Technological Issues

The first Game Boy to be released had extremely limited technical capabilities, the original had a  2” screen which used only four shades of grey and was not backlit. Considering the Atari which at the same time released the ‘Lynx’, which had a much more ergonomic design, a colour LD screen and was able to connect up to 17 other players via it’s ‘ComLynx’ networking system ; a system which right up until just before the initial release date would have used infra-red signals, as opposed to it’s lower-fi cabling method but was changed at last minute. The Game Boy only had connectivity for more than one player on a single game called “Faceball 2000”. So Game Boy was by no means the technical superior, in fact it was panned by many critics and reviewers as an out-of-date poorly conceived device.

It held the number one spot for so long for a single reason, a puzzle game called ‘Tetris’. Tetris game bundled with the core package and was synonymous with the Game Boy. It was invented by a Soviet mathematician by the name of Alexey Pajitnov. A simple puzzle game which gave Nintendo’s Game Boy the almost sole monopoly of the hand-held gaming market. Scheff (2006) agrees with Tetris being a large part of the Game Boy’s success and states “There is no way to measure accurately how much ‘Tetris’ contributed to the success of the Game Boy… Once a customer bought one, Nintendo could sell more games, an average of three a year at $35 a pop. Not counting Game Boy, ‘Tetris brought Nintendo at least $80 million. Counting Game Boy, the figure is in the billions of dollars” (2006:223)

All in all the Game Boy has had 7 incarnations, since it’s original was released…

·         Game Boy (1989)

·         Game Boy Pocket (1998)

·         Game Boy Color  (1998)

·         Game Boy Light (1998) – only released in Japan

·         Game Boy Advance (1998)

·         Game Boy Advance SP (2001)

·         Game Boy Micro (2005)

It is unusual to see that it took Nintendo nine years to make a real advancement to their hand-held device, it is possible that Nintendo, having no real competitors simply felt no need to improve.

Perhaps another of the reasons that Nintendo held the hand-held gaming top-spot over the far technically superior was GameGear and Lynx was its battery-life. Both the Lynx and the Gamegear, being larger devices and with their color screens held six AA batteries, giving them about 4.5 hours of battery life, while the Game Boy worked on just 4 AA batteries which gave it over 8 hours more gaming time.

It could be argued that it was not the Game boy itself that made the console such a phenomenon and dominated the market as the number one hand-held console for so long is not the console but its games. Were it not for Nintendo owning the rights to the Pokemon franchise and Super Mario then perhaps the Game Boy would have been a flash in the pan and could not have ridden on the tails of Tetris alone.