Two generations of gamers have vastly different memories of the Nintendo Game Boy. While it may not technically be the first handheld console – depending on how you define “console” – it was the first portable device capable of playing games comparable to those on contemporary home systems.
For those who grew up in the 1980s, the Game Boy was a bulky but powerful device with a battery life that could last for days. In contrast, ’90s kids remember it as a simple yet iconic gadget – not a replacement for home consoles, but the go-to platform for the one game everyone was talking about.
Before phones could download games, the Game Boy dominated handheld gaming for well over a decade. Its success laid the foundation for Nintendo’s dominance in the handheld market by combining simplicity with groundbreaking games. This clever design philosophy established the blueprint for future handheld consoles, including the Nintendo Switch.
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The iconic tech gadgets that shaped our world. From groundbreaking gaming consoles to revolutionary mobile devices and music players, discover the legends of technology.
Not Black and White
Throughout the 1980s, Nintendo found success with its handheld Game & Watch devices, each dedicated to a single game. These used calculator-like displays with pre-drawn shapes rather than pixels. By the late 1980s, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) had become synonymous with home consoles in the U.S., after doing the same in Japan under the name Famicom.
The Game Boy was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, a legendary Nintendo R&D director and engineer who believed in “lateral thinking with withered technology.” This philosophy emphasized using simple, proven technology in innovative ways to keep costs low and reliability high.
The technology that made the Game Boy possible was the dot-matrix LCD, which enabled flat displays for laptops, personal digital assistants, and later TVs and desktop monitors. Nintendo’s R&D1 division began developing a new device under the codename “Dot Matrix Game” (DMG).
Yokoi initially envisioned the device as a multi-game successor to the Game & Watch series he had previously designed (pictured above), but assistant director Satoru Okada eventually persuaded him to create a portable NES-like system with swappable cartridges.
The idea for the pocket devices came when Yokoi noticed a fellow commuter on a train passing time with a pocket calculator. This sparked the vision of a portable gaming system that could entertain people on the go.
The team agreed on one crucial feature: the display had to be monochrome. An RGB display with three sub-pixels per pixel would have drastically reduced battery life.
Image credit: Lander Denys
When the prototype was presented to Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, he was disappointed by the Sharp TN display’s (twisted nematic) poor viewing angles and canceled the entire project. Refusing to give up, Yokoi secured a new super-TN display with superior angles, which won Yamauchi’s approval. The blue pixels appeared black against the screen’s reflective yellow-green background.
To this day, DJs around the world use modified Game Boys to create music.
The Game Boy featured a mono speaker but could output stereo sound through its headphone jack. Its audio quality bridged the gap between the beep-heavy sounds of the 8-bit era and the more advanced music of later consoles. To this day, DJs around the world use modified Game Boys to create music.
The name “Game Boy” may have been inspired by a Japanese magazine of the same name that was never trademarked, but the true rationale likely lies elsewhere. In a world where everyone had a Sony Walkman or one of its clones, the name Game Boy clearly defined the device’s purpose and target audience. The Game Boy aimed to change gaming the way the Walkman changed listening to music.
Short-Lasting Competition
The Game Boy debuted in Japan in April 1989 alongside four games, the most successful of which was Super Mario Land. The idea of playing a Mario game on a handheld device was so novel that players forgave its short length and its rough adaptation to the Game Boy’s 160 x 144 resolution, where Mario appeared just 12 pixels tall.
This was later fixed in later platformers like Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, which adopted a zoomed-in perspective compared to their NES equivalents. That game was the first to showcase Wario, Mario’s arch-nemesis. Another popular character that debuted on the Game Boy was Kirby.
Retro Gaming Nostalgia: A colorful glimpse into the Super Mario Land Game Boy manual. Click for a video gameplay walkthrough of the 1989 title.
When the Game Boy arrived in the U.S. the following July for $90 (about $230 today), it was bundled with one of the first and most popular versions of Tetris. The inclusion of the game was a stroke of genius. Nintendo managed to secure the rights to the game in a dramatic series of negotiations with the Soviet Union, where Tetris was created by Alexey Pajitnov. Henk Rogers, a Dutch entrepreneur, played a key role in helping Nintendo win the rights over competitors like Atari.
With no story or playable characters, Tetris appealed to all ages, and expanded the console-playing demographics like Wii Sports did for Nintendo in the late 2000s. It even became the first video game played in space in 1993, thanks to cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov.
First Lady Hillary Clinton would play on her daughter Chelsea’s Game Boy before getting her own device.
Nintendo’s marketing for the Game Boy targeted not just kids but also teenagers and adults. Commercials often showed people of all ages playing the Game Boy in different settings, such as airports, offices, and even on dates. This clever strategy broke down stereotypes that gaming was only for children and made the console a cultural phenomenon.
