The Game Boy turns 30

When our editors started talking about doing a feature for the Game Boy’s 30th anniversary, I instantly knew I wanted to do this photo series. I guess the nostalgia factor kicked in; it brought all the memories back that I’m sure many of you also share with this device.

I should mention that this whole meeting took place at a bar during one of those post-work drinks with the team. Minutes after drinks were served, all of us we were scouting eBay to find some of the old accessories: the link cable, Game Boy camera, external battery pack, and Game Genie all came from various places across the US and the world. Some, to our surprise, were never even opened or used.

The Game Boy was the most dominant line of products in the history of video games. Every iteration of Game Boy faced several competitors, often with greater technical capabilities. Yet, every time, Nintendo won out. This week marks three straight decades of handheld gaming supremacy from Kyoto.

How did Nintendo do it?

When Niamh Houston was around four years old, she and her sister received a Game Boy and a copy of Super Mario Land for Christmas. Along with the game and handheld, they also had a tiny speaker that plugged into the Game Boy’s headphone jack, amplifying the sound. For Houston, her earliest memories aren’t of collecting coins in the game or exploring the Mushroom Kingdom. “I remember the music the most,” she says. “It was really raw and beautiful, and unlike anything else that you’d hear.”

That little speaker would have a big impact on her. Today, Houston is better known by her stage name Chipzel; she’s one of the most iconic performers in the chiptune scene, where musicians make new songs using old video game hardware. Today she travels the world performing with a pair of Game Boys onstage, and has also become heavily involved with composing soundtracks for indie games. “I thought it was super cool and really punk, and really futuristic and weird and nerdy,” she says of discovering the chiptune scene. “I just loved everything about the aesthetic.”

When Nintendo’s Game Boy arrived in the world in the late ‘80s, two things happened. The first was that the handheld became an instant international sensation — Nintendo sold out its entire first run in Japan in two weeks, and it sold 40,000 units the day it came to America — and the second was that it changed how games could be played. It brought games outside.

I never had a Game Boy. It was only after the Game Boy Advance came out that I had a Game Boy Color because my parents were somewhat biased against the latest hardware. In my recollection, that happened shortly after kids my age had moved on to 3D consoles, like Sony’s Playstation 2, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s GameCube. The moment, at least for me, had passed. We found Halo, and we could drive ourselves to the LAN cafe. But I never felt like I’d missed any of that era because, in the years before, I’d discovered emulation. It was how you could play Game Boy without a having a Game Boy.

Many years ago, before AirDrop and Bluetooth, before widespread Wi-Fi and even remotely fast home internet access, there was the Game Boy Link Cable. It was how you got all three starters on your copy of Pokémon Red, and it was, at least in my mind, the only way to bring any sort of peer-to-peer connectivity to Nintendo’s handheld. I remember dutifully trading pokémon with friends after school, ensuring we could fill one another’s Pokédex entries before trading back our precious virtual creatures using Nintendo’s cable accessory, a device Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri credits as inspiration for virtual worlds that insect-like creatures could crawl between, like tunnels.

But the link cable was just the beginning of the Game Boy’s wild, bizarre experimentation with the future. In the late ‘90s, Japanese game company Hudson Soft eventually came up with a more radical idea to bring wireless connectivity to the handheld. It would use infrared — built directly into game cartridges. That way, you could transfer data between two games, or even download data from the internet, directly onto the game. And for some inexplicable reason lost to time, I convinced my parents to buy the one and only Game Boy Color game sold in North America to feature this technology.

The first video game console I ever loved was a hand-me-down Game Boy from my sister who rebelliously outgrew video games to chase her dreams of starting a cool garage band. The handheld taught me a lot about video games, but it wasn’t until I stole a copy of my friend’s Pokémon Blue and secretly played it in the backseat of my parents’ car that I fell in love with gaming.

She gave me a couple of games with it, including Super Mario Land and a random Conker title. Tetris was my sister’s favorite, and she offered it to me with the same adoration as a grandmother who passes down her engagement ring. My sister loved her Game Boy, the bulky handheld console with the green-tinted screen, and she wanted me to appreciate it the same way. If I didn’t, she said, the Game Boy would sit in a closet collecting dust. I didn’t particularly want a Game Boy at six — I didn’t really want anything other than a soccer ball and the first Harry Potter book — but I was a kid, and would rather have a dumb Game Boy than not have anything at all.

There has never been a device with the number of accessories that the Game Boy had. As the first mainstream portable game console, the Game Boy had the kind of user base to support a vast hardware ecosystem, and it came into being at just the right time to need those kinds of accessories to offer a complete experience. It was a perfect storm of hardware that resulted in some of the most varied add-ons ever made for a console. Looking back, there have been roughly two categories that Game Boy accessories fit into: the practical and the weird.

The practical side is less interesting in hindsight. After all, things like attachable lights, link cables, rechargeable battery packs, AC adapters, and screen magnifiers all make a certain amount of sense for a device that lacked these modern conveniences.