Game Boy

The Game Boy is a handheld game console developed by Nintendo, launched in the Japanese home market on April 21, 1989, followed by North America later that year and other territories from 1990 onwards. Following the success of the Game & Watch single-game handhelds, Nintendo developed the Game Boy to be more like a portable console, with interchangeable cartridges. The concept proved highly successful and the Game Boy became a cultural icon of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Game Boy was designed by the Nintendo Research & Development 1 team, led by Gunpei Yokoi and Satoru Okada. The device features a dot-matrix display, a D-pad, four game buttons, a single speaker, and uses Game Pak cartridges. Its two-toned gray design included black, blue, and magenta accents, with softly rounded corners and a distinctive curved bottom-right edge. At launch in Japan it was sold as a standalone console, but in North America and Europe it came bundled with the wildly popular Tetris which fueled sales.
Despite mixed reviews criticizing its monochrome display compared to full-color competitors like the Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and NEC TurboExpress, the Game Boy's affordability, battery life, and extensive game library propelled it to market dominance. An estimated 118.69 million units of the Game Boy and its successor, the Game Boy Color (released in 1998), have been sold worldwide, making them the fourth-best-selling system ever. The Game Boy received several redesigns during its lifespan, including the smaller Game Boy Pocket (1996) and the backlit Game Boy Light (1998).
The Game Boy was designed by Nintendo Research & Development 1 (R&D1), the team behind the Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong arcade games and the successful Game & Watch series of handhelds, which had helped stabilize Nintendo financially. By 1983, while Game & Watch remained popular internationally, sales in Japan had begun to decline, pressuring R&D1 to innovate. At the same time, they faced competition from Nintendo Research & Development 2 (R&D2), an in-house rival created by Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. That same year, R&D2 had launched the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), intensifying the pressure on R&D1. Looking to improve Game & Watch, R&D1 researched new screens from supplier Sharp, including dot-matrix displays that could support multiple games—unlike Game & Watch, which used pre-printed segmented LCDs, limiting each device to a single game.
On June 10, 1987, division director Gunpei Yokoi informed R&D1 that Yamauchi wanted a successor to Game & Watch priced under ¥10,000 (equivalent to ¥11,796 in 2019). From the very first meeting, the team knew they wanted to use a dot-matrix displays and codenamed the project Dot Matrix Game (DMG), a name later reflected in the Game Boy’s official model number: DMG-01.
Within R&D1, Yokoi had long championed "lateral thinking with withered technology", a design philosophy which eschewed cutting-edge technology in favor of innovative use of mature technologies, which tended to be more affordable and reliable. This led to early clashes between Yokoi and his assistant director Satoru Okada. Yokoi envisioned a simple toy, akin to an advanced Game & Watch, while Okada pushed for a more powerful system with interchangeable cartridges—essentially a portable NES. Some within R&D1 believed Yokoi resisted the idea simply to avoid links to the NES, developed by their rivals at R&D2. Eventually, in a heated meeting, Yokoi relented, approving Okada’s vision and gave him full responsibility for the project.
Initially, R&D1 considered using a Ricoh CPU, similar to the NES, for potential compatibility. However, R&D2—then building the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)—blocked this, claiming it would strain Ricoh’s resources. R&D1 suspected this was simply an attempt to hinder their project. Ultimately, they opted for a Sharp CPU. A key side effect of this choice was the CPU’s built-in communication feature. In the early 1980s, Okada, had worked on an earlier Nintendo project called Computer Mah-jong Yakuman that featured multiplayer gaming over a cable connection between two devices. He saw an opportunity to implement a similar feature. Despite skepticism from his team that the feature would be too difficult to use, he personally developed the Game Link Cable technology, which later enabled Pokémon's "battle" and "trade" game mechanics. The Game Boy also retained a key innovation from Game & Watch: the D-pad. Yokoi had designed it as a compact alternative to joysticks, making it ideal for handheld devices. Its use on the NES controller also helped ease the transition for players.
