Nintendo: We happily closed 30 years of Game Boy

In April 1989 the Japanese Nintendo was launching the portable gaming machine for the first time Game Boy. Its huge commercial success is due to the use of reliable, but not necessarily impressive technology.

ΤMobile games are now a daily occurrence. The first decisive step in this direction, however, was taken 30 years ago, when Nintendo launched the Game Boy portable video game only in the Japanese market. By today's technological standards, the gray console looks like a brick and its black and white graphics are at least funny. In 1989, however, the Game Boy was a revolution, since in addition to children, it was also aimed at adults, with games such as Tetris. Sales of the Japanese portable gaming machine reached 120 million devices.

At that time Game Boy was not the only portable electronic game on the market. Similar devices were then released by competing companies such as Sega and Atari. But only Nintendo had the courage to launch a gaming machine that did not take technological risks, but relied on a reliable and proven technology. So for example the screen was black and white with a resolution of only 160 x 144 pixels. Today even an iPhone application icon has a resolution of 180 x 180. But precisely because the Game Boy's LCD resolution was low even for the data of the time, the batteries were very durable, to the great satisfaction of the users.

With two Game Boys, Nintendo secured the rights to Tetris

The father of the famous gaming machine is the Japanese Gunpei Yokoi, who has been working at Nintendo since the 60s as a maintenance machine for making toy decks. A few years before Game Boy built Game & Watch that contained various relatively simple games and sold more than 40 million devices. Its disadvantage compared to the Game Boy was that it did not allow the user to purchase additional games and play them on the existing device.

Perhaps Game Boy's biggest commercial advantage was that it contained Tetris in its original equipment, which was loved by those who bought the gaming machine. Nintendo people in search of an original toy found in the then Soviet Union a developer from Moscow who had created the later famous brick game. To secure the rights from the Russian developer they simply gave him two Game Boys for his children.

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