Description

The Game boy was the first Nintendo handheld with interchangable cartriges, the console featured only four shades of green and had no backlight making it the weakest major handheld at the time. The game that defined the Game Boy in its early years was Tetris which was picked over Super Mario Land as the pack-in-game, the reason it was so popular was because of its simplicity and addictive gameplay, additionally the console came with a link cable allowing people to play the game against other people. The Game Boy’s success was helped by its 30 hour battery life on 4 AA batteries and low cost. In 1994 Nintendo released the Super Game Boy which went into the Super Nintendo cartiridge slot and allowed people to play Game Boy games in colour on the TV. Nintendo refused to upgrade the hardware for a very long time with the first revision being the Game Boy Pocket in 1996 which was small, only needed 2 AAA batteries (which came at the cost of having only ten hours of battery life) and using the colour grey rather than green but it did not have any upgrades to the hardware. Demand for the Game Boy increased dramatically in the late 90s because of the success of Pokémon which used the link cable to trade Pokémon. In 1998 the Game Boy finally had a successor, the Game Boy Colour which had 4 times the ram and twice the CPU speed. The Game Boy continued to be sold until it was finally discontinued in 2003, just one year before the DS.