The Game Boy Turns 30

There aren't many consoles that can claim to have had the impact of creating an entire sub-industry of an already popular industry. Nor are there many that can claim to have done this with minimal graphical power and a very simple game as its main feature, but Nintendo's iconic handheld can claim to have done it all. The console spawned handheld rivals, pushed miniaturisation to new extremes, and most importantly, spawned some of the greatest games of all-time. Not bad for something that was first seen as a novelty product, but through thick and thin, the Game Boy has seen it all, often challenged but never beaten, it is the iconic handheld, and possibly holds a name as famous as its parent company all by itself. Let's take a look back at how Nintendo created the Game Boy.

The origin of the Game Boy owes its success to a previous handheld gaming device, Nintendo's Game & Watch system. The predecessor, featuring Mr. Game & Watch, contained a series of fixed games for the player to enjoy, but Nintendo wanted to do something more, they wanted a portable system that could change games like its big brother the Famicom, or NES outside of Japan. The Famicom was Nintendo's flagship product but it had limitations, the main one being that the player couldn't take the console with them on the go, well, not easily anyway.

A name that may be familiar to gaming historians is Gunpei Yokoi, a legend in the halls of gaming and Nintendo. Every time you look at the D-Pad on your controller, you have Yokoi-san to thank, it was his idea after all. Yokoi was the original thinker behind Nintendo's fun first philosophy when it came to making games. Yokoi-san believed in making a new piece of hardware using seasoned technology and not experimenting with developing new technology that could fail. There's a reason the Game Boy opted for monochromatic graphics to preserve battery life, and it was down to Yokoi-san.

Along with Satoru Okada, and Yokoi-san's Nintendo Research and Development 1, the team was tasked with developing the home console experience in a handheld device. Renowned calculator manufacturers Casio and Sharp play a part in the creation of the Game Boy, they were slugging it out for supremacy in the calculator market, which had caused a deluge of LCD screens to be readily available. Using his philosophy of using technology that is readily available, Yokoi-san had the screen that would bring the Game Boy to life.

Whilst Nintendo Research and Development 1 was busy creating the prototype Yokoi-san would pitch to Hiroshi Yamauchi, global president of Nintendo, another creator was putting the finishing touches on a game that would be intricately woven into the success of the Game Boy. That game? Tetris.

Alexey Pajitnov was a Russian games designer, who created the game back in 1985. It was the perfect choice of game, but required Nintendo to deal directly with the Soviet government, due to no civilian being allowed to engage in such an enterprise that wasn't state-backed. Luckily, Nintendo managed to secure rights to the game for their handheld console.

The prototype, known as Dot Matrix Game 001, or DMG-001, had been pitched to Yamauchi-san, with the speculation that it would sell twenty-five million units, when it was shown to Nintendo of America president, Minoru Arakawa, he was convinced he would be able to shift one-hundred million units in the United States. Bold figures, but Nintendo was confident in their product, even if internally some employees laughed at the humble hardware being produced. Nintendo had managed to make a superstar out of Mario when it had bundled Super Mario Bros with the original Nintendo Entertainment System, and they were doubling down that the same would happen with Tetris.

Still, the development of the prototype console was underway, and with high hopes for sales, Nintendo knew they could be onto a winner, possibly even rivalling the sales of their home console product. This new product needed a name though, and that's where Sony, future console rivals of Nintendo, would indirectly influence Nintendo's name choice. The previous decade had seen the rise of the Sony Walkman, a portable cassette player, that was revolutionary at the time. Nintendo liked the name, and wanted to come up with something as fitting for their new revolutionary portable product, the chose game because of what the product did and boy to appeal to a younger audience. So the DMG-001 became the Game Boy, although it's code designation of DMG-001 would stick with it as a product name.

The controller for the handheld console was a direct duplicate of the control pad for the Famicom/NES, put into the body of the handheld. With the same button layouts players were used to, some added additions to the handheld was the ability to adjust the brightness of the screen with a dial and also increase and decrease the volume. Along with this, Nintendo provided a cable to attach two Game Boys together to allow for multiplayer. Whilst this may seem laughable today, it was cutting edge for the time.

The handheld was powered by a custom 8-bit Sharp x80 core at 4.19 MHz, almost twice as fast as the chip that powered the Famicom/NES, and with 4kb of memory onboard, again, double what its home console big brother had, the system had some impressive specifications for its time.

With the packaged game ready, the hardware fixed and ready to go, and a name chosen, Nintendo Research and Development 1's new baby was ready to face the world, but what did the world have in store for it?

The Game Boy sold out everywhere. Selling seven million more units than the twenty-five million estimated, but that doesn't mean it was all smooth sailing for the Game Boy. Challengers would appear on the horizon.

Sega's Game Gear, and the Atari Lynx were both technically superior consoles, and whilst they could produce visuals far more appealing than the humble monochromatic graphics players received on the Game Boy, Yokoi-san's wise choice to forego a colour screen for good battery life paid off, with the handheld smashing its technically superior rivals, and long after the rivals had fell into ruin, the Game Boy was still going strong. It would receive an upgraded colour version in 1998, and whilst marketed as a new console, the Game Boy Color was at its heart still the Game Boy.

The system would be responsible for introducing gamers to the Pokémon series, as well as giving us unique adventures such as the Super Mario Land adventures, and new Legend of Zelda games, along with an expansive library of games for the system. By the time the handheld was doing its victory lap with the Game Boy Pocket, the Game Boy was already a symbol of pop culture and one of the icons on the 90s. The name Game Boy would live on until 2008, when it's 32-bit successor, the Game Boy Advance was retired.

The Game Boy sold a staggering 118.69 million units over its lifetime, and is still remembered today by fans the world over. Speak to many gamers from the nineties, and most of them will tell you they played a Game Boy. It is the second-best selling handheld of all-time, only being surpassed by the Nintendo DS, and the third-best selling console of all-time.

With the Game Boy turning 30, that's quite the list of achievements for a humble little console people laughed at.