30 Years Ago, Game Boy Pocket Saved Nintendo’s Bacon by Ignoring Conventional Wisdom

30 Years Ago, Game Boy Pocket Saved Nintendo’s Bacon by Ignoring Conventional Wisdom

To thine own self be tiny and true.

It’s no secret that the back half of the 1990s were pretty tough for Nintendo. The company never ran the risk of shutting its doors or anything, but it certainly wasn’t flying anywhere near as high as it did during the salad days of the NES and Super NES. The Nintendo 64 arrived late, and its reliance on cartridge-based media instead of discs limited the size and content of games while making N64 releases far more expensive than CD-ROM releases for the competing PlayStation. That system arrived right on the heels of the Virtual Boy, a weird and disastrous attempt to create a virtual reality headset (the end product was neither VR-capable nor a headset).

No, for a while there, the best thing Nintendo had going for it was its Game Boy handheld. And even that was looking long in the tooth by the time N64 launched.

Actually, the Game Boy always looked long in the tooth. Even back when it first launched, back in 1989, critics called it dated, primitive, and limited. With its terrible monochromatic screen and underpowered processor, it felt practically like a toy compared to Atari’s Lynx (a powerful 16-bit color handheld), Sega’s Game Gear (a beefed-up Master System on the go), and NEC’s TurboExpress (literally a portable TurboGrafx-16). By all accounts, it should have failed hard. Instead, Game Boy went on to become the single best-selling game system of the 20th century. Yes, better than NES. Better than PlayStation, too.

Game Boy is the only console in history that not only started obsolete but also had a second wind seven years after its debut. The latter days of the Game Boy’s life began in earnest 30 years ago this week, when Nintendo’s surprising secret weapon arrived in stores: The Game Boy Pocket.

By 1996, most people had given up on Game Boy as a going concern. Fresh releases slowed to such a sad trickle that Nintendo adopted the habit of slapping a big, shiny, holographic sticker that said, “NEW RELEASE” on the front of new titles. The system and its games still sold on pure inertia and affordability—not to mention the fact that there were no competing handhelds on the market by that point—but it’s not as though anyone looked to new Game Boy releases with real excitement.

Nothing says “consumer awareness” like a blaring holographic sticker to remind them that new products exist.

There was hunger for a next-generation Game Boy, especially once it became clear that Virtual Boy wasn’t it. And Nintendo knew it—they developed a powerful successor codenamed Project Atlantis, which would have brought a color screen and a 32-bit processor into the mix, easily eclipsing all handhelds before it in sheer power. That was the obvious play. And yet, Project Atlantis never came to fruition. Instead, Nintendo chose in 1996 to give us... just another Game Boy.

Game Boy Pocket didn’t add any power to the Game Boy architecture, which was based on a chip that felt dated even in 1989. It didn’t include color capabilities, something that Nintendo fans had seen plenty of for Game Boy software thanks to the Super Game Boy peripheral. No extra RAM, no cool hardware features. And it was a massive success.

Rather than follow the general consensus about what the Game Boy needed to overcome its weaknesses, Pocket lead designer Gunpei Yokoi decided instead to double down on its strengths. The Pocket featured a new screen—still monochromatic, still small, but now with higher contrast, higher reflectivity, and a faster refresh rate. It made Game Boy’s visuals look more appealing despite being fundamentally unchanged. And although the Pocket used the same internal tech as the original Game Boy, Nintendo used updated iterations that were cheaper to manufacture and used less power. The Pocket hardware was tiny compared to the original Game Boy, small yet solid in the hand. It sold for a fraction of the original hardware’s price, and it could play games for dozens of hours on a pair of AAA batteries (as opposed to the four AAs that the original Game Boy hardware required).

These little guys certainly didn’t hurt Game Boy Pocket’s fortunes.

Small, inexpensive, efficient, and still plenty of fun: The Game Boy Pocket embodied Yokoi’s design philosophy. It would be his final statement for Nintendo after decades of creative contributions. Yokoi actually intended to retire after Virtual Boy, legend has it, but felt he couldn’t let that project stand as his swan song after it went off the rails so badly. So, he stuck around long enough to miniaturize and improve the Game Boy.

It certainly didn’t hurt the Pocket’s fortunes that it arrived around the same time as a whimsical little game about making cute monsters fight. Pocket monsters, as it were. That gave the Pocket a real lift in Japan: the revamped system arrived there just as Pokémania exploded, giving players a super inexpensive and incredibly portable hardware option for playing the hot new game that all of their friends had become obsessed with. Sure, in the West, Pokémon arrived a couple of years later and coincided with the launch of Game Boy Color (at last!). But the Game Boy Pocket still did pretty well over here despite that. Cheap, efficient, compact, portable gaming options are the international language of love.

In summary, Game Boy Pocket was exactly the opposite of what critics wanted from an updated Game Boy. And it was perfect. Exactly the thing Nintendo needed to balance out the middling success of the N64, which Americans loved and the rest of the world seemed indifferent to. When you know you’re heading in the right direction, you have to ignore the backseat drivers and maintain a steady course.