One of the most famous and influential video game consoles ever came out on the Japanese market on April 21, 1989, exactly 30 years ago: it was the Game Boy, the portable device that the Japanese company Nintendo managed to put in the hands of tens of millions in the following decade. of children, teens and adults all over the world, thanks to an essential design, extreme practicality and a series of games that have become memorable for at least a couple of generations, from Tetris to those of Pokémon.
There were several people behind the Game Boy: the most important was probably Gunpei Yokoi, a Nintendo electronics engineer who one day saw a businessman on a train chatting with the keys of his LCD screen watch. There he had the intuition of a portable device that would allow you to play using that essential mechanism: a few keys, a screen. There was already something like this: the US firm Mattel produced a line of games, LEDs, that worked around a screen with a series of steady lights that turned on and off. And above all there was the Microvision, a bulky interchangeable cartridge console with a small LCD screen.
But Yokoi had something different in mind: he designed a screen that worked on a series of “pre-printed” backgrounds, which allowed a system of rudimentary animations, just enough to make them look like those of traditional console video games. This technology was applied to Game & Watch, a series of portable consoles on which you could play some simplified versions of Nintendo classics such as Donkey Kong, Zelda and Super Mario Bros. They came out in 1980 and was a remarkable success, also because Nintendo kept them. at low prices.
Almost ten years later, there were now several companies that had experimented in the field of portable consoles, but it seemed that no one had really had the winning intuition. As explained by the site UsGamer.net, there was a project for a very powerful console that could have changed the market, called Handy Game: but Epyx, the company that had developed it, did not have enough money to make it and sold it. to Atari, who wasted time and postponed its release. Nintendo, having no money problems, asked Yokoi to design a Game & Watch heir that was more suitable for the late 1980s.
As JC Fletcher of the Tiny Cartridge blog writes, Nintendo's great intuition was to choose essential technology, and consequently low prices. This produced an object that children could take anywhere, without having to think too much about batteries – 4 AA batteries – and without parents worrying about possible damage. A very solid structure was then devised for the Game Boy, one that inspired trust and that resisted a lot of abuse: it was really a game, in essence. This conception was also demonstrated by other details, for example by the fact that it had no internal clocks or other things that could distract from its fundamental function: to entertain the user by taking up as little space as possible and giving up all unnecessary frills.
The dimensions, technology and concept behind the Game Boy were things that video games had to adapt to, and not vice versa: therefore totally new genres were born, which revolved around more immediate and short-lived experiences. Those that worked best were precisely those designed with this in mind: Tetris, for example, or Super Mario Land, or Tennis and F-1 Race, very simple and stripped-down versions of sports video games. In the following years Atari released Lynx, while Sega launched Game Gear: they were the answers to the Game Boy, but their more sophisticated technologies required a higher cost and battery consumption.
The fact that there were fewer “fireworks”, then, forced the developers to focus on the dynamics of the game, what in jargon is called gameplay. What could go into a game wasn't much, and so only the really important stuff went into it. “Each pixel had to fight for its right to be on the screen, and as a result games were more likely to maximize their potential,” explained programmer Matt Bozon, who developed several games for the Game Boy.
Contributing to the success of the Game Boy were then other insights that in some ways were ahead of their time: such as the Link Cable, a simple cable that allowed you to play games with your friends by connecting the Game Boys. But other still ambitious accessories were also successful, such as a camera that slipped in place of cartridges, accompanied by a portable printer.
The definitive consecration of the Game Boy as an object of world popular culture probably came with the first Pokémon video games, which were born precisely in function of the console and which gave rise to a huge franchise still very profitable and still of Nintendo. Pokémon Red, Blue, and Green, released in 1996, were the best-selling Game Boy video games behind Tetris, with over 31 million copies. By the time they came out, the traditional Game Boy had already been replaced by the more compact Game Boy Pocket, which also had a better screen. Two years later a version with a backlit screen came out, and in the same year the color version came out.
Like the Nintendo DS, which radically changed the design of the Japanese company's portable consoles, Nintendo never abandoned the principles of simplicity and practicality that made the Game Boy so popular: principles that in many ways are still seen in the Nintendo Switch, the console. released in 2017. The Game Boy – in all its versions – is still the third best-selling console ever, with 118 million units: only the Playstation 2 and Nintendo DS managed to do better.
