The name Game Boy fills me with a nostalgic haze, making me remember my elementary school summer vacations that were dedicated to gaming, and the memorable Tetris theme echoing through my house. If you are a child of the 1980s or 1990s and have any kind of memory of that time in your life, there is probably a strong chance that the Game Boy is part of the remembrances of your wasted youth. But it was not wasted. Being wasted means you were also having fun, and the Game Boy was a half-pocket-sized powerhouse of fun that conjured up thoughts of not having a care in the world whenever a kid would sit down and play it.
In 1989, the Game Boy was not just a game-changer – it was a revolution. This was the first time in history that video games could really be taken on the go with you. Before then, if you wanted to play a video game, you had to be attached to a console. The only exceptions were the handheld electronic games of the ’80s – but those games were pretty primitive, and there weren’t very many of them in any case. Game Boy, on the other hand, boasted an entirely new experience. It offered an opportunity to have a console-like experience in a way that had never been seen before in the gaming world, and the results were nothing short of awesome.
The Emergence of a Legend
The narrative of the Game Boy commences with Gunpei Yokoi. Only the hardcore gaming historians know that name well. Yokoi was a good-for-naughty kind but nonetheless a visionary at Nintendo—and I believe the most accomplished. His inventions ranged from handheld games (Game & Watch series) for the company to some tragicomic capers with other electronic machines like the Virtual Boy. His Nintendo products were, for the most part, big hits. But it was the hot cakes of the Game & Watch games in the early 1980s that led to the Game Boy.
Nintendo aspired to create a device that was low-cost, sturdy, and capable of delivering extended gameplay times. Gunpei Yokoi, famed for his work on the Metroid series and the Game & Watch line, was the lead designer of the project. He had a philosophy of doing “more with less” while on the design team for the Game Boy. The handheld used tried-and-true technology and reworked it in a way that was new, which was an extended metaphor for the “longer gameplay” concept the device was built around. The platform went on to house a collection of games so good that it’d take you years to play them all.
Enduring Design and Toughness: Made to Go the Distance
The Game Boy was an incredible device for many reasons, but the sturdiness of it was one feature that made me, and many others, fall in love with it. With its tactile, button-plastic controls and the droning, eight-bit version of Bach’s cello suites, the Game Boy was a beautiful, simple, sturdy instrument you could play out in the sun (The Preposterous Success of the Game Boy). And I played it everywhere. When I dropped it, I freaked out but then quickly relaxed when I saw that the thick, sharp edges of the system just deflected the impact and left what was inside untouched. The worst thing that could happen in dropping the Game Boy was that the game cartridge could pop out.
The compact screen was small and with little room for detail. It used a dot matrix and had no backlighting, lit only (one assumed when you couldn’t prove it otherwise) by reflected ambient light from the front.
Incidentally, “reflected ambient light” (as I have discovered in the course of this nostalgia project) is a term of art that means the same thing as “shining a flashlight on the front.” That is what I did upstairs, on the all-too-typical 1980s wood-paneled basement steps, for way too many of my off-hour gaming adventures.
The Game Boy control scheme was simple. It featured a directional pad, two action buttons labeled “A” and “B,” and Start and Select buttons. This basic setup was very easy to understand for gamers of all skill levels and gaming experiences, making it a very user-friendly device. It was also easy to play on; even children didn’t have much difficulty understanding the Game Boy’s mechanics.
The Games: A Timeless Library
Indeed, the value of a gaming console is found in the quality and diversity of the games that can be played on it, and the original Game Boy’s software library was nothing short of legendary. From the system’s unforgettable original pack-in game, Tetris, to the many excellent and charming Nintendo titles like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and the old-school Ultra Games’ puzzle series, these were games that had a sparkle to them. And in our family, they certainly promised to and delivered an awful lot of fun.
The Unbeatable Bundle: Tetris
Let’s begin with Tetris, among the games that came bundled with the original Game Boy, which was a totally great pick, I must say. Do you recall how “right” the game felt? This was a puzzle situation that seemed to be almost purely attached to using your thumb on tiny buttons, yet somehow the block magic also came with a timely sense of meditation. Sure, you were lining up these falling blocks on the Game Boy and making them disappear à la digital wizardry, but your mind might’ve been on a long car ride itself—somewhere on the long road between franchises, probably.
