The Game Boy was the most dominant line of products in the history of video games. Every iteration of Game Boy faced several competitors, often with g

Only Nintendo could kill the Game Boy

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2021-07-08 14:30:04

The Game Boy was the most dominant line of products in the history of video games. Every iteration of Game Boy faced several competitors, often with greater technical capabilities. Yet, every time, Nintendo won out. This week marks three straight decades of handheld gaming supremacy from Kyoto.

Over the past 30 years, it’s been pretty much the same story. Nintendo has competed the exact same way it always has: on price, simplicity, and sheer quality of its games. Take the Atari Lynx. Released just a few months after the Game Boy, it was technically superior in almost every way. It had a backlit color screen, and it was based around 16-bit architecture, making launch titles like Blue Lightning look impressive even next to the home consoles of the day. But at $179.99, the Lynx cost nearly twice as much as the Game Boy, and the games just weren’t there.

Two more major color-screen competitors to the Game Boy emerged the following year. Sega’s $149.99 8-bit Game Gear was slightly more affordable than the Lynx, and it at least had big names like Sonic the Hedgehog on board, but it was notorious for its short battery life, which was a big deal in the days when you had to buy AA replacements. NEC’s TurboExpress, meanwhile, was a technically impressive portable version of the TurboGrafx-16, but its high price of $249.99 and its parent console’s niche status meant it was never going to be a major player.