Over the years, there have been many attempts to capture the thrill of console games in a smaller, handheld package, but none have been as prolific as Nintendo’s Game Boy. But how, and why, did this asymmetrical gray brick become so popular? To find out, we have to journey to Kyoto, Nintendo’s headquarters, in the year 1989. The company was riding a giant tidal wave, the already well-selling Nintendo Entertainment System being further rejuvenated in the form of Super Mario Bros 3 and Dragon Quest. They decided to look to another frontrunner which its rivals, notably NEC’S PC Engine and the Atari 7800, had hitherto untouched; that of the handheld market. Before then, there had been a few attempts at recapturing the magic of arcades and consoles in a smaller, more versatile package; including Nintendo’s very own Game and Watch in 1980, but each could only play one single game; and each could only handle at speeds so agonizing that it was futile. But Nintendo’s R&D man, Gunpei Yokoi, who was the brains behind the Game and Watch, had a plan: using older parts to prolong battery life and keep the fun in a more endearing package. The result: a black and white rendering console with a mint-ish green screen and a layout reminiscent of a calculator, known as the Game Boy. Ok, so now the handheld was ready, but what about the games? Just like how there had been Super Mario Bros as prepackaged titles for the NES, the Game Boy needed some too. The original plan was to sell this monochromatic venture with Super Mario Land, a pale, crude imitation of the console games with a desert-like theme. But Land didn’t have the perceived ‘wow!’ factor that Nintendo desired, so they were sent back to the drawing board. It was around this time that an addictive puzzler game that recently escaped from Russia, involving stacking blocks, was attracting attention. When the dust cleared, after a meeting with the game’s original creator alongside a rival delegation from Atari, Atari won the arcade rights, but Nintendo was free to use this puzzler for its new Game Boy. That game was a little thing called Tetris. And in the end, that bargain paid off. Within the first year alone, the little console raced to the top of the charts, totaling $2.5 million. And that trend continued. An upgrade–the Pocket– released a few years later, with a bigger screen, and peripherals, including but not limited to a camera, a printer, and even fishing sonar. Sales were further boosted, in the device’s latter years, with a little monster-catching game starring a yellow mouse–Pokémon. And that was all it took, with revisions, new models, and streamlined editions, totaling, in all, around $199 million by the product line’s end in 2004. So next time you boot up a Playstation 5, or play on your iPhone before a flight, remember that even the simplest things can dazzle.
nintendo
The Rise of Nintendo by Schamil Saeed, 11
Nintendo. The console that changed the world, for 40 years and still going, there’s no escaping that video games have influenced multiple generations. We’ve all seen the ads; Mario’s mustachioed visage is as familiar to us as Santa Claus or Uncle Sam. But how exactly did this come to be? To figure this out, we have to go back to the year 1981, in the city of Kyoto, the headquarters of Nintendo Japan. The company was a sort of jack-of-all-trades, having dabbled in (successively), playing cards, hotels, and even a taxi service. Their most recent pursuit was electronics, buoyed by the success of their handheld gaming line, the Game & Watch, which was selling like hotcakes in their home country. Recently, however, President Hiroshi Yamauchi, whose great-grandfather had founded the company, had been thinking about trying to reach North American audiences. He soon learned that they preferred the full color, heart-racing action of arcades. Seeing how fellow company Taito had burst onto the scene with Space Invaders, Yamauchi asked his R&D group to develop another space shoot-em-up; the result was Radar Scope, a semi 3-D adventure where you pilot a starship. While the results were positive within the land of the rising sun, the USA release was a disaster. Shipped to the newly founded, short-staffed Nintendo of America in New York City, it had the misfortune to release around the same time as the likes of Pac-Man, and paid the price, with only around a third of the cabinets being sold. Dismayed, Yamauchi asked a new hire to the company, one Shigeru Miyamoto, to come up with a game to quickly reprogram the unsold cabinets with. A year later, he promptly came up with one, featuring Popeye navigating mazes, but the project hit a bump when the company wouldn’t give licensing. No matter, however; Miyamoto quickly replaced series antagonist Bluto with a giant, muscular ape, and Popeye himself turned into a mustachioed man you may have heard of. To prevent animating his hair, our hero got a red cap; and soon the maze was replaced with a rickety construction site filled with barrels. And so Donkey Kong was created, and a star was born. Soon, they couldn’t keep up demand, and the money kept flowing. Sequels poured in; and nothing could stop them, not even a lawsuit from Universal on America’s new favorite ape. Looking forward from arcades, Nintendo saw a new horizon: the console. This came at an especially opportune time in gaming, as, in 1983, the gaming market imploded in America. Atari’s massive stock market crash meant that the field was free of challengers. So, starting in Japan, the same brilliant brainstormers behind Nintendo’s arcade successes devised the Family Computer, or Famicom, coming in an elegant red and yellow color scheme, in 1984. It was an overnight success; but the real greatness would come with the US release. Renamed and redesigned, this would prove to be what put the company in the history books, and it was proven with every timeout hero, with his new, well ‘super’ look, stomped on that Goomba. That much is indisputable. So next time you see, hear, or play Super Mario, or any of Nintendo’s other games just remember it’s not just a game, ‘it’s-a him, a-Mario!’
