This Week In Retro: Game Boy (Patreon)

April 21, 1989: I'll take pleasure in playin' you, boy

by Diamond Feit

The arrival of the Nintendo Entertainment System in late 1985 did not startle me. I couldn't tell you when I first saw it or played it for myself—I grew up in New York so I likely touched one sooner than a lot of other kids—because by that point I was already well familiar with the video game console as an entertainment concept. We had an Atari 2600 in our household before I could even ask for such an indulgence, and throughout the early 80s I would visit friends' houses and play games on their Colecovisions and Intellivisions. Given my upbringing, the NES merely represented the latest in a long line of exciting products rather than anything game-changing (pun intended).

When it came to portable amusements, I held fond memories of Nintendo's Game & Watch series, even if I could hardly describe their visuals as "graphics." Rather, those simplistic gadgets featured a fixed array of art on their miniscule screens, illuminating and erasing the images in response to players' inputs to create the illusion of animation. Other companies, too, produced similar pocket-sized toys, often branding them as an adaptation of a popular arcade title. Some even managed to squeeze the action onto a digital watch. I remember receiving one in elementary school as a gift from Japan; I found it enthralling even if I couldn't read the instruction manual.

Regardless of who made them, however, these little knick-knacks all suffered from the same handicap: Each unit only played a single game that looped forever. The more you played with it, the sooner you grew tired of it. I know I spent months controlling a tiny swashbuckler on my wrist during lunch periods at school but one day I took that watch off for the last time.

Given this limited experience, I trust you can imagine what happened in 1989 when I first learned about what Nintendo had in store for kids around the world. Looking at pictures in magazines, I knew its small green display and miniature speakers wouldn't compare to the dazzling graphics and sounds of the NES, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that the Game Boy replaced the chintzy slideshow-esque games of my youth with legitimate action and adventure on-the-go.

The word "brick" gets thrown around a lot in the tech world, usually disparagingly. People will compare any component that's too bulky or heavy to a brick, and if a machine suddenly stops working, people say it's "bricked." Look around the internet today and you'll find plenty of people lamenting the design of Nintendo's original Game Boy model as a brick. While I admit the eventual release of the slimmer Pocket line caught my attention, I found the 1989 version fit my needs perfectly.

Let's start with the screen, a dot matrix grid with a greenish tint. Modern enthusiasts often debate the merits of pixel-perfect displays when it comes to older games, as arcade and console developers carefully crafted their sprites knowing the images would pass through a cathode ray tube before reaching players' eyeballs. Yet the Game Boy delivered its graphics directly through its built-in screen; with a bit of patience I could literally count the blocks. This did nothing to take away from the artistry of the characters and backgrounds I saw on my Game Boy. Quite the opposite: Seeing the individual elements that made my games come to life gave me a new appreciation for the work which went into every frame of the action.

Having trained my fingers on the NES controller, picking up a Game Boy immediately felt comfortable. The handheld featured the exact same directional-input and buttons as its elder counterpart, albeit in a slightly different configuration to fit the Game Boy's smaller frame. I remember the weight of it in my hands—especially when loaded with 4 AA batteries—helped convince me of its significance, as opposed to all those other LCD toys that had no substance to them.

Another Game Boy feature that deserves more attention is the power switch on the top. Unlike the NES, the Game Boy used a slider that hard toggled between ON and OFF. This doubled as a safety feature, as it extended a plastic nub over the cartridge in the slot, preventing accidental removal during play. With all our modern devices relying on buttons that softly depress and offer no feedback, I find myself oddly longing for the days when I could tell whether a gadget had power or not just by reaching my fingers into my bag and feeling around.

Of course, the real appeal of the Game Boy lay in its library of software which started strong and only ballooned in size and quality as the years passed. At launch in Japan, Nintendo had a brand-new Super Mario game and Alleyway, a simple Breakout-clone guest-starring Mario as the man controlling the paddle—both immediate pickups for me. Super Mario Land had the longest legs despite its short length; at just 12 stages I could easily clear it in a single sitting, so I did just that many times on car trips, ski trips, and even at home when I had no pressing matters at hand.

By the end of 1989, when I got my Game Boy as a Bar Mitzvah present, Konami added a petite Castlevania adventure to the mix. Although only four stages long, it still took me a great deal of time to complete due to its notoriously high difficulty. The exceptional soundtrack soothed my frustration though, and I eventually cleared it by slaying the very large Dracula waiting for me at the end.

When it comes to Game Boy titles in 1989, however, no one in the United States needed to spend any extra money because Nintendo wisely chose the absolute best possible game to bundle with the console. I first saw Tetris on computers in my middle school shop class; it lacked color graphics and sound effects but all of us could hardly wait to take our turns on the curious Soviet puzzler. Tetris wasn't the kind of game you finish, you just keep trying your best until the falling blocks overwhelm you; this meant that, long after I put away my other Game Boy games, I would revisit the pack-in title again and again.

The crazy thing about Tetris is it proved so popular that it lured people who didn't even like video games to play Game Boy. Anecdotal evidence abounds, but I'll never forget hearing from adults my parents' age sharing stories of their parents finding Tetris impossible to quit. It blew my teenage mind that rotating little shapes could capture the imagination of both elderly World War II veterans as well as Gen X punks like myself.

More than Tetris or later mega-hits like Pokémon, that incredible reach stands as the Game Boy's real legacy. The Famicom and NES sold tremendously well, but as products in toy stores aimed at children. The Game Boy—despite its juvenile gendered name—was Nintendo's first mass-market global success that reached beyond the youth market, and it couldn't have arrived at a better time. The Kyoto company never stopped designing video game consoles, but as the 90s and 2000s wore on, they drew a smaller crowd with each launch. Yet the Game Boy proved evergreen; even as more advanced competitors entered the handheld space, Nintendo's monochrome mainstay outlasted them all.

Looking at the video game landscape today, the Game Boy's shadow still lingers over Nintendo. I find it telling that the company followed up the abysmal public reception of the expensive Wii U with the smaller, cheaper Switch that doubles as a handheld. I wouldn't put it on the same tier as the Game Boy as far as cultural impact, but even in its eighth year on the market the Switch far outsells anything Sony or Microsoft puts on store shelves. I believe its ability to let people play games wherever and however they like—as Game Boy did—makes the Switch much more appealing than its high-spec rivals trapped in the living room.

Obviously at this point we'll never see another big-name publisher put out a dedicated handheld like the Game Boy again, but that doesn't mean people have lost their taste for cute little gaming devices. If anything, smaller companies have picked up the slack. What is the PlayDate but a Game Boy with a crank on the side? Search YouTube for "retro handheld" and you'll see dozens and dozens of custom designs for gaming on the go, many of which imitate or outright copy Nintendo's 1989 form factor. When I first looked into Raspberry Pi emulation during the pandemic, I settled on a retailer who shipped their wares inside a Game Boy-shaped plastic shell.

Can we dismiss this affection for a 35-year-old piece of plastic as mere nostalgia? I don't think so. Rather, I believe Gunpei Yokoi and his team at Nintendo hit upon a winning formula that people still enjoy. Plenty of other configurations have come and gone since the Game Boy left us in 2003, yet none have endured like Nintendo's. Call me naïve, but I think it comes down to the Game Boy's purity. So many of its rivals promised the world with their handhelds, tossing in music players and TV tuners and even entire feature films. Game Boy provided exactly what its name suggested: It played games, boy.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.