A handheld had to fit a pocket and run for hours on ordinary batteries, and most other decisions followed from those two. The machine that won its generation, Nintendo’s Game Boy, had the dullest screen of its rivals and the longest battery life, and the press of 1989 and 1990 argued over exactly that trade. The budget had been set a decade earlier, when Gunpei Yokoi chose cheap calculator parts for the Game & Watch. (The Portable Gaming entry tells the history of the machines; this entry is about the design choices.)
Fast facts
- Screen: LCD chosen over “fancier technology” for cost and battery life (Retro Gamer, 2008, quoting Lara Crigger on Yokoi); “black and white, [but] a lot more flexible than their LED counterparts” (C&VG, April 1990).
- Battery: Game Boy, four cells, “20 hours” (Zero, January 1990); Lynx, “battery life of only three hours” (C&VG, April 1990); Game Boy Pocket, “ten hours off two AAA batteries” (Edge, August 1996). Later figures were kinder to the Game Boy: Edge in 2001 gave it “more than 30 hours” and the Lynx five.
- Pocket: the Game Boy “could fit into a jacket pocket”, the Atari could not (ACE, August 1989); “148 x 88 x 31mm” (Words Works advert, 1990).
- Pack-in: Tetris, plus a Video-Link cable and stereo earphones (Nintendo Power, July 1989).
The budget Yokoi set
Retro Gamer’s 2008 Game & Watch retrospective credits Gunpei Yokoi with laying down “principles of hardware design that would echo through Nintendo’s history”, under the name “Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology”. Its explanation comes from the journalist Lara Crigger rather than from Yokoi:
Essentially, Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology boils down to using mature technology in novel or radical applications. At the time of the invention of the Game & Watch, LCD technology was everywhere. It was a well-understood process and because prices for individual components had dropped so much, integrating LCD into a product was relatively inexpensive. Some people at Nintendo wanted to use fancier technology in the Game & Watch, technology that would have reduced battery life and raised costs, but Yokoi insisted that affordability was key and that the player cared more about fun gameplay over flashy technology.
The same piece gives the two other choices that followed from the screen. Power came from “button cell” batteries “previously seen in digital watches and calculators”, cheap to replace and small enough to fit “without breaking the sleek, straight lines of the casing”. Control came from buttons rather than a stick, because “a conventional joystick would impede on the Game & Watch’s portability”; the 1982 Donkey Kong Jr. unit used “four buttons arranged in a cross shape”, which “would later evolve into what we now know as the direction pad”. The multi-screen Donkey Kong of the same year had a single cross-shaped pad, which, as Retro Gamer put it in 2004, “later graced the NES controller and GameBoy”. Crigger’s verdict: “The entire portable games industry wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the invention of the D-pad.”
Yokoi put the same idea in his own words to David Sheff, whose history of Nintendo appeared in 1993: “The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.” British advertising sold them to adults. A December 1981 CGL advertisement in Computer & Video Games imagines a driver stranded on a cold, damp winter’s day, waiting for help, who takes a game the size of a small calculator from a pocket. It sells the range as a watch first — “At last. A watch that’s fun.” — lists five games (Headache, Parachute, Octopus, Lion, Manhole) and names the shops that stock it: Boots, Rumbelows, Selfridges and Hamleys.
The trade-off, as the press saw it in 1989-90
When Atari showed its colour handheld against the Game Boy at the summer 1989 CES, ACE put the two sides of the trade-off in one panel headed “IS GAME BOY A WIMP?”:
Game Boy’s 8 bit processor and black and white LCD display make it look dull alongside the Atari. But it is substantially smaller - unlike the Atari machine you could fit it into a jacket pocket
The Atari screen was “160 x 102 pixels, displaying up to sixteen colours on screen at any one time from a palette of 4,096”. ACE thought “the Atari has the edge over the Game Boy. But it may well be too soon to write off Nintendo”.
C&VG’s Paul Rand covered the same ground in April 1990 with the history attached. The first generation of handhelds “mainly used battery-guzzling illuminated LED displays”, until “a then fairly unknown Japanese company called Nintendo cottoned on to the idea of using LCD displays which, although black and white, were a lot more flexible”. Those games “were still lumbered with crude displays and short-term playability”; the 1989 Game Boy “cost around four times as much as even the most advanced of its predecessors”, but had “a very hi-res dot-matrix screen”, so “game sprites could be properly defined and animated instead of just flicking between predefined LCD graphic frames”, stereo sound, and a link for two players. The Lynx, by contrast, was “12 inches long, and with a battery life of only three hours” it “seemed a bit of a non-starter. However, switch it on and the colour screen lights up with graphics that are even better than an Atari ST”.
Zero had already put a number on the Game Boy’s side of the bargain in January 1990, from an imported unit: four small batteries “to give you 20 hours of continuous punishment”, with a six-volt supply “for playing the machine at home”. The monochrome screen was a decision, not an oversight. Sheff wrote that Hiroshi Yamauchi “had decided to forgo color for cost and efficiency”: colour would have “drained the batteries too quickly”, and cheap colour screens were hard to see in bright light.
What the buyer was told
Nintendo Power announced the Game Boy package in July 1989: “stereo earphones, a Video-Link Cable (for connecting two Game Boys), plus a Game Pak as part of the introductory package. Which game? Better hold on to something! It’s Tetris!!!” ACE saw the cable “demonstrated most effectively at CES with Tennis and Baseball”, and noted that both handhelds shipped with a game — Tetris for Nintendo, California Games for Atari. A UK mail-order advert in Raze in November 1990 reduced the design to its dimensions: “The pocket sized games machine measures just 148 x 88 x 31mm.”
The next models moved the same numbers. Edge reported the Game Boy Pocket in August 1996 as “30% smaller and half the weight of the original”, lasting “ten hours off two AAA batteries”. Atari’s cheaper Lynx of 1991 dropped the game, cable and adaptor from the box, and C&VG noted the batteries “still only last two hours or” so.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008, p. 46: “Retroinspection: Game & Watch” (Lara Crigger on “Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology”; button cells; the joystick and the cross of buttons on Donkey Kong Jr.).
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 2, “In Heaven’s Hands” (Yokoi on “mature technology”); chapter 13, “From Russia with Love” (the decision against a colour screen).
- Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004: Game & Watch feature (Donkey Kong’s cross-shaped pad).
- Computer & Video Games issue 2, December 1981, p. 89: CGL Game & Watch advertisement.
- ACE issue 23, August 1989: Summer CES report, with the panel “Is Game Boy a wimp?”, the Atari handheld’s screen and the pack-in games.
- Nintendo Power issue 7, July–August 1989: the Game Boy package.
- Zero issue 3, January 1990: Game Boy import report.
- Computer & Video Games issue 101, April 1990, pp. 76–77: Paul Rand’s history of handhelds.
- Raze issue 1, November 1990, p. 28: The Words Works Game Boy advertisement.
- Computer & Video Games issue 112, March 1991: “Cheap Lynx” news item.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996: Game Boy Pocket news item.
- Edge issue 104, December 2001, pp. 54–57: history of handheld games (Game Boy and Lynx battery life).