The Story of the Nintendo Game Boy - StMU Research Scholars (2023)

You've probably heard of Nintendo at some point in your life. Nintendo was founded in Japan in 1889 as a card game company. However, Nintendo is now a video game company. As pinball machines gave way to electronic video games, the toy industry sought to bring video games into the home with console games that could be plugged into televisions. The next step was to be able to take the game with you on your travels. With this in mind, Nintendo developed a gaming system called the Game Boy.¹

Gunpei Yokoi developed the Nintendo Game Boy. The first version of the Nintendo Game Boy was made in 1989 and "offered a Z80 processor, a green LCD screen and a gray rigid body".²The Nintendo Game Boy was one of the first portable video game consoles. About the size of a paperback, the Game-Boy used game cartridges and greyscale dot-matrix graphics.³The Nintendo Game Boy was paired with a game called Tetris, a block-based puzzle game that made the Nintendo Game Boy an instant hit.⁴When the Nintendo Game Boy was released in Japan, 300,000 units were sold. A few months later, the Game Boy was released in the United States on July 31, 1989. Development of the Nintendo Game Boy did not stop after its release, but the game unit went through many changes over a ten-year period.⁵

While there were other portable video game consoles on the market, the Game Boy was one of the first to feature interchangeable cartridges. Other laptops only had one game preinstalled. In other words, if you wanted to play different games, you had to buy separate consoles. My mom's family talks about going camping with their cousins' portable soccer and baseball games, which was pretty much all there was in the days before the Game Boy. The Game Boy allowed a user to purchase a console and several (sometimes hundreds) of game cartridges. This was not only a new idea, but also a very profitable one.

Game Boy users not only bought game cartridges, but also all kinds of accessories. Users needed cases to carry the console and cartridges. They bought gadgets to enlarge the screen. They also bought equipment to use the console in low light conditions due to the Game Boy's lack of a backlight. And of course, while Nintendo continued to develop new products, users wanted to upgrade to the next best console.

One of the many modifications of the Nintendo Game Boy was the mini arcade. Mini Arcade turned a user's Game Boy into a tabletop game. He locked inMiniaturversion des Joysticksused in other standard game consoles.⁶The addition of mini-arcade turned the Nintendo Game Boy into something that people could use as a tabletop game if the user so desired.

Another modification that the Nintendo Game Boy has undergone is different body colors. In 1995, users could choose the case colors of their Nintendo Game Boys.⁷One option included "Play It Loud" colors. Play It Loud was a campaign showcasing the different colors they were offering for the Game Boy. The different colors that “Play It Loud! The units produced were red, green, black, yellow, white, blue and clear.”⁸The clear or transparent Game Boy, sometimes called the X-Ray, was found in the UK at the time. A source describes: "The most common Game Boy colors were yellow, red, clear and black. The green Game Boy was pretty rare, but the blue and white are the rarest.”⁹Nintendo released other accessories like a printer and camera in 1995. They also toyed with a 16-bit version when the printer and camera accessory came out that same year, and considered making a touchpad adapter three years later.¹⁰

A third revision of the Nintendo Game Boy was the Game Boy Pocket, released on July 21, 1996. The Game Boy Pocket was smaller and lighter compared to the original Game Boy. Ads highlighted the fact that this console could fit in your pocket. Another benefit of the console was that game cartridges were interchangeable with the original Game Boy. Unlike the original Game Boy, which required 4 AA batteries to operate, the Game Boy Pocket only required 2 AAA batteries to operate. Although the Game Boy Pocket required fewer batteries to operate, it was only able to provide the console user with about ten hours of gameplay compared to the original Nintendo Game Boy which provided about fifteen hours of gameplay.¹¹With Nintendo's many revisions and iterations such as the Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Color, the Game Boy has sold over 118 million units worldwide.¹²

Another revision was the Game Boy Light, released in Japan on April 14, 1998 and only available in Japan. The Game Boy Light was a slightly larger console than the Game Boy Pocket. The Game Boy Light offered a feature that previous Game Boy versions did not have, namely "an electroluminescent backlight for low light conditions".¹³The Game Boy Light requires 2 AA batteries to operate and will give the console user approximately twenty hours of gameplay without the electroluminescent backlight on and twelve hours of gameplay with the electroluminescent backlight on. The Game Boy Light came in two standard colors, gold and silver. It also has "numerous special editions, including an Astro Boy Edition..., an Osamu Tezuka World Edition with a transparent red box and a picture of his characters, and a solid yellow Pokemon Center Tokyo version".¹⁴

The Game Boy Color is another version of the Game Boy that was released in Japan on October 21, 1998 and hit the international market a month later. Compared to the other versions of the Nintendo Game Boy, the Game Boy Color had a screen capable of displaying color images. Unlike the Game Boy Light, which had an electroluminescent backlight for use in low light, the Game Boy Color didn't have one. The Game Boy Color requires 2 AA batteries to give the user 10 hours of gaming fun. The Game Boy Color also took advantage of backwards compatibility, adding the ability to play game cartridges originally designed for the original Game Boy and Game Boy Pocket. Colors unique to this Game Boy version included berry (fuchsia), grape (purple), kiwi (neon green), dandelion (yellow), and teal. Two other options sold at the same time were called Atomic Purple, a translucent purple color, and Neotones Ice, a clear box only sold in Japan. The original Game Boy and Game Boy Color sold an estimated 118 million units worldwide.¹⁵

The Game Boy Advanced SP was another version of this system and was released in February 2003. The Game Boy Advanced SP included a screen that showed color images, a front light that could be used in low light conditions, and a clamshell design to protect the screen from damage or dirt. The clamshell design was also used on the Nintendo DS released in November 2004. The Game Boy SP had a rechargeable battery that took three hours to charge and gave the user 18 hours of playtime with the lights off and 10 hours of playtime with the lights on. Compared to other Game Boy consoles before it, post-Game Boy Advanced SP consoles had better and more colorful graphics, game mechanics became more complex with the addition of voice controls and the touch screen, and games with more moving parts were easier to cover.¹⁶

The Nintendo Game Boy wasn't the only portable game console that could hold multiple game cartridges, but it was by far the most popular and enduring. Atari and Sega released handheld consoles, but they failed to innovate at Nintendo's level. Nintendo continues to dominate the world of full-size video game industry while integrating online gaming. While handheld consoles aren't as popular due to the proliferation of smartphones, the Game Boy influenced app-based gaming and cemented the idea that we can take gaming with us.