Early in development, R&D1 evaluated dot-matrix displays from Sharp but found them unsuitable due to severe ghosting. Seeking alternatives, they approached Citizen, Epson, Hosiden, Matsushita, and Seiko. Most declined, but Citizen, already producing LCDs for portable TVs, was eager to collaborate. The team was impressed by Citizen’s chip-on-glass technology, which integrated the screen controller into the display, reducing cost and production time. They offered Nintendo a monochrome screen for ¥1,300 or a color version for ¥3,900. However, following Yokoi’s philosophy, the team rejected color due to higher power consumption and cost, opting for a simple grayscale screen without a backlight. This decision proved wise, as competing color handhelds would suffer from poor battery life, giving the Game Boy a significant advantage.
However, Sharp was still an important partner, so Nintendo asked if they could match Citizen on technology and price. Sharp responded with vague answers on their screen technologies and quoted a price of ¥2,500 to ¥3,000 per screen. In response, Citizen lowered its price to ¥1,000. With Yamauchi’s approval, R&D1 finalized a deal with Citizen on September 1, 1987. However, as Citizen’s representatives left Nintendo’s offices, they saw Sharp’s team arriving for a meeting with Yamauchi. Without explanation, Yamauchi canceled the Citizen deal and awarded the contract to Sharp. To soften the blow, R&D1 fabricated a story, telling Citizen they were interested in buying color screens the next year, even drafting fake project documents. Citizen later supplied color screens for Sega’s Game Gear, which had a design closely resembled Nintendo's fake project. Citizen never admitted sharing the design.
The R&D1 team soon discovered that Sharp was unprepared to make the screens they needed, leading to months of delays. Early prototypes with low-quality twisted nematic (TN) screens sparked internal skepticism, with some employees mockingly referring to the project as DameGame (with dame (だめ) meaning "hopeless" in Japanese). In the summer of 1988, R&D1 presented a prototype to Yamauchi, who immediately canceled the project, citing the poor visibility of the display. Team members argued that minor screen adjustments or a slightly higher budget could resolve the issue, but Yamauchi refused, leading them to suspect other teams had already convinced him the device would be a commercial failure. Furthermore, with the NES still thriving and the SNES on the horizon, a Game & Watch successor was no longer seen as essential.
Most of R&D1, including Okada, was reassigned. However, Yokoi remained committed to the project. Defying Yamauchi’s decision, he continued refining the display. During discussions with a Sharp director involved in Game & Watch, the team learned of a super-twisted nematic (STN) display secretly in development. While it had a green tint and slightly lower contrast, it dramatically improved the viewing angle. Yokoi devised a plan. In a meeting with a Sharp board member, he pressed them about new technologies, leading them to reveal the STN display. R&D1 secured a prototype and installed it in a Game Boy.
Three months after canceling the project, Yamauchi was shown the STN prototype. Though still unimpressed by the screen, he approved the console for sale, perhaps influenced by delays in SNES development, which was now two years away from launch.
To offset costs, the team reduced the screen size, though it was too late to shrink the console’s overall dimensions. The ¥10,000 price target was also missed due to the STN display. To increase perceived value, Yamauchi decided to include headphones and four AA batteries in the box, which cost Nintendo very little but made the Game Boy appear like a better deal.
On January 17, 1989, Nintendo officially announced the Game Boy. It launched in Japan on April 21, selling out its initial production run of 300,000 units within the first two weeks. By August, sales had reached 720,000 consoles and 1.9 million games across just four launch titles. The Game Boy debuted in North America on July 31, 1989, backed by a US$20 million marketing campaign (equivalent to $51 million in 2024) aimed at making it the must-have, hard-to-find holiday toy. On its release day, 40,000 units were sold, and within just a few weeks, sales reached one million.
Learning from one of the NES launch's shortcomings, Okada pushed to offer third-party developers a development manual and development kit, built by Intelligent Systems, to encourage software creation for the Game Boy. Meanwhile, R&D1 developed Super Mario Land as the console's flagship title, but another game captured the attention of Okada and Yokoi—Tetris. While a team within R&D1 was porting the Soviet-made puzzle game to the NES, they recognized its potential for a handheld platform. Although Tetris would not be ready for the Game Boy’s Japanese debut, it was completed in time for the North American launch. Henk Rogers, who had acquired the rights to Tetris, convinced Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa to make it the pack-in game with the Game Boy instead of Super Mario Land, arguing that while Mario primarily appealed to young boys, Tetris would appeal to everyone. As a result, Tetris was bundled with the Game Boy in every region except Japan.
