1989 — Game Boy

It was the year 1989 and well the next piece of technology I am going to talk about as well an 8-bit handheld game device. What?? A handheld game device, what in the world is this coming to?

Introduction

On April 21, 1989, I was in my JR year in high school, I know, I know looking at my past, so don’t cry over it. Anyway, it was a Friday and I am not sure what classes I had. But in Japan Nintendo released this thing called a Game Boy.

This was Nintendo’s second handheld game console, it contains features from both the NES home system and Game and Watches hardware. It was released in the USA 3 months later and in Europe a year later.

Look of it

If you look at the Game boy, you will see that it consists of a screen, you can call it green and a directional pad, 2 game buttons and a start and select and it features a 2 voice speaker with a volume dial and it used cartridges to play games. It was a pretty cool little toy.

Inferior

If you look at the Sega’s Game Gear, Atari’s Lynx and NEC’s Turbo express (Haven’t heard of these handheld devices) the game boy was way inferior. However, it outsold everything, and it is one of the most recognizable devices from the 1980s and it sold over 118 million devices

Redesigns

It had some redesigns over the years

• Gameboy Color
• Gameboy Pocket
• Gameboy Light (Japan only)
• Gameboy Advance

It stopped making devices after 2001, shortly after the release of the Gameboy Advance.

My take

I played this Gameboy a lot, I became a pro at Tecmo Bowl winning all the time by about 70 points. I don’t know how many super bowls I won. This was amazing piece of technology something that changed the way video games were played.