Six reasons why GameBoy dominated the handheld market
From an article at arstechnica:
Twenty years ago this week, Nintendo released the Game Boy, its first handheld video game console. Excited Japanese customers snatched up the innovative monochrome handheld by the thousands, which retailed for 12,500 yen (about $94 at 1989 rates) at launch-a small price to pay for what seemed to be an NES in your pocket. Nintendo initially offered four games for the new Game Boy: Super Mario Land, Baseball, Alleyway, and Yakuman (a mahjong game), but the number of available titles quickly grew into the hundreds.
Later that year, the Game Boy hit the US at $89.99 with a secret weapon-Tetris as its pack-in game. Selling over a million units during the first Christmas season, the Game Boy proved equally successful in the US, and that success was by no means short-lived: to date, Nintendo has sold 118.69 million units of the original Game Boy line (not including Game Boy Advance) worldwide, making it the longest running dynasty in the video game business. So in honor of the Game Boy’s twentieth anniversary, we give you six reasons why the Game Boy dominated the handheld video game market during most of its astounding two-decade run.
- Tetris
It’s common pop-marketing knowledge these days that every new hardware platform needs a “killer app” to truly succeed. In the Game Boy’s case, Tetris filled that role perfectly.
Alexey Pajitnov’s block-stacking classic was easy to play in short sessions, and its simple graphics and mostly non-action gameplay proved perfect for the Game Boy’s limited screen capabilities. (If you’ll recall, the first Game Boy had a slow LCD response time, which translated to blurry “ghosting” during movement in action games.) Nintendo of America’s management made a gutsy and intelligent move to pack in Tetris with its new handheld instead of a proven name like Super Mario Land, and that move proved essential to the Game Boy’s long-term success.
Tetris didn’t start with the Game Boy, of course (Pajitnov created it for the PC in 1985), but the Game Boy made it mainstream. Ultimately, Tetris proved so popular that it quickly drove sales of Nintendo’s handheld console into the millions. Tetris’s grown-up gameplay also attracted adults to Nintendo’s new platform, expanding Game Boy’s potential audience beyond the usual adolescent NES set.
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