Exactly 30 years ago, on April 21, 1989, Nintendo released the next generation console for handheld games after the success of their Game & Watch game. It was a gray machine with a green LCD screen and red buttons where the games were loaded via cassettes. It was called Game Boy and would take the world by storm.
The concept was mainly Satoru Okada and Gunpei Yokoi, a couple of Nintendo’s veterans in the development department. The new handheld console with interchangeable game cartridges quickly became a success.
After the release in Japan in 1989, the console reached the United States a few months later, and here in Europe we had to wait more than a year when Game Boy was first released here in 1990. The little gray console got a long life span and was manufactured to change in 2003 and also came in a number of updated versions in the meantime. By the time production went down, Game Boy had sold nearly 120 million copies worldwide.
The Japanese company had released portable gaming gadgets before, everyone who was born in the 70s and 80s remembers the different Game & Watch machines but with Game Boy we got almost the same kind of entertainment that the desktop 8-bit offered us. The monochrome screen may not have given us the same flair, but the games were no longer locked to the same screen and Super Mario was basically the same game as the TV.
The console came to sell just over 118 million units (along with the sequel Game Boy Color) and was long the company’s best-selling console, only the Nintendo DS family has sold better with its more than 154 million.