Nintendo‘s Game Boy is one of the most historically significant video game consoles ever made. During its 14 year lifespan, it sold nearly 120 million units making it one of the best selling consoles of all time. Its original design provided the foundation on which many of Nintendo’s subsequent consoles have been built. It singlehandedly created the handheld market and, together with its future iterations, dominated it for more than two decades.
It launched at a price of $90 and came bundled with a copy of Tetris. Although it faced stiff competition from the likes of Sega and Atari, none could come close to matching the Game Boy’s sheer mastery of handheld gaming. It really was a machine like no other and its history is steeped in interesting facts and trivia.
10 It Was Incredibly Durable
The ‘Gulf War Game Boy’, as it is known to some, once belonged to an army medic named Stephan Scoggins. Stephen was stationed in the Middle East during the Gulf War and was unfortunate enough to be caught up in a bombing run. Although Stephen thankfully survived the attack, his Game Boy was not so lucky.
The handheld was covered in scorch-marks and its motherboard was visible due to the plastic casing having melted. As a result, Nintendo technicians had little hope of saving the machine. Perhaps on a whim though, one of the technicians decided to test it with a copy of Tetris. To everybody’s surprise, it still worked perfectly. As a testament to the incredible durability of the system, it was placed on display at the Nintendo World Store in New York.
9 It Was The First Console To Visit Space
One of the big selling points of the Game Boy was its portability. Unlike a traditional console, players could take it anywhere and play their favorite games on the go. Nintendo had probably envisaged it being used on road trips and visits to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, but one Nintendo fan took the concept much, much further.
In 1993, Russian Cosmonaut Aleksandr A. Serebrov took his Game Boy into space. The machine accompanied him to the Mir space station and the pair remained there for a total of 196 days. Perhaps fittingly, the game he decided to take with him was Tetris, which, much like the space station and the rocket that took them there, was developed in the Soviet Union. The system was later sold at auction for $1,220.
8 It Wasn’t Nintendo’s First Handheld
There’s no doubt that the Game Boy is both the most successful and the most iconic handheld console ever made, but it was far from being the first. That honor goes to the Microvision, a cartridge-based system produced by Milton Bradley and released in 1979. Although the console was fairly successful, only 12 games were ever released for it and it was discontinued after just two years.
Nintendo’s first handheld wouldn’t arrive until another nine years after the death of the Microvision. It came in the form of Game & Watch, a series of handhelds with different games built into them. The series sold more than 40 million units before it was phased out in the early 90’s due in large to the success of the Game Boy. Legendary engineer Gunpei Yokoi created both devices.
7 Its Iconic ‘Nintendo’ Boot Screen Logo Was Actually Loaded From The Cartridges
Boot screens have been present when powering up consoles for as long as most gamers can remember. Although this was also the case with the Game Boy, it worked a little differently. Upon powering on the console, a Nintendo logo would fall slowly from the top of the screen before settling in the middle. What many might not realize though is that this logo wasn’t actually stored on the Game Boy itself.
Anybody who powered on their Game Boy without a cartridge will have noticed that a black box replaces the Nintendo logo. This is because the Nintendo logo is actually being read from the cartridge rather than the system memory. This served as a rudimentary anti-piracy measure.
6 It Could Take Selfies Long Before The Word ‘Selfie’ Was Ever Coined
In 1998, Nintendo released a Game Boy cartridge with a camera attached to the top known as the Game Boy Camera. The camera could be rotated 180° to allow the user to take selfies and these could then be stored, printed or used in a selection of simple minigames. The pictures were not in full color and had a resolution of 128×112, which was fairly low even for the time.
The photographs taken using the Game Boy Camera may have been of poor quality, but that didn’t stop them from being used by professionals. The most notable example of this can be found in the form of the Neil Young album, Silver & Gold. The album’s artwork uses a Game Boy Camera photograph of Young taken by his daughter, Amber. You’d never tell just by looking at it though.
5 It Allowed For Up To 16 Person Local Multiplayer
It may not have been used too often, but the Game Boy allowed for local multiplayer through the use of a special link cable. Most Game Boy games typically accommodated for between one and four players, but there was one which took full advantage of the cable’s capabilities. Spaceball 2000 holds the Guinness World Record for being the first and only Game Boy game to allow for 16-person multiplayer.
Most players who used the link cable likely did so to trade or battle Pokémon. What they might not realize though is that the link cable actually helped to inspire the Pokémon games. Series creator Satoshi Tajirri imagined monsters running through the link cables and later used this animation for trading in the games.
4 It Was One Of Only Two Nintendo Handhelds Not To Have A Pokémon Game As Its Best Seller
Due to them releasing so late in the Game Boy’s life-cycle, Pokémon Red and Blue just missed out on the number one spot on the list of best-selling Game Boy games. That honor went instead to Tetris, which sold a staggering 35 million units. It’s worth noting though that Tetris was often bundled with the Game Boy, which helped to massively inflate its sales total.
The only other Nintendo handheld not to have a Pokémon game as its best-seller was the DS. Pokémon Diamond and Pearl fell quite far short of the other best selling games on the system, although they’re also considered to be the two most pirated games ever.
3 It Was Sold Under A Different Name In Korea
Tension has existed between Japan and Korea for hundreds of years, but the relationship between the two countries was particularly bad back in the early ’90s. As such, Nintendo believed that many Koreans would be unlikely to purchase a product manufactured by a Japanese company. To get around this, they licensed the Game Boy to Hyundai, who sold it under the name Mini Comboy.
This wasn’t the first partnership between the two companies, nor would it be the last. One year prior to the launch of the Mini Comboy, Nintendo had teamed up with the Korean company to release the NES, which was sold in Korea as the Comboy. Hyundai later released the Super Comboy and the Comboy 64 – licensed versions of the SNES and N64 respectively.
2 It Had Incredible Battery Life
The Game Boy was able to get around 30 hours of playtime out of four AA batteries and this could be further extended with the use of third party battery packs. It’s widely accepted that the system’s incredible battery life was one of the key features that helped it to stave off competition from Sega’s Game Gear.
On paper, the Game Gear was arguably the superior machine thanks mainly to its color screen. This color screen came at a huge cost however, both literally and figuratively. When it launched, the Game Gear was nearly double the price of the Game Boy. As for battery life, it offered just three to five hours from SIX AA batteries.
1 It Could Be Used To Catch Fish
The Game Boy had a plethora of strange accessories, but perhaps the most bizarre of the bunch was the Game Boy Pocket Sonar. Anglers plugged one end of the device into their Game Boy’s cartridge slot and then dropped the other into the water. It used sonar waves to detect fish in the immediate area and was supposed to help the user to improve their catch.
Amongst some of these unusual accessories were a few must-haves. The Worm Light helped to partially mitigate the problems caused by the lack of a backlight and external speakers allowed for stereo sound. Although this could also be achieved using headphones, the console itself only had a single speaker and outputted mono sound.
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