The Game Boy uses a custom system on a chip (SoC), to house most of the components, named the DMG-CPU by Nintendo and the LR35902 by its manufacturer, the Sharp Corporation.
Within the DMG-CPU, the main processor is a Sharp SM83, a hybrid of the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 processors. It combines the seven 8-bit registers of the 8080 (omitting the alternate registers of the Z80) with the programming syntax and additional bit manipulation instructions of the Z80. The SM83 also includes new instructions optimized for operations specific to the Game Boy's hardware arrangement. It operates at a clock rate of 4.194304 MHz.
The DMG-CPU also incorporates the Picture Processing Unit, essentially a basic GPU, that renders visuals using an 8 KB bank of Video RAM located on the motherboard. The display is a 2.5-inch (diagonal) reflective super-twisted nematic (STN) monochrome liquid-crystal display (LCD), measuring 47 millimeters (1.9 in) wide by 43 millimeters (1.7 in) high with a resolution of 160 pixels wide by 144 pixels high in a 10:9 aspect ratio. The screen displays four shades of grey/green.
Additionally, the SoC includes a 256 byte "bootstrap" ROM which is used to start up the device, 127 bytes of High RAM that can be accessed faster (similar to a CPU cache), and the Audio Processing Unit, a programmable sound generator with four channels: a pulse wave generation channel with frequency and volume variation, a second pulse wave generation channel with only volume variation, a wave channel that can reproduce any waveform recorded in RAM, and a white noise channel with volume variation. The motherboard also contains a 8 KB "work RAM" chip providing storage for general operations.
The Game Boy's physical controls include a D-pad (directional pad), four action buttons (labeled 'A', 'B', 'SELECT', 'START'), a sliding power switch with a cartridge lock to prevent accidental removal, along with volume and contrast dials on either side of the device.
The original Game Boy was powered internally by four AA batteries. For extended use, an optional AC adapter or rechargeable battery pack can be connected via a coaxial power connector on the left side. The right side also has a Game Link Cable port for connecting to up to four Game Boy devices for multiplayer games or data transfer. For sound output, the Game Boy includes a single monaural speaker and a 3.5 mm headphone jack that offered stereo sound.
The Game Boy remained a strong seller throughout the 1990s, fueled by popular game releases like Pokémon that kept demand high. However, its success posed a challenge for Nintendo: the hardware was aging, but the company was reluctant to replace it. Instead, Nintendo introduced several updates to extend the system’s relevance.
The first revision to the Game Boy came on March 20, 1995, when Nintendo released several special edition Game Boy models in various colored cases as part of the "Play It Loud!" campaign, known in Japan as Game Boy Bros. These units came in red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, and transparent, with screens featuring a darker border than the original model.
A major revision to the Game Boy came in 1996 with the introduction of the Game Boy Pocket, a slimmed-down unit that required just two smaller AAA batteries, albeit at the expense of providing just 10 hours of gameplay. The other major change was that the screen was changed to a much-improved film compensated super-twisted nematic (FSTN) LCD. The screen's visibility and pixel response-time had been improved, mostly eliminating ghosting. Additionally, the film compensation layer produced a true black-and-white display, rather than the green hues of the original Game Boy. The Pocket also has a smaller Game Link Cable port, which requires an adapter to link with the original Game Boy. This smaller port design would be used on all subsequent Game Boy models. Internally, the Game Boy Pocket had a new SoC, the CPU MGB, which moved the Video RAM from the motherboard to the SoC.
The Game Boy Pocket was released in Japan on July 20, 1996, and in North America on September 2, 1996, for US$69.99 (equivalent to $140 in 2024). The Game Boy Pocket revitalized hardware sales and its release was ultimately well-timed as it coincided with the launch of Pokémon, which became a massive hit, revitalizing Game Boy sales. Reviewers praised the device's compact size and improved display, but some critics dismissed it as a minor upgrade with the Los Angeles Times saying Nintendo was, "repacking the same old black-and-white stuff and selling it as new."
The initial version was available only in silver and did not have a power LED, which also served as a battery strength indicator for the device. A revision in early 1997 added a power LED, different case colors (red, green, yellow, black, gold metal, clear, and blue) and dropped the price to US$54.95 (equivalent to $108 in 2024). By mid-1998, just before the Game Boy Color went on sale, the price had fallen to US$49.95 (equivalent to $96 in 2024).