The Pokémon Cultural Phenomenon
And then came Pokémon. The release of Pokémon Red and Blue was like a landslide—once it picked up momentum, nothing could stop it. People were drawn to it like moth to flames. What was most surprising was the rapidity with which one and then the second game of the duo appeared. We barely had time to draw breath in between, and then it overtook us entirely. At this era, I was way more energetically invested in the happenings of my school—too young to have secret or ulterior motives for any sort of engagement (with the games) beyond innocent ones. I embraced Pokémon with wholesome and nigh-totally unironic love.
The divine design and the ingenious marketing strategy of the Game Boy can’t be overlooked, even though the god in this machine was, once again, less identified with the idea of gameplay, as Phil Harrison, then director of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, criticized in his look back at the device during my 2007 interview. “I think they lucked out,” he said with more biting bitterness and about as much faux admiration as you would expect from someone who, at the top of the market, had to once again fear a coming wave of Pokémon.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is a classic video game beloved by millennial gamers. But when it was released on the Nintendo Game Boy in 1993, it broke significant new ground. It was one of the first video games to have a “living world” where non-playable characters (NPCs) operate on set schedules and follow their own variably complex paths of behavior. Other games would follow suit in generating the sort of vibrant worlds that are now a staple of RPGs. And then there’s the dungeon-crawling.
Another remarkable release was The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. The mechanisms that moved the Zelda story to the Game Boy worked one hell of a magical act. It was enchanting and utterly ingenuous in taking the very good game, with its very good story, and making a very good handheld game out of it. This was no small feat, and I remember thinking, ‘What, this puzzle is in the game? Wow. This is an actual dungeon that moves in the wind. And this dungeon, I just spent an eternity in it. It was never-ending.’ That moment, when I finally reached the boss and looked at my dungeon map—that is the story of a game that needs a level of prerendered imagination and inspiration in the confinement of a small visual range, as is the case on a Game Boy.
The New Era of the Game Boy Color
In 1998, Nintendo launched the Game Boy Color. It was a souped-up version of the original Game Boy, with one very notable upgrade: it displayed colors. For a good many of us, the first thing we did on Christmas morning, 1998, was pull a brand-new Game Boy Color out of the gift wrap, pop in the (also brand-new) Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX, and play a few hours with a very odd, very engrossing Zeldaverse where everything generally goes three or four shades of right but still winds up all kinds of wrong.
Adding color was not the sole improvement made to the Game Boy Color. Enhanced with a more robust CPU, the GBC was more adept with handling complex games. This enabled developers to really tap into and flex the limits of handheld systems of the period. Some argue that superior games emanated from the new hardware, games of not only great graphical appeal, but also mainframes big enough to give a powerful clout to the narrative punch—both the original and the orchestrated side of what games could be and then be seen as, for undeniably, games are always also about power.
Pushing the Boundaries with the Game Boy Advance
The Game Boy Advance came out in 2001 as a real successor to the original Game Boy. This was right around the time I started getting into gaming, so I have fond memories of this system. The games on the GBA looked so good, especially compared to the original Game Boy titles. Games like “Fire Emblem” and “Golden Sun” were almost on par with early PlayStation games, at least when it came to visual presentation. I had a mulberry colored GBA and a copy of “Super Mario Advance” to start with, and I was in handheld heaven.
The Game Boy Advance had some truly great games. Metroid Fusion, the GBA’s first original Metroid title, was every bit as good as—if not better than—Super Metroid, which is still regarded as the best Metroid game, and so the best game in the series, ever. Fire Emblem was a long-running strategy game series that we didn’t get to lay eyes on until the characters started making appearances in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Advance Wars was something like the first-generation equivalent of Fire Emblem in the Western Hemisphere. It was a blisteringly innovative turn-based strategy game that fed people handily into the strategy game we’ve since come to know and love as the Advance Wars series.
The Game Boy’s influence and heritage are in the area of handheld game consoles. All of the portable game consoles that have come to market since the Game Boy can be seen as its spiritual successors in some way or another. The Game Boy established that a handheld game console could be successful, “walk-around money,” and if it could be done well, it could be done wonderfully. It also set some new parameters in terms of physical sturdiness and the headache-free operation of a piece of electronic portable something.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact the Game Boy has had on the games industry. The first, truly successful portable game console owes a lot to that sturdy, 8-bit piece of kit. It, and the Game Boy Color, have sold close to a combined 119 million units around the world. Because of the Game Boy, the sun has risen over ’90s handheld gaming. Even if some of the titles that dominated both the ’90s and the ’00s seasons have been repackaged as downloadable “classics” for cell phones, they originally thrived on these systems.
Many of the conventions and features we now associate with handheld gaming were born of the work that went into the original Game Boy’s design. Swappable game cartridges, the and portable design, the emphasis on battery life—all of these are elements that handheld gaming now incorporates as a matter of course, and all of these scales first slid into the balance when the Game Boy was being created.
