The Game Boy was Nintendo's second handheld gaming machine and was created by Gunpei Yokoi (who had also been the brains behind Nintendo's earlier hand held machine, the "Game and Watch" series of machines in the early 1980's). The Game Boy was originally released in 1989 in Japan and the USA before coming to the rest of the world during the early 1990's and went on to be the biggest selling games machine in history with well over 100 million units sold between the original Game Boy and it's follow ups.
The original Game Boy was a chunky, thick and resilient piece of hardware which was powered by either an electrical adapter, battery pack or 4 AA batteries and allowed the player to play games that had simple monochrome graphics. The latter models of the Game Boy however were run from 2 batteries (Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Colour) and in the case of the Game Boy Colour it allowed a coloured display to be shown allowing games to show off much more impressive visuals.
The console (all versions) featured a D-Pad, 2 action buttons (A and B), a Mode button and a Start button as well as a headphone jack and various input and output sockets allowing for accessories like the Game Boy Printer or Game Boy Camera to be used along with the machine.
The console huge success and was helped massively by the release of games such as "Tetris" (which was often bundled with the console), Pokémon, Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins . It's reported that over 500 million games for the console were sold.
The ProductsThe original Game Boy (as mentioned above) was sold from 1989 it was later shrunk and became the Game Boy Pocket (1996) and then got coloured in 1998 with the Game Boy Colour. The Game Boy was later followed by the Game Boy Advance (which we will be treating as a separate console) which allowed users to play not only Game Boy games but new games that came in a smaller sized cartridge. The Game Boy Advance, released in 2001 effectively brought mobile gaming into the 21st century and marked the end of the Game Boy.
The Accessories
The Game Boy had a number of accessories, as mentioned above it had a Camera and Printer attachment which could be used well together (though had few real uses in relation to actual games) as well as other more useful accessories such as a link cable (which allowed multiplayer gaming and trading in games like Pokémon), The "Super Game Boy" (which allowed Game Boy games to be played on a SNES/Super Famicom) and the N64 "Transfer Pak" which allowed specific Game Boy games to interact with N64 games (such as Pokémon and Pokémon Stadium or the Perfect Dark games).
The Legacy
The console is one of the most influential consoles in history, it's by far the biggest selling and helped Nintendo to become the dominant force in game. The original handheld was some what rudimentary though Nintendo and the developers managed to get a lot from it and the fact series like Zelda, Pokémon, Mario, Megaman and Kirby all made it to console proved it was much more than just a portable mini game machine. Whilst Tetris may have been the biggest success story of the early days of the machine it moved a long way in it's long life span.