Released exclusively in Japan on April 14, 1998, the Game Boy Light was slightly larger than the Pocket and added an electroluminescent backlight, making it playable in low-light conditions. It ran on two AA batteries, lasting 12 hours with the backlight on and 20 hours with it off. It was available in gold and silver and retailed for ¥6,800 (equivalent to ¥6,892 in 2019).
More than 1,000 games were released for the Game Boy, excluding cancelled and unlicensed games. Additionally, more than 300 games developed for the Game Boy Color were backward compatible with the monochrome Game Boy models.
Games are stored on cartridges called the Game Boy Game Pak, using read-only memory (ROM) chips. Initially, due to the limitations of the 8-bit architecture of the device, ROM size was limited to 32 KB. However, Nintendo overcame this limitation with a Memory Bank Controller (MBC) inside the cartridge. This chip sits between the processor and the ROM chips. The CPU can only access 32 KB at a time, but the MBC can switch between several banks of 32 KB ROM. Using this technology, Nintendo created Game Boy games that used up to 1 megabyte of ROM. Game Paks could also provide additional functionality to the Game Boy system. Some cartridges included up to 128 KB of RAM to increase performance, which could also be battery-backed to save progress when the handheld was off, real-time clock chips could keep track of time even when the device was off and Rumble Pak cartridges added vibration feedback to enhance gameplay.
The top-selling franchise for the Game Boy were Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, the first installments of the Pokémon video game series, which sold more than 46 million copies. The best-selling single game was Tetris, with more than 35 million copies shipped, it was a pack-in game included with the purchase of many original Game Boy devices.
Beyond the platform's official titles, as of 2025, an active online community continues to create new games for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color through tools like GB Studio, a free and user-friendly game-building engine that simplifies the process compared to manual coding.
When the Game Boy launched in Japan in April 1989, it featured four launch titles: Alleyway (a Breakout clone), Baseball (a port of the NES game), Super Mario Land (an adaptation of the Mario franchise for the handheld format) and Yakuman (a Japanese mahjong game). When the console debuted in North America, two additional launch titles were added: Tetris and Tennis (another NES port), while Yakuman never saw a wide international release.
Though it was less technically advanced than the Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, NEC TurboExpress and other competitors, notably by not supporting color, the Game Boy's lower price along with longer battery life made it a success.
Upon its release in Japan on April 21, 1989, the entire initial stock of 300,000 Game Boy's sold out within the first two weeks. In the United States, 40,000 were sold on its release day, July 31, 1989, and within weeks, sales in the U.S. reached one million units. Globally, more than 118.69 million units of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color combined have been sold worldwide, with 32.47 million units in Japan, 44.06 million in the Americas, and 42.16 million in other regions. By Japanese fiscal year 1997, before Game Boy Color's release in late 1998, 64.42 million units of the Game Boy had been sold worldwide. At a March 14, 1994, press conference in San Francisco, Nintendo vice president of marketing Peter Main answered queries about when Nintendo was coming out with a color handheld system by stating that sales of the Game Boy were strong enough that it had decided to hold off on developing a successor handheld for the near future.
In 1995, Nintendo of America announced that 46% of Game Boy players were female, which was higher than the percentage of female players for both the Nintendo Entertainment System (29%) and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (14%). In 2009, the Game Boy was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, 20 years after its introduction.
The console received mixed reviews from critics. In a 1997 year-end review, a team of four Electronic Gaming Monthly editors gave the Game Boy scores of 7.5, 7.0, 8.0, and 2.0. The reviewer who contributed the 2.0 panned the system due to its black-and-white display and motion blur, while his three co-reviewers praised its long battery life and strong games library, as well as the sleek, conveniently-sized design of the new Game Boy Pocket model.
The Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Color were commercially successful, selling a combined 118.69 million units worldwide: 32.47 million in Japan, 44.06 million in the Americas, and 42.16 million in all other regions. At the time of its discontinuation in 2003, the combined sales of the Game Boy made it the best-selling game console of all time. In later years, its sales were surpassed by the Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Switch, making it the fourth-best-selling console of all time, as of 2024.