We all have a cell phone these days that does almost everything, but for those of us living in the early 90s, the two fashionable gadgets were the SONY Walkman and the Nintendo Game BoyToday the two of them competed to see which was the one that occupied the space in our trouser pocket. And it is that being able to play anywhere became an immediate revolution for those of us who could only do it from home and glued to the television.
The Game Boy was going to have a color screen
If there is something that we will remember from the original Game Boy, it is its monochrome LCD screen, without colors and without backlighting. which allowed Nintendo to reduce the number of sub-pixels to one instead of three and to reduce their consumption compared to the competition. Thus, one could spend dozens of hours playing with a four-battery pack with the original model or two batteries with the more compact and smaller Pocket model.
The idea for the Game Boy grew out of the concept of making a portable version of the Famicom, the Japanese name for the legendary 8-bit NES. For this, a console with a color screen designed by Citizen was designed. At the time, the chipmaker for Nintendo was Ricoh, but Hiroshi Yamauchi didn’t want that to affect the development of the Super Famicom, so he went with Sharp to design the chipsets for the Game Boy. It was the first point of difference with the NES which would stop using a clone of the 6502 and adopt a CPU based on the Intel 8080.
In 1988, just a year before the console was released, Sharp had released a display PDA called the PA-7000, which used a display and a dot-matrix processor, so it was more advanced than a conventional calculator. Nintendo eventually opted for this screen in their final design and dumped Citizen’s, who offered it to SEGA who would use it in their Game Gear that would be released a few years later, which would stand out precisely for having a color filter.
The real father of the Game Boy
In many places you will read that Gunpei Yokoi was the creator of the first model of the Game Boy, which is wrong, since his assistants were Satoru Okada and Shin Kojo. Information that is confirmed in the patent of the original model. As can be seen in the following image:
However, Yokoi was indeed the creator of Game & Watch and his original concept was to derive from it. That is, slot machines with a single game that could not be exchanged. Of course, the situation wasn’t the same and since Nintendo was making a lot of money selling games for the NES, both its own and third-party royalties, the winