Cultural Issues

The Game Boy wasn’t the first hand-held, In 1979 Milton Bradley, the company who created the popular ‘Simon’ game, created the first truly programmable hand-held games console ‘Microvison’. Despite the fact that the console was technologically quite advanced for the time as it was fully upgradeable due to the CPU’s being housed in the games cartridges rather than the console itself,  the sales for the Microvision swiftly fell and by 1981 was nowhere available. Wolf (2008) explains that perhaps the world’s culture was simple not ready for handheld gaming (2008:144). Another of the reasons the Microvison failed as a venture was that it was given very little support by independent games companies; it’s CPU’s being housed in the game cartidges themselves, the same thing that made it quite an advanced console meant that few games companies wanted to create games for the console if they had to produce the CPU’s as well.

The Game boy revolutionised not only hand-held gaming but gaming culture as a whole as it did what only now the Wii was doing again, it brought adults into gaming. People of all ages were beginning to be seen everywhere with the Game Boys in hand. According to Wesley and Barczak (2010) “Game boys became frequent attachments to business executives who spend hours in first class compartments dropping Tetris blocks” (2010:83)

Although it was the Tetris game that made the Game Boy the market leader in the beginning, it was Nintendo’s use of another cultural phenomenon that helped them to hold on to the title. In 1996 Nintendo released the game ‘Pokemon Red’ to their Game Boy system in Japan and seeing it was it released into America in 1998. The game was a simple Role Playing Game created by Satoshi Tajiri who wanted to emulate insect collecting for children at home. The game was an instant success. This success was not a fluke the marketing was carefully planned, at the time of release of the game, the comic book was released as well and a cartoon series hit Japanese screens very shortly thereafter. It hit multiple media’s within in very short time and this helped to build the games cross-media franchise as gamers would seek-out the comic-book , watch the cartoon and so on. Each would interlink, the cartoon would make the gamer seek out more comics and this cross-pollination was what defined Pokemon as a brand,. at more or less the same time and it’s transmedia technique helped propel the game to massive sales. In fact thanks to Nintendo’s marketing skills and the success of the Game Boy as a console put the sales of Pokemon into the Guiness World Record book, which was just one of its entries among several other entries in 2009’s Guinness World Records Gamer edition, it sold 14.77 million units as of March 2008.

Game Boy’s success was not welcomed by all, in 1992 Bredon Hill Middle School in Evesham, UK followed a trend among many others at the time and banned Game Boy’s from being in the school. Any pupils seen with one in school had their console’s immediately confiscated. This happened in several schools across the UK as well at the US at the time.