30 Years Of The Game Boy
We look at the cultural impact of Nintendo’s handheld and go behind the scenes of some of its coolest ports, including R-type
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 see what was [happening] on the screen, and it did not come off as a particularly compelling entertainment option. As you might remember, there were a lot of competition at the time – most of us kids had a Commodore 64, NES or even an Amiga, and for mobile gaming the Atari Lynx seemed more desirable, even if too expensive.
I already had my Tetris needs served by an original C64 tape, and the Game Boy did not seem like an improvement at the time. Certainly the load times were much faster on the Game Boy, but we kids had lots of time to waste anyway.” But Nintendo had made a judgement call, and it paid off. “Even though it was underpowered and its screen had issues with ghosting and no lighting, all those things that kind of worked against it also worked in its favour – it made a very economical system,” says
Jeremy Parish, a veteran videogames journalist and creator of the Game Boy Works video and book series.
The Game Boy was half the price of the more impressive Atari Lynx, and would run three times as long on fewer batteries. This made it attractive to parents, and the built-in display meant that it didn’t tie up the TV. It was a viable purchase, even for families that already owned a console. “I first received a Game Boy for Christmas when I was a kid. I’d been trying to play my brother’s NES and so I got my own portable system to keep peace in the house,” says Mathew Boyle, a Game Boy fanatic whose game collection consists of approximately 800 games. “Of course, I was a bit too young I think to really appreciate it, but I would play Kirby’s Dream Land until the batteries ran dry!” As good as games like Kirby’s Dream Land were, one game overshadowed the rest when it came to selling the system to players – including those with no previous gaming experience. “The first time I laid my eyes on a Game Boy was at my cousin’s house, he had gotten one for Christmas. It had Tetris on it and he was showing my dad and I,” says Gaz Thomas, an indie developer whose work includes Owyn’s Adventure as well as contributions to Hydroventure and Stealth, Inc. “It was the first time I had ever seen a console, let alone a handheld, and it was very exotic. I was only five at the time but I could understand the game and the music was entrancing!” Indeed, Tetris could be universally understood and its new handheld home proved to be conducive to spreading the game’s appeal. Plenty of young players would frequently find their systems being borrowed by parents and grandparents. Indeed, while Sega and Sony get much of the credit for bringing older audiences into the videogaming market during the Nineties, Nintendo’s machine had a killer app that appealed to players across all demographics. “It definitely did reach a broader spectrum of gamers than the NES did, and Nintendo recognised that from the very beginning,” notes Jeremy. “Some of their early ads were targeted at working professionals and adults, promoting games like Tetris and saying, ‘Hey, you can enjoy yourself when you’re waiting at the airport – it’s not just
“It was the first time I had ever seen a console, let alone a handheld, and it was very exotic”
for kids, even though it’s called the Game Boy.’” That campaign had the tag line “Have you had your fun today?” and deliberately targeted non-gaming media, appearing in magazines such as GQ as well as on TV. Even then-first Lady Hillary Clinton admitted to buying a Game Boy for herself in a 1993 interview with Time magazine, after having become a fan through playing her daughter’s machine. The Game Boy had a long tail, too. While the first couple of years played host to more major hits than later years, the hardware saw at least a few games hit the 1 million sales mark every single year. That’s pretty remarkable, as Game Boy owners didn’t buy a lot of games. Nintendo’s figures show that just 4.22 pieces of software were sold for every piece of Game Boy/game Boy Color hardware – a low number compared to the 8.07 games sold for each NES, or the 7.72 games for each SNES console. It didn’t hurt that the system had a late hit in the form of Pokémon Red & Blue – the games gave the format a shot in the arm in Japan when introduced in 1996, and plenty of hand-medown systems were dusted off when they made their way west in 1998 and 1999. In the financial year ending March 1998, the Game Boy was old hardware (the Game Boy Color still having yet to be introduced) and the world was fixated on home consoles with 3D graphics. But even at what should have been its loweest ebb, the low cost and timeless library of the Game Boy, combined with the absence of any serious competition in the handheld console space, meant that Nintendo managed to sell through 10.37 million hardware units. The Game Boy Color was introduced just months later and revitalised hardware sales – and even though that model saw plenty of exclusive software, major releases including Pokémon Gold & Silver and Dragon Warrior Monsters still supported the old model. Only when the Game Boy Advance was released in 2001 did the classic system truly ride off into the glorious greyscale sunset. That level of reach alone gives Game Boy nostalgia a much wider resonance than most other machines can claim. But there’s something
more to it – the hardware choices Nintendo made gave the Game Boy a very distinctive identity, a look and feel that its competitors can’t match. Show most people a screenshot of Lemmings on the Atari Lynx or the Game Gear, and they’d be hard-pressed to identify the platform. But when you show people a screenshot of the same game running on the Game Boy, there’s no hesitation – the four shades (green if you’re original, grey otherwise) are a defining characteristic of the platform. And the Game Boy sounds unique amongst Nintendo systems too, not inheriting its sound hardware from the NES or having anything in common with the SNES. Combined with its overwhelming commercial success, these unique distinguishing factors have turned the Game Boy into a true cultural icon, recognisable even to those who weren’t around to experience the system’s birth 30 years ago. Take the form factor of the system, for example. When Nintendo chose to reintroduce its Game & Watch classics in mini keychain size in the Nineties, it did so in Game Boystyle casing. The machine has also been the basis for all sorts of novelty products, from shampoo bottles to drinking flasks and alarm clocks. Though Nintendo would abandon the vertical orientation beginning with the Game Boy Advance, it was widely imitated by manufacturers of lower-level handhelds in the
Nineties, from cheap ‘block game’ handhelds to the likes of the Mega Duck and the Supervision. Even today, contemporary machines such as the Playdate draw clear inspiration from the Game Boy’s classic design. The limited display of the system has also been a visual inspiration for many, including Gaz, whose game Owyn’s Adventure uses the Game Boy visual style. What inspired this choice? “I started Owyn’s Adventure as an entry to the Unofficial Game Boy Jam run by my friend Jamie, who convinced me to take part away from another personal project that I’d gotten a creative block on,” explains the developer. If you’re a regular reader of our Homebrew section, you’ll likely be familiar with such development drives. “It was two weeks to make as much as you could so long as the game featured just four shades of the Game Boy green. After two weeks I had some systems in and a rushed level, so I thought I’d spend a couple of weeks working on the level design but kept going as I was enjoying working on it so much.”
The existence of an unofficial jam suggests that there’s no shortage of people interested in making Game Boy-style games, and a look around the indie scene bears that out. Browse the online store for the Nintendo Switch and you’ll find games like Save Me, Mr Tako and Awesome Pea that lift their limited colour palettes and green hues directly from the original model of the Game Boy. It’s not just on the handheld platform that you’ll find this reverence for Nintendo’s original machine, either – PC games like Madcap Castle and Squidlit also pay homage to the system’s distinctive display, while others like Evoland 2 and Platago! include the Game Boy as one of many retro gaming styles. The look even goes beyond games, as mobile apps like Retrospecs, Bitstagram and Retroboy offer camera filters designed to produce images like the Game Boy Camera add-on. So what makes the look of the machine so popular with indie developers? “A couple reasons as to why the Game Boy aesthetic is popular come to mind,” says Gaz. “Firstly the
“Both the Game Boy and the Spectrum are Z80, so I already had a head start”