The Game Boy turns 30 – The Verge

The Game Boy’s 30th anniversary: a celebration in photos

2025-01-23T19:54:20-05:00

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 neve …

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Only Nintendo could kill the Game Boy

2019-04-19T10:17:00-04:00

The Game Boy Micro, Nintendo’s last ever Game Boy. | Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge

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?

Over the past 30 years, it's been pretty much the same story. Nintendo has competed the exact same way it always has: on price, simplicity, and sheer quality of its games. Take the Atari Lynx. Released just a few months after the Game Boy, it was technically superior in almost every way. It had a backlit color screen, and it …

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Chipzel has spent a decade making incredible music with Game Boys

2019-04-19T08:45:00-04:00

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 t …

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How the Game Boy found a new life through emulation

2019-04-18T10:00:00-04:00

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 …

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One of the Game Boy’s weirdest games was a Pokémon clone with built-in infrared

2019-04-18T09:30:00-04:00

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 coul …

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The Game Boy was the first console that felt like it was mine

2019-04-17T08:30:00-04:00

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 han …

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The wild world of Game Boy accessories

2019-04-16T11:14:49-04:00

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 …

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The Game Boy paved the way for the Nintendo Switch

2019-04-15T10:15:34-04:00

My first portable console wasn't a Game Boy. It was a Game Gear, Sega's giant black brick of a gaming platform. Technically, I had the superior device. The Game Gear featured a display that felt incredibly bleeding edge, with colorful graphics and a bright backlit screen that let you admire the visuals from anywhere, even the dark. I used to show off just how cool Sonic and Virtua Fighter looked on Game Gear to my friends whenever I had the chance.

In reality, though, I was jealous of my friends with the comparably low-fi Game Boy. Nintendo's portable had an ugly display with a greenish tint, and you had to play it in good lighting to see w …

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