The Game Boy at 35: a portal to other magical worlds

The handheld console introduced millions to the joy of video games, and remains one of the best-selling consoles ever

On April 21, 1989, Nintendo released a chunky grey game-playing rectangle to stores in Japan. It’s fair to say that nobody expected much of it. Internally, at Nintendo’s Kyoto HQ, the portable console was reportedly not a well-loved project. But within two weeks, it had sold out its entire 300,000-unit initial run. The Game Boy would arrive later that year in the US, and across the rest of the world over the next couple of years. Everywhere it went, it proved just as popular. Thirty-five years and almost 120m sales later, it is still the fourth best-selling games console in history.

Like Sony’s Walkman, the Game Boy is a tech design icon of its time, still instantly recognisable from its silhouette alone. Developed by a team led by Satoru Okada and Gunpei Yokoi in Kyoto, the Game Boy is perhaps the preeminent example of Yokoi’s “lateral thinking with withered technology” maxim, a do-more-with-less technological principle that endures at Nintendo to this day. It’s so simply designed – with four buttons and a cross-shaped directional pad – that you already know how to use it as soon as you look at it. Thanks to its greyscale screen, the battery lasted for days of play. And most importantly for accident-prone kids of the 90s (and their parents), you could throw it off a bridge and it would probably still work.