My Game Boy experience has been about developing an appreciation for what games can be, what they can do, and the kind of person they can help you become. My experience with the Game Boy has been tied into the routines and moments of my life in such a way that my consciousness of the world has been affected, and my appreciation for the people in my world and the life I live has deepened. And along this path, the Game Boy has given me games and the still more meaningful moments that come with them.
Thinking about my own life and the Game Boy, it is simply amazing what a big part that little machine has played for me. As a kid, and even as an adult, I’ve had a few absolute favorite top video game systems. The Game Boy was, and still is, one of those portal-type, pathway-to-a-new-world type of game systems. You can easily remember getting a new game—the cart still had a cool, almost cold feel before you put it into the system. Hearing the “ding” of the start of the system? Heck, I still almost get chills today when I turn on a real Game Boy system! – right before it plays a very simple half-second musical selection…once more with the Game Boy…and once more on my journey into a game-rich world.
An especially memorable summer comes to mind when thinking back to when I was around ten years old. At that time, my family and I went on a trip to a cabin by a lake. As an equipage essential for a ten-year-old, I had taken my Game Boy along. That video game machine was essentially a way for me to spend “me” time. I have spent countless hours playing Pokémon Blue from morning to night, absorbing the 8-bit musical wonders that emanate from that game. The only actual sound that I remember hearing was the faux-muted mew of Mewtwo.
The Community of Game Boy
One of the most wonderful things about the Game Boy was the bond it helped form between so many children. Everyone in my class was obsessed with it. If you didn’t have one, you were tethered to someone who did. A number of second- or third-hand devices passed between lots of people. We battled, we played. When you hit Prune City, you needed someone to act as a Pokémon Center; otherwise, you were going to lose your high-level guys against the invisible Elite forces. There were the linked-cable “trades,” the classic TV cartoon watching that helped give me a handle on my home team, and the act of also just playing the Red/Blue cartridge itself.
Game Boy significantly influenced the dawning of the video game era and its inevitable arrival in the cultural mainstream. Its influence was so profound that it could be seen as a catalyst for the change of this culture by making it inclusive, almost feminized. Game Boy’s presence had the effect of a hierarchy of platforms; to play games, what system or console to choose from. This was now video gaming’s era.
Game Boy’s Long-lasting Allure
For numerous gamers, the Game Boy remains something enchanting. It does not possess the stunning graphics of the modern-day Nintendo Switch, nor does it have the processing power of it or the current consoles. Still, it mostly retains its original library, which means gamers who grew up with the original Game Boy, who might very well possess a better understanding of its top games (for which they might have a top five) than its ostensible “top 10 with console-specific games.”
I have my Game Boy. And so, I pick up and play again and again. But when I do, I come back to this strange complex that reeks of nostalgia but is also much more. Occasionally, they let me write about this in the paper. And to warm this up (and stop them from yelling at the press conference that we in Campus Gaming put on), they let me write about and take a big ol’ goofy photo with, what else, a GAME BOY, the actual device that sucked up my childhood and still makes me smirk for whatever reason.
More than just a handheld gaming device, the Game Boy was a revolution in portable gaming. Before it, there was a stark distinction between console games played at home and the painstakingly programmed diversions people took on the go. Playing games on a handheld system could be a convenient — if not a popular — pastime. But if you could play games that were just as good as the ones you played at home, on a system that was nearly as accessible (and cheap) as a console, wouldn’t that be something?
A straightforward, robust, and low-cost game apparatus was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi. Emerging from his mind were the foundations of a gaming revolution that took on the unassuming form of the original Game Boy. Despite its appearance as a clunky piece of machinery made from a light, gray plastic shell—about as attractive as a vintage lunch box—the Game Boy was a marvel of design and opportunity when it was launched in 1989.
By the end of its lifetime and the lives of its immediate successors (Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance), the platform had accumulated a library of over 1,000 games.
When we think about the history of video games, the Game Boy is something that just about everyone recognizes. And for very good reasons. Every handheld gaming device, from the Nokia N-Gage to the Nintendo Switch, can trace some part of its design back to the ideas that sprung from the Game Boy. There’s no doubt the Game Boy was a huge influence not just on handheld gaming, but on gaming in general. It is an influence that will likely be felt for generations to come.
Who can say? Perhaps someday, a new generation of players will themselves find enchantment in the Game Boy’s seemingly eternal battery life; the way a game there felt as though it were both an offering of friendship and a test of same.
