Game Boy

~ the obit ~

Nintendo put the Game Boy on sale in Japan on 21 April 1989 and in North America that July. Europe waited until 28 September 1990. It cost ¥12,500 at home and $89.95 in the United States, which was cheap for a games machine even then.

Gunpei Yokoi's team at Nintendo R&D1 built it around a 160 by 144 pixel monochrome screen and a Sharp processor running at roughly four megahertz. Both numbers were behind what the competition was announcing before the thing even shipped. Yokoi's stated design principle was to take mature technology that had already gotten cheap and use it in a way nobody had bothered to, and the Game Boy is the clearest object he ever made out of that idea.

It sold 118.69 million units across every variant and the Game Boy Color, a figure no handheld came near again until Nintendo's own DS. Production ran until 31 March 2003, by which point the Game Boy Advance had been out for two years.

The library outlived the hardware. Pokemon Red and Green arrived in 1996, seven years into the machine's life, and turned a platform the press had already written off into the best selling thing in Japanese retail. A dying handheld got a second decade out of two games about trading monsters down a link cable.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the screen everybody complained about ~

The Atari Lynx arrived the same year with a backlit color display. The Sega Game Gear followed in 1990 making the same argument. Both were better machines on a spec sheet and both lost, because color LCDs of that generation drank batteries. A Game Boy ran roughly thirty hours on four AA cells. A Game Gear ran three to five on six.

This is where my distance from it sits. I was five when it launched and eighteen when Nintendo stopped making it, and across that whole stretch in Turkey it was an import rather than a shelf item, priced like one. Handheld gaming where I was meant the cheap unbranded LCD units that played one built-in game forever. The Game Boy was something I knew existed without ever expecting to hold one.

~ tetris ~

Nintendo of America wanted Mario in the box. Henk Rogers, who had chased the Tetris license across three continents and into a Soviet ministry office, argued that Mario would sell to people already buying Nintendo products while Tetris would sell to everyone else. He won that argument. The Game Boy shipped in North America and Europe with Tetris as the pack-in, and Japan did not get it.

The consequence was that millions of people whose entire contact with video games was a gray brick on a commuter train ended up holding Nintendo hardware. Tetris on the Game Boy went on to sell around 35 million copies, more than any other title on the system.

~ the end of the line ~

The Game Boy Pocket arrived on 20 July 1996, smaller and with a screen that had finally lost its swampy green tint. The Game Boy Light, backlit at last, stayed in Japan from April 1998. The Game Boy Color in October 1998 kept the same processor family and the same cartridge slot, so the original library never went out of reach.

Nintendo ended production on 31 March 2003. No statement survives that anybody quotes, because the Game Boy Advance had shipped in 2001 and the succession was two years finished by then. Fourteen years is an absurd run for consumer electronics, and nothing Nintendo has built since has stayed on sale half that long.

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