Last week gaming website 1up.com celebrated the 20th anniversary of Nintendo’s famous, blurry portable, the Game Boy. Swept up in the love, I can’t help but add my own observations to the discussion. Would it be trite to mention that the Game Boy revolutionized portable gaming? Yes, very. But I’ll risk it, as it’s still an apt statement — the influence of the system cannot be denied.
Revolutionary as it was though, it didn’t emerge from a vacuum. Most gaming historians will be happy to point out to anyone willing to listen (or unable to flee) that the Game Boy emerged from Nintendo’s own previous line of handheld gaming systems: the Game and Watch series. There’s an obvious connection, of course. They were both developed by Nintendo, both were based around monochrome LCD screens, both featured a mix of remakes of popular triple-A titles and original software, and both were the premier solutions for gamers who wanted to play on the go.
Of course, there were plenty of other manufacturers turning out handheld electronic games. Unlike the original Game Boy’s era, where it seemed that Nintendo had the cartridge-based portable market pretty much all to themselves, Game and Watch shared the space with a large number of competing products. It makes sense that this would be the case when you consider that each handheld was dedicated to playing a single game. If a player wanted access to new content, he or she would have to buy a whole new separate device; there were no incentives for loyalty. Portable gamers on the make could buy a Nintendo product one week and (assuming they had a kick-ass allowance) a Tiger Electronics game the next.
(The competition was great for consumers. Advancements in pricing, quality, and battery life no doubt resulted from the constant battle for the easily-bored-on-long-car-trips demographic. It’s little wonder then why, once it quickly became clear that the Game Boy completely owned its market-segment, the device remained basically unchanged for seven years after its initial release. Of course, once Nintendo realized that consumers were willing to buy what was essentially the same hardware over and over again, with only slight improvements in each iteration, the changes proceeded apace.)
In itself, the rise of handheld gaming (prior to the Game Boy) was built partly on the backs of addicts. The widespread proliferation of arcade and home videogame systems led to the birth of a population that seemed to require constant electronic stimulation. (Watch the movie Tron for the scene where Flynn, whilst talking to his buddies fresh after a bout of arcade gaming, reflexively reaches for Coleco’s Electronic Quarterback, in kind of the same way that somebody might reach for a cigarette.) But you’ve got to leave the arcade sometime, and unhooking and re-hooking up your Atari every time you left the house was quite a pain in the ass. These little pre-Game Boy handhelds were like a junkie’s bottle of cough syrup. Not ideal, but it kept the shakes away until you could score. But the larger market was nowhere near as besotted with videogames as those poor souls, though they were probably just as pathetic. They were people who cannot tolerate boredom. And by that I mean, of course, kids.
And that’s why my original assertion (that the Game Boy revolutionized handheld gaming) isn’t just trite; it misses the point completely. Because it wasn’t just a watershed moment for gaming – it was a sea change for portable entertainment altogether. It didn’t just compete with single-purpose LCD games. It competed with everything. And it redefined what it meant for something to be portable.
Allow me to illustrate this with an anecdote (because I’ve given my statisticians and research staff the day off, and this is the best I can manage). When I was a kid, I lived about an hour’s drive from my grandparents’ house. We used to visit them every weekend for dinner. Now most people have longer commutes than that, but as anyone who used to be a child knows, an hour was an interminable stretch when spent in the back seat of a hot car. Whether it was my habit of constantly losing things, or my parents’ stated goal of not letting me “shit up the car”, or some other rationale, I was only ever allowed to bring one thing with me on these trips.
So, to pass the time I could bring one G.I. Joe; or one book; or one Transformer; or one Walkman (with one cassette); or one single-purpose game, and so on. Each week I’d have to choose, and I never knew what to pick. Nothing would hold my interest for an hour. I wasn’t much of a reader at the time, and you can only imagine the story of a lone soldier/robot stranded in a Chevy Celebrity-shaped wasteland so many times before it starts to get monotonous. I got pretty familiar with the scenery along that one stretch of highway, let me tell you.
Of course, all that changed when I got the Game Boy. Sure, I could only bring one game at a time with me, but the games often had enough depth to them so that an hour would pass like mere minutes. What else could compete with that? I’d play the whole car-ride. Then I’d play the entire time I was stuck at grandma and grandpa’s. Then I’d play the whole way home (assuming there was enough light).
The Game Boy was a boon to kids like myself. But it wasn’t just car rides and doctor’s appointments, oh no. It was everywhere. The Game Boy rapidly became the mortar that filled the cracks in my life. You can’t play with the NES in the bathroom, or when your parents wanted to use the TV, or late at night when you should be asleep. But you can work in a few rounds of Tetris in all of those situations. I received the Game Boy for Christmas in 1989 (thank you K-mart layaway!); I wasn’t allowed to play Nintendo on Christmas Day – but the Game Boy was fair game. That first day, I must have played the thing for ten hours straight through.
To me, nothing was more immersive, nothing could even come close. It wasn’t until about two years later, when I discovered cheap paperback fantasy and science fiction novels, that I finally was able to get out of that obsessive relationship. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
But, as influential as that little beige box was, it seems so anachronistic now, doesn’t it? Even its descendants look a little out of place in this day and age. Once, stranded in Oakland, waiting for my car to get fixed after breaking down on the freeway, I spied a kid playing a red Game Boy Advance SP at the auto repair place. And I thought, well that’s strange. It looked… odd, somehow. That’s because, however far the Game Boy’s shadow was cast, in terms of portable entertainment it’s been eclipsed by the 2nd great revolution in portable electronic entertainment: the mobile phone.
It may not happen for a long while yet, but the thing that will eventually kill the portable game system concept will be the rise of mobile general purpose computing. Because the mobile space is completely different from the home-based paradigm. It’s not unreasonable to have a computer, a game console, and a video player all occupying the same household. We’ve got the room for that stuff, usually, and there’s a whole host of specialized furniture for storing it all in the most efficient way possible. But, when you leave the house, if you want to hedge your entertainment bets, you might bring your MP3 player, your portable game system, your ebook reader, and your phone with you. That’s several expensive gadgets that all way you down, and make you worry about loss and theft. (Also, this recession isn’t bothering you much isn’t, Mr. Gadget guy!)
The Game Boy then is not so much of a starting point as it is an apex. It represents a time when one portable electronic gadget was all one could be expected to take, and sufficient to combat boredom. That its progeny are still going strong twenty years later is less a testament to its greatness (though it was really, really great) than it is an indication that – for all their bells and whistles – cell phones still do not have their shit together. Until they get it right, we’ll always have the Game Boy’s children to hold on to.
