Game Boy Retrospective: American Anniversary

As of this month, the Game Boy is now 20 in America. You may remember my previous retrospective when I talked about its Anniversary in Japan, but as of who knows what day - I've seen July 31 and sometime August, so history can't make up its mind apparently. The Game Boy was the system that made portable gaming actually stand for something, so you can bet that, as a person who likes portable games more than the average person (well, outside Japan), I'd like to talk about its impact on gaming history and "culture."

During the time of its launch, it was a widely accepted convention that video games were primarily played in the house, mainly because of the options (or lack thereof) available to the consumer. Handheld games were merely an adequate distraction, an anodyne for parents who need something to distract their children while away from the home. Console games, however, were the real deal, and what qualified as a handheld initially wasn't meaty enough to satisfy anyone looking for that kind of experience. Not to say they were bad - and not to say that a lot of them weren't bad - but Game & Watch titles could only be addictive for so long. And the less said about handheld "games" from companies like Tiger, the better.

But then, the situation changed. Nintendo provided a handheld that offered a nearly similar experience on the go, as long as you didn't mind monochrome graphics and the lack of an ability to see the screen at night without using some over-sized contraption. It was a sight to behold when people realized a game like Super Mario Land could nearly replicate the experience of playing Super Mario Bros. on a small screen. Unlike something like the NES, the Game Boy was perfectly suited for traveling, and Nintendo made sure you knew that.

Around the time of the Game Boy's release, demonstration kiosks across the country displayed an extended advertisement showing how great it was to have a portable system that could be played literally anywhere. I was hoping the video would be on Youtube or something, but since you don't see it linked here, you know the result of my search. (Of course it could be that my searching skills are inept.) I think it did a good job of selling people on the system, people who liked to play video games though they were away from the house.


As good as the act of selling someone on its portability is, it's hard to look back fondly on the entire Game Boy lineup. Most consoles have an easily distinguishable quality-to-crap ratio, but the Game Boy's was unfortunately higher than average. This happened because some developers were unfamiliar with precisely how to approach game design for a portable game, resulting in titles whose mechanics were inadequate for a portable format. The existence of Metroid II: Return of Samus proves that Nintendo also wasn't exempt from this, uh, curse, if you will. Funnily enough, this still happens today, especially on the PSP.

Considering that last bit, you can think of the Game Boy as marking the beginning of something even greater. With more experience, developers learned to provide work that fully benefited the portable format. The Game Boy also provided the necessary instruction to keep things simple on the format, something its competitors certainly didn't learn. While most of its lineup isn't looked upon as fondly as the software lineup as something like the NES, it provided enough and started something that makes it well worth remembering.