30 Years Of The GAME BOY®
When the modern handheld console market developed in the late Eighties and early Nineties, it quickly became clear that one of the manufacturers was significantly more attuned to the challenges of creating a portable platform than the others. The designers of the Atari Lynx focused on pairing the familiar 6502 CPU with relatively high-end custom graphics technology, with Epyx giving the system arcade-style graphical features like sprite scaling. Sega and NEC focused on how they might leverage their existing hardware in a new environment, ultimately basing the Game Gear and PC Engine GT on the Master System and PC Engine respectively. All of these consoles seemed to be born of similar thinking: they were consoles designed in service of the games. They allowed players experiences close to what they’d get elsewhere, and allowed developers to continue using the techniques they had elsewhere. With the Game Boy, Nintendo approached the problem from the other end – the company designed the hardware in service of the gamer.
Nintendo reasoned that the ability to actually play the machine was more important than what it could play, and that less impressive software was a worthy sacrifice. As a result, more than most pieces of videogame hardware, the Game Boy is a product of compromise. Where other handhelds had colour screens, the Game Boy had four greyscale shades (or green, if you’re staring at that original screen). The other machines were backlit, and Nintendo’s hardware relied on getting just the right level of light. Nintendo even opted for a custom processor based on the Z80, rather than the 6502 used in the NES, meaning that its developers couldn’t simply reuse code. But it didn’t matter if it couldn’t play Super Mario Bros – Nintendo could just make a new Mario game tailored to what the machine could do.
Not everybody was impressed – it has been said that there was even some deal of scepticism at Nintendo prior to launch. Even those who would later come to be associated with the platform didn’t always get a great first impression. “I do remember when a neighbour classmate showed off his Game Boy to me. I’d guess this was summer 1991, since he was playing Blades Of Steel,” says Johan Kotlinski, author of the Game Boy music tool Little Sound DJ. “Being outdoors in the sun, it was rather difficult to
