Nintendo, Pokémon, and the Game Boy

It might be oblivious to say in today’s market, but Nintendo has proven their continued longentity and cultural relevance with the smash success of the Switch. With games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and Animal Crossing rocketing to new heights in terms of popularity and sales for their franchises. And yet given the Switch’s design legacy as not just the successor console to the Wii U but also the 3DS, its current momentum to become the best-selling console of all-time could be seen as a natural extension of Nintendo’s handheld dominance. A dominance never successfully challenged and rooted in the inception of their first handheld system: the Game Boy.

The brainchild of deceased hardware designer Gunpei Yokoi and his assistant director Satoru Okada, the original Gameboy was released in April for Japanese markets and July of 1989 in North America to immediate success. While competing handhelds of the time like the Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and NEC Turboexpress featured color screens, higher resolutions, and ergonomic designs, the affordability ($89.99 compared to Sega’s $149.99) and significantly longer battery life (30 hours compared to 6 hours) more than made up for the pea-green display. This was further compounded by the brilliant decision to package Tetris as the pack-in game outside of Japan. The triumph of the Game Boy can be understood as more than a simple David vs. Goliath story (Especially considering the market share of the then NES), but as an application of lateral thinking which considers new uses for older technologies that keep costs low and aid in innovation. Still after several years of success, Nintendo’s handheld began to slow in terms of sales and more than likely would have been replaced by 1998 or 1999 with a new device. But the lifespan of the Game Boy, not unlike the Switch today, was buoyed by the release of the now iconic worldwide phenomenon of Pokémon Red and Blue in 1996.

Now a juggernaut of global media from anime to cards to collectibles, the launch of the original Pokémon games was a revelation to what handheld gaming could be. Despite the limitations of the hardware, the addictive collectathon gameplay complemented the battery life (catching them all does take some time) and the detailed battle sprites contrasted well with more vague but imagination-firing overworld sprites (I swear Mew is under that truck). As Peter Main of Nintendo of America once quipped, “The name of the game is the game.”. And while the Game Boy’s library up to that point had been strong, the introduction of Pokémon solidified it as rock solid. It upended the idea that portable gaming would never be able to achieve more than a pale imitation of what home consoles could produce.

Considering this in hindsight, the outsized sales of the Switch in spite of its age and processing limitations are understandable as minor impediments at best. Nintendo understood that they had found a winning formula balancing affordability with innovating on form factor every other generation. Which is why the Game Boy was followed by the Game Boy Advance, and why the paradigm shifting Nintendo DS was followed by the conventional and conservative 3DS. This is also the best evidence of why Nintendo followed their iconic Switch up with the stylish Switch 2 coming later in 2025, and it will all be thanks to the trailblazing path originally set by the original Game Boy and the enduring staying power of Pokémon.