The brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the early Game & Watch, Nintendo’s Game Boy was unleashed in 1989, and took the world by storm.
Like any popular gaming system, it needed great games to go with it, and the Game Boy certainly wasn’t lacking in great titles. Most famous of them all was probably Tetris, a game which invited a whole new generation of non-gamers into the hobby, with its simple but deep gameplay, and has rightfully become a gaming classic. Thanks to the success of the Game Boy, other companies released their own handhelds to try and steal the Game Boy’s thunder, but all of them missed the point.
The Game Boy, despite not having a colour display, had a huge battery life of up to 20 hours, which made it viable to take on long journeys and a genuinely portable gaming device. The competitions’ handhelds on the other hand, had batteries lives as low as two hours. Also, despite the many pick-up-and-play games on the handheld, the Game Boy also had plenty of hardcore titles which players their time and energy, such as Zelda: Links Awakening.
The Game Boy was also the birthplace of mega-behemoth franchise Pokemon, which is a story unto itself. Through the years, the handheld has gone through many upgrades and evolutions – the Game Boy Plus, the Game Boy Colour, the Game Boy Advance, and its spiritual successor, the Nintendo DS – making it one of the longest staying forces in gaming history.
