Today, April 21st 2019 Marks 30 years since the release of the Nintendo Game Boy in Japan. While the US would have to wait until July 31st, 1989 to get the console, and Europe even longer, today is the day that little brick of a portable gaming system hit the market, and oh did it hit hard.
The Game Boy is a console I spent plenty of time playing for a good chunk of my childhood and early teens – in fact, it’s possibly my favorite console of all time, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss now – for now, the machine itself, in a broad sense.
While not the first portable console, and certainly not the most powerful during its lifetime, it had the right mix of things going for it – the Nintendo brand, power efficiency compared to competitors, and most importantly a solid game library headed off with must have games like Tetris, maturing with games that in some ways pushed the console far past what it should have been able to do, such as Pokemon.
It’s funny – the Game Boy was, in its most simple form, a portable equivalent to the NES – an 8 bit design with a CPU produced by Sharp which was similar to the Intel 8080 / Zilog Z80, as opposed to the MOS 6502 based design of the NES. It had a 4 color grayscale (well, green-scale) display which was a pretty low resolution (160×144 square pixels) but it worked.
Well, it worked in so far as it was a display – it had ghosting issues and no form of lighting, relying on reflection from lighting elsewhere in the room (or front lighting devices which were common in the console’s day) so you could see the screen. Oddly, this is something I kind of enjoyed about the console when I would play it as a child.
Sound was rudimentary but unique and honestly had an incredible charm to it. I liken it to the SID chip, not in the “feel” of the sound but in how distinctive it is – in fact, it’s so distinctive that Game Boy consoles have at times been used in music production due to the unique sound they generate.
The games though, oh, the games. They were where the system shined. It goes without saying that, at least here in the states Tetris sold the system – many people buying the console just to play Tetris, a phenomina that Nintendo would have happen again 15 years later with the Wii selling in droves just for people to play Wii Sports. I’ll stick to Tetris, thank you.
Many games from the systems early days hold up well, even today. Are they simple? Sure. In many ways they are somewhat simplified NES titles, but that’s the beauty of it – the Game Boy gave a quality gaming experience that was portable! It didn’t matter if the screen had some blurryness issues, we adapted. The lack of a back light? No issue, we made due with what light we could get. Whatever we could do to get a chance to play games, we’d go for, because it was fun. It had games we could enjoy, and we could carry it anywhere!
That was the real magic, it was something we could just take with us. Games like Pokemon, late in the systems life, really took advantage of this aspect and made it a key part of the game experience, between battling and trading with friends.
The Game Boy would continue to live well into the 16-bit era of gaming, and would get its own revisions for size, power, and screen visibility, before eventually getting a proper upgrade in the form of the Game Boy Color in 1998, improving the processing power and having its own set of dedicated Game Boy Color games, but still being able to play all existing Game Boy software. Of course, following this would come the Game Boy Advance, but that I consider a truly “new” console, whereas the Game Boy Color was certainly just an upgraded version of the original hardware.
I’ve got much more that I would love to say about the Game Boy and my own time with it, but I’ll get to that later. For now, maybe just some video of one of my favorite games on the console, Trax! (In this case, being played on the Super Game Boy, a device that let you play Game Boy games on the Super Nintendo. Nice!)