30 Years of Click-Clack

The Game Boy, the dinosaur among gaming consoles, is celebrating its 30th birthday this year. Whilst the device is hopelessly outdated, for many children of the nineties it is a journey back in time to their youth.

When US Army doctor Stephan Scoggins took his Game Boy Classic to a military deployment in Iraq in 1991, he had no idea that his gaming device would one day end up charred and with a melted casing as an exhibit in a display case in the New York Nintendo Store. He also had no idea that his barracks would one day be shelled by enemy troops and burn down. In the flames: his Game Boy. 

"Fortunately, this Game Boy and a few games were the only casualties of the attack," he added a note to the repair shipment that he sent to Nintendo's technicians after his return. They were quite astonished and tried to switch the device on. To their great surprise, it still worked. Scoggins received a new unit, and Nintendo kept his war-damaged device as a spectacular exhibit. As a sign of its indestructibility, it has been on display for fans and admirers at Nintendo in Rockefeller Centre ever since.

However, the robust casing of the Game Boy was by no means the only reason for its worldwide success. The simple controls, the handy size for taking along, the long battery life, the unique game characters such as Zelda, Super Mario and Donkey Kong, as well as the simple graphics were the reason why millions of teenagers and young adults like Stephan Scoggins could not keep their fingers off the Game Boy in the early nineties.

The Game Boy Classic, the first of its kind, cost around 150 marks when it came to market in 1990. Included in the sales package at the time: the game of the century, Tetris. To this day, the product of Japanese games manufacturer Nintendo has sold more than 120 million units worldwide. Only Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's own Nintendo DS sold more over the counter.

The Game Boy was never a toy for loners. On the contrary, gaming was an experience that fostered relationships. Together, you would sit for hours after school in a mate's room, look at his Game Boys and chat until you had worked your way through a level with combined effort. Parents despaired at this sight, but did not understand the value of this shared experience. Together you puzzled, failed and fought until the seemingly overpowering opponent was defeated.

To fuel the imagination of players, so the legend goes, Japanese Game Boy inventor Gumpei Yokoi originally dispensed with a colour display. Instead, he had the device's 8-bit processor programmed to only four shades of grey. "The technology for colour existed back then," he is said to have once said. "But the game world appears much more powerful when the player has to supplement it with their own imagination."

After the first successful model, the Game Boy Colour came to market in 1998. It offered up to 32,000 colours. Games from the previous model could still be played on the Game Boy Colour. New was an infrared interface that allowed you to play some games against each other without a link cable. 

With the Game Boy Colour, Pokémon also saw the light of day. "Catch them all!" was the slogan of the game series in which you, as Ash Ketchum from Pallet Town, caught the colourful monsters, trained them and duelled with other trainers. The game editions Blue, Red and Green were released first, with more following later. 

In the following years, the series was to become one of Nintendo's most important gaming brands. From the new millennium onwards, the Japanese manufacturer increasingly tried to compress the cutting-edge technology of Nintendo consoles into the casing size of a Game Boy. The Game Boy Advance came out in 2001 as the first product of this new strategy. With its 32-bit processor, the handheld console was significantly more powerful and enabled entirely new graphical possibilities beyond the initial four shades of grey. 

Some may still remember the unsuccessful follow-up models: the Game Boy Advance SP in laptop format or the Game Boy Micro with integrated MP3 player. In retrospect, however, they are only drops in the ocean of gaming history. Neither could match previous successes, so in 2006 the then Nintendo president announced the end of the Game Boy series. The future was called Nintendo DS and impressed with two touch screens, a microphone and a Wi-Fi adapter. 

The Game Boy has not been produced since then, but its legend lives on among the children of the nineties. On the internet, its legacy is preserved by gamers through Game Boy forums. They provide game tips or instructions on how to modify or upgrade the handheld yourself. 

Nowadays, many Game Boys are still stored in dusty cellar shelves around the world. In some places you can still find units in the shop windows of gaming shops for a purchase price of around 50 euros including some games. There it stands, the revered cult object, its halo glowing dimly, until you notice that compared to today's paper-thin and super-light smartphones, it looks like a block from the Stone Age. 

Cian Hartung