a scaled-down showcase for Nintendo’s mascot.¹⁵¹⁹ The system’s software library eventually held over 450 games, spanning platformers, puzzles, shoot-‘em-ups, fighting games, and sports titles, and brought established franchises such as Mario, Metroid, and Zelda into portable form.¹⁷¹³

The Game Boy’s most consequential software arrived late in its life with Pokémon. Planning for the games began in 1990 — the same year the Game Boy launched — when Satoshi Tajiri founded Game Freak, and the titles were originally conceived as software for the then-new hardware.¹ Development stretched to an unusually long six years, and Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green were finally released for the Game Boy in Japan on February 27, 1996.¹ Producer Tsunekazu Ishihara recalled that by then there was a sense the Game Boy “might have reached the end of its shelf life,” and that the team felt it was “going to miss the last train”.¹ The games began quietly, hovering around the edges of the top ten, before word of mouth, coverage centered on the manga magazine CoroCoro Comic, and the hidden character Mew drove them to enormous popularity, extending the original hardware’s life still further.¹

Against competitors with superior technology — color screens and backlights offered by systems such as the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear — the Game Boy won on endurance and cost, since the technology of the era made long battery life difficult to combine with those features.¹⁵¹⁶ Nintendo’s bet on software and accessibility over hardware specifications succeeded, and the system sold well over 100 million units according to Nintendo’s own retrospective materials.¹⁷¹⁸

Variants and legacy

Nintendo revised the hardware repeatedly. The slimmer Game Boy Pocket (product code MGB-001) arrived in 1996 with the same core specifications but a drastically improved screen, two AAA batteries, and smaller dimensions.⁷¹⁷ The Japan-only Game Boy Light (MGB-101) added a backlit screen in 1998.⁷⁹ The first true successor, the Game Boy Color (CGB), followed in 1998, supporting up to 56 colors and remaining backward compatible with the entire original library.⁷¹⁹ The line continued with the 32-bit Game Boy Advance (AGB-001) in 2001, the clamshell Game Boy Advance SP (AGS) in 2003, and the miniature Game Boy Micro (OXY-001), the last iteration Nintendo released.⁷⁹¹⁹

The Game Boy platform was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2009.¹⁶ Its creator Gunpei Yokoi, whose earlier Nintendo work included the Ultra Hand toy of 1970, left the company after the failure of the Virtual Boy and died in a traffic accident on October 4, 1997, before the full extent of the Game Boy’s legacy became clear.¹⁶¹⁹ The Game & Watch’s dual-screen layout later foreshadowed the two-screen design of the Nintendo DS, which supplanted the Game Boy brand as Nintendo’s portable line.¹⁵¹⁹ Cumulative Nintendo sales figures record 118.69 million Game Boy hardware units and 501.11 million pieces of software over the platform’s lifetime.²