The twentieth anniversary of a true gaming milestone

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the Game Boy, Nintendo’s first hand-held video game console. Released in Europe on 28 September 1989, the original 8-bit Game Boy has sold close to 119 million units worldwide, making it the second highest selling console in the history of the video game industry. Quite the achievement for a console who’s screen measured only 66 millimetres and which could only display four kinds of grey.

Despite being virtually outclassed technically across the board by its competitors, the monochromatic challenged Game Boy managed to defy the odds and fend off Sega and Atari’s more powerful offerings in the form of the Game Gear and Lynx, both of which offered full colour screens. In fact, since its release, the Game Boy and it’s follow-up systems have allowed Nintendo to completely dominate the portable gaming market for the last 20 years.

The Game Boy introduced a higher standard for portable video-games at the end of the 1980s. Up until that point, hand-held systems were a poor substitute for home or arcade consoles. Most were nothing more than toys, capable only of the most simple games. Even Nintendo’s own Game & Watch product line, precursor to the Game Boy, were limited to pre-printed LCD screens and repetitive game-play.

Having seen the potential in portable gaming, Nintendo turned to Gumpei Yokoi, the creator of the Game & Watch systems, and tasked him with inventing a hand-held system that combined features from both the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Game & Watch. The result was the Game Boy - the first cartridge-based hand-held system since the failed Microvision in the late 1970s.

Like its forerunners, the Game Boy was based on LCD technology, but unlike the Game & Watch series’ limited pre-printed displays, the Game Boy’s LCD screen was pixel-based. This gave the hand-held console similar capabilities to its home and arcade equivalents; animated sprites, interactive backgrounds and so on, allowing game developers to push the boundaries on what had been done on hand-held systems before.

This came at a heavy price though, one that would plague the original Game Boy for the entirety of its production life. At the time, LCD screens had a very low refresh rate, due to the fact that their main use was as readouts on electronics devices like calculators. This low refreshing rate had the effect of blurring any kind of fast paced action on the Game Boy’s screen – severely limiting some aspects of the console.

Aware of this problem, Yokoi often stated his belief that as long as its games were good, people wouldn’t care too much about the Game Boy’s limitations. He proved this point with the release of Super Mario Land, a game based on the classic Super Mario Bros. The game effectively demonstrated that the Game Boy could match the capabilities NES and yet still overcome it’s own shortcomings. However, it wasn’t a Mario game that would become synonymous with the Game Boy and truly turn it into a worldwide phenomenon – that claim rests with a block-dropping puzzle game created by Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov.

Tetris worked well on Game Boy for a number of reasons, not the least of which was its simple style and portability, making it easy to play anywhere just to pass time. And while Tetris had been available on various home computer systems before, Nintendo’s decision to bundle it with each Game Boy played a large role in cementing it within popular culture. There are few moments in life that are as purely satisfying as clearing away those four lines with that single long awaited vertical block.

As a system, the Game Boy continued on for more than a decade after its initial release but by the late 90s its light had begun to wane.

Despite a brief resurgence thanks to the game Pokemon, the era of 8-bit gaming came to an end in 2001 with the release of the 32-bit Game Boy Advance.

What else can be said about the Game Boy other than it left an indelible mark on the video game industry – not only did it establish Nintendo as the dominate force in portable gaming, but it proved that hand-held systems were just as viable as a gaming platform as their home counterparts. Today, the Nintendo DS and its rival, the Sony PSP, are viewed as every bit the equal to the PS3 and the Xbox 360. We have the Game Boy to thank for that.