The Game Boy handheld console turns 25

In our country, the Game Boy prefix, released by the Japanese company Nintendo, was quite modestly popular. But on the scale of the entire gaming industry, this gadget has made a real revolution. And all this happened exactly 25 years ago, on April 21, 1989.

Game Boy is the brainchild of Nintendo’s engineer Humpey Yokoy. It is to this person that we owe it to the fact that in 1989 video games migrated from television screens to handheld devices. Game Boy was the first gaming console with interchangeable cartridges, which allowed people who purchased the console to simply buy new games for it. Previously, for the sake of a new game, you had to buy a completely new device. So it was with the previous game consoles Nintendo - Game & Watch, which are known in our country under the guise of domestic clones "Well, wait!", "The mystery of the ocean" and so on.

Game Boy has become a truly popular gaming system. To date, more than 118 million consoles of this series have been sold worldwide. And Nintendo continued to release them until 2003, i.e. as many as 14 years.

For the most part, Game Boy was famous for its great library of great games. Recall at least Tetris, which was first officially released for this console. Later on, the so-called Chinese Tetrises began to be sold everywhere. Since 1989, over 30 million cartridges have been sold with this game for the Game Boy. Another system prefix became a series of Pokemon, which has sold 23.6 million cartridges.

Iron consoles by today's standards is just ridiculous. The central 8-bit processor with a frequency of 4.19 MHz produced by Sharp, 8 KB of RAM, expandable up to 32 KB with the help of built-in cartridge chips, 8 KB of video memory. The display of the console allowed to display a monochrome image in four shades of gray, or rather, green, with a resolution of 160 by 144 pixels. The screen was so dim and inconvenient that you had to unscrew the contrast to the maximum and find the perfect angle to distinguish the image on it - but that didn’t bother anyone, since the Game Boy simply had no alternatives. Cartridges with games contained in themselves from 256 KB to 8 MB of information. All this worked from four AA finger-batteries, which were enough for 15-30 hours of play.

In 1996, an updated revision of the console appeared, which was called the Game Boy Pocket. The console became thinner, lighter, and also worked on two batteries instead of four. The green screen has become fully black and white, and the picture quality has improved significantly. In 1998, there was another modification of the console - Game Boy Light. In this console, the screen backlight finally appeared, thanks to which it became possible to play in the dark. But the most serious successor to Game Boy was the Game Boy Color console, which offered color games to players.

Officially, the Game Boy has never been sold in Russia. Yes, there was a gray import, and in some stores the console could be purchased, but it was quite expensive, so it didn’t gain much excitement among Russian gamers of the 90s. At that time, a clone of another popular Nintendo-Famicom console, known in our country as Dendy, was much more popular.

Today, the heir to the Game Boy is the Nintendo 3DS handheld (as well as its 2DS and 3DS XL revisions), which is very popular among gamers around the world. Here you have a new version of Tetris, and another adventures of a plumber Mario, and hundreds of other wonderful games in the updated three-dimensional graphics with stereo effect. But after all 25 years ago it all started with a small monochrome screen, green in color and working on as many as four batteries! In my personal collection there are still fully functioning Game Boy in two colors, as well as Game Boy Color. It's nice, you know, from time to time, remember the school years and hack to the original Tetris or pocket Mortal Kombat.

Let us congratulate one of the most iconic gaming consoles with such a significant anniversary and wish Nintendo not to lose grip in the era of modern technologies, which are developing so rapidly in our days.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/entertainment/karmannoj-konsoli-game-boy-ispolnilos-25-let.html.