The Game Boy’s first competitor was the Atari Lynx, featuring a backlit color screen, pseudo-3D capabilities and an ambidextrous design. The original model cost twice as much as the Game Boy at launch, and had a pocket-unfriendly, bone-like shape. Worst, it could only provide about four hours of gameplay with six AA batteries, compared to 30 hours with four batteries on the Game Boy. The Lynx’s lack of popularity and games were feeding each other, and only 73 games were ever released for it.
The closest competitor the Game Boy ever had was the Sega Game Gear, which shared most of its game library with the Master System, the most popular home console in Europe at the time.
The Game Gear was slightly cheaper than the Lynx at $150 and had a more compact shape, but with the same battery issues it remained a niche product, selling about 11 million units. The NEC TurboExpress, known in Japan as the PC Engine GT, played the same cartridges as the TurboGrafx-16 at a 400 x 270 resolution. It cost $250, had a three-hour battery life and only sold 1.5 million units.
One of the most famous anecdotes about the Game Boy’s durability involves a U.S. medic who brought his Game Boy to the Gulf War in the early 1990s. The handheld device survived a tent fire and was left charred and melted. Amazingly, the Game Boy still worked and continued to function despite its disfigured exterior. This incident became a testament to the console’s toughness and was even showcased in Nintendo’s World Store in New York for many years.
By the mid-1990s, the Game Boy had transcended gaming to become a cultural icon. Celebrities like Madonna and Michael Jackson were seen playing Game Boy, and it made appearances in movies and music videos. Its distinctive shape and simplicity also inspired artists and designers, becoming a symbol of 1990s pop culture.
With no real competition, Nintendo didn’t need to release a complete successor to its console. The Super Game Boy, launched in 1994 for $60, was a screen-less Game Boy that used the Super NES to connect to the TV.
While the Game Boy could only show four shades of green, the Super Game Boy could replace them with any four colors the SNES could show. Games created with the Super Game Boy in mind could also use different 4-color palettes for different objects.
Monster in a Pocket
The Game Boy Pocket was released in 1996, using just two AAA batteries for 10 hours of gameplay. The screen had the same 2.5-inch size, but used a film-compensated STN panel to display true grey. In the U.S., it sold well by default. In Japan, it was for a different reason.
That same year, Pocket Monsters Red and Green launched in Japan, followed by the enhanced Blue version. These RPGs combined surprising depth with 151 collectible creatures, and utilized a Game Boy feature rarely used before: moving data between cartridges with the same Game Link Cable used for local multiplayer.
Each version of the game had several missing monsters, so in order to “catch ’em all,” you’d need to physically meet someone with the other version and trade. By early 1998, the Game Boy surpassed the NES as the best-selling console of all time with 64 million units.
The Game Boy’s popularity spawned numerous accessories, from magnifying glasses with built-in lights to stereo speaker attachments. Standing above the rest was the Game Boy Camera, one of the first consumer digital cameras, which attached to the Game Boy like a game cartridge and could rotate 180 degrees to take selfies.
The Game Boy could take selfies, and print them too. Image credit: Glaucaa
In 1998, Pokémon Red and Blue were released in the U.S., sparking an unprecedented commercial phenomenon known as Pokémania. By then, Japan had already got the Yellow version, based on the anime series following the games. Combined, all versions sold 46 million copies.
Pokémon became a global phenomenon, extending the Game Boy’s lifecycle and ensuring it remained relevant even as newer consoles entered the market.
Nine years after its original launch, the Game Boy Color debuted in 1998. It had a marginally smaller 2.3-inch screen and the same battery life as the Pocket with two AA batteries. The new model packed more video memory to support the extra colors, and could overclock its CPU to twice its speed when playing Color-exclusive games.
It was hard-coded with 4-color palettes for the most popular monochrome games, and players could set one of 12 palettes by pressing a button or two at startup.
Not surprisingly, the most popular games created with the Color model in mind were Pokémon Gold, Silver, and the Color-exclusive Crystal, selling 29 million units. With Pokémania in full swing, the SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color had no chance to gain a significant market share, despite its 40-hour battery life and quality selection of fighting games.
Boys at Heart
At the height of its success, the Game Boy was succeeded in 2001 by the Game Boy Advance, with much more powerful hardware, a wider screen and shoulder buttons. The original Game Boy series was discontinued two years later, having sold nearly 119 million units.
The Game Boy Advance was eventually replaced by the Nintendo DS in 2004. Featuring a second touchscreen, the DS drew a vast audience of casual gamers and became Nintendo’s best-selling console with 154 million units.
Image credit: ayrtonallen
By the time the Nintendo 3DS launched in 2011, casual gamers had shifted to smartphones and it became clear that the second screen was no longer needed. The most popular games on the 3DS were the same type of games that found success on the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance.
The Nintendo Switch was released with a single screen in 2017 as a “hybrid” console that could do both portable and TV gaming, and the cheaper Switch Lite dropped the TV-connected dock two years later. With its continued success, the Game Boy’s influence lives on, and the Nintendo Switch 2 promises to carry on its legacy.
Masthead credit: Arwen_7
