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RetroMo: Game Boy
Written by Chris Buffa on Thursday, June 22, 2006
The little system that could still outmuscled its color competition for almost seven years...
...Continued From Page 1
I'm not going to bore you or myself with a bunch of boring statistics. Instead, it's best to just cut to the damn chase. The Game Boy is without question the most successful videogame device in history, selling well over 120 million units world wide, in large part because of a very successful 1989 launch that saw the unit packaged with Alexei Pajitnov's Tetris, which is arguably the greatest puzzle game of all time. Together, this very special tag team tore apart all competitors, not only because Nintendo fans flocked to it, but also because the company had managed to do the same exact thing that it's currently doing with its DS: it attracted the non gamers, people who didn't really care about Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. Tetris was a game that everyone could enjoy and the Game Boy was just a slick piece of hardware.
Plus, the games that were released in the early part of its life were exquisite. Tetris was the killer app, but Super Mario Land, Alleyway, and Metroid II: The Return of Samus all helped sustain the unit's popularity, so much so that it's become the longest-running system in the history of videogames, having gone through numerous iterations and updates including the Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Light, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and the Game Boy Micro. It also spawned a few interesting peripherals such as the Game Boy Camera & Printer, Super Game Boy (allowed you to play original GB titles on the SNES in color and with attractive borders), and a handful of others. It also survived vicious attacks by the press, particularly from Electronic Gaming Monthly, who's infamous Sushi X butchered the system in one of the magazine's buyer's guides.
All of the Game Boy's various forms are all well and good, but this piece is all about the original Game Boy, the cumbersome, pea-green, blurry-screened wonder that began the whole portable craze. So let's take a look at the system as well as some of its most memorable (and not so memorable) games.
First, I wholeheartedly apologize for this box shot. While I admit it's actually a decent picture, this packaging isn't from the original Game Boy run. Rather, it's the "core system" design. You didn't receive Tetris with this, just the Game Boy, which I suppose, like today, was so consumers could customize their own library, though why they wouldn't want Tetris is beyond me. But I love the late 80s, early 90s art work with the grids. Nintendo did an excellent job marketing the Game Boy as this otherworldly product and this is a prime example of its genius. Truly, the device was out of this world if you were a kid.
The back is your standard videogame packaging fare. Nintendo slaps a few high profile titles on the back, then runs down the system's features, the most notable of which (even though it's not a feature per se) is Four AA batteries included! This was at the time unheard of, as Tiger, Sega (with its Game Gear), Atari (with its Lynx), and NEC (with its Turbo Express) forced the buyer to purchase their own damn batteries, so kudos to Nintendo for taking a stance and establishing a trend among its own merchandise that very few followed. Oh, and feel free to abuse my registration code.
