Have passed 36 years from one of the revolutions that has changed the world of video games forever. On April 21, 1989, Nintendo launched the first in Japan Game boythe most successful portable console in history. Not the first device of its kind of cartridges, that title belongs to Mattel’s microvision, but the only one to have imposed itself in the collective imagination and how icon of the 90s And beyond.
The exit of the game boy in the Japanese country was a triumph thanks to his line-up of games, like Super Mario Land, Yakuman, Alleyway And Baseball. Equally success achieved in Europe and America, where the console was sold together with the famous Tetriswhose cartridge released in 1990 in Japan. And thanks to the colored blocks, the Nintendo product has also managed to bewitched an audience away from its previous consoles and sell in a short time Tens of millions of copies.
In 1996, the turning point came: Red pokemon And Green They are immediate successes and, in its seventh year of existence, the game boy lives a new age of commercial gold. At the end of their existence, the consoles of this “family” (game boy, game boy pocket and game boy color) placed 118 million copies all over the world, defeating competition products such as Game Car and Atari Lynx, consolidating the Japanese company as true leader of portable gaming. A title, this, held in the following years by the Game Boy Advance, by the Nintendo DS and today by Nintendo Switch.
The only weak point of the beloved Game Boy has always been it monochromatic screenin the years in which rivals such as Game Gear already exploited a color display, but unprocessed autonomy: 2-3 hours with six stilled batteries against over 20 of the Nintendo console with four batteries.
Beyond this defect, the game boy has created a throne from which no one has ever managed to undermine it and which is still standing thanks to the many fans of the
retrogamingwho thanks to the emulators manage to relive the memories of their childhood or, if younger, to limestone for the first time the pixels of titles who wrote the history of video games.