Game Boy

With a few months in-between, Nintendo revolutionised the game industry in both Japan, the US and Europe. The launch of the Game Boy was an immediate success, and ended up selling in excess of 145 million units, effectively becoming the best selling console in history. In its long life, the Game Boy had some competition from Segas GameGear, while Ataris Lynx never proved to be any kind of competitor.

A great deal of its success can be ascribed to the battery life, which in comparison to the competition is very long. On all other accounts, the Game Boy was the underdog. It is built around a Z80 main processor, running at 4 MHz with only 8 kilobytes of RAM. However, with the four black/green colours on a 2,6" LCD screen, it is more than enough to cater for most situations. The sound is delivered through the mono speaker from four internal sound channels. If headphones are pluged in, the Game Boy can also deliver stereo sound. During its life span, many accessories were released, including a camera, a printer and the most popular item - the link cable, enabling more Game Boys to be linked together.

With the Game Boy came also Tetris. The game with Russian roots, and an incredibly catchy game play, is undoubtedly the main reason as to why everyone, boys and girls, children and adults, all wanted to have a Game Boy. The console also had very good support from third party developers, with incarnations of Konamis Castlevania games and Squares Final Fantasy series (the SaGa series) as the main titles. In hindsight it is however Nintendo's own games that still shine, with titles such as The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening, the Mario- and Wario Land series as well as Metroid II. The console also gave Nintendo a whole new mega-brand: Pokémon. This series was an immediate success and helped Nintendo through the economically rough times in the Nintendo 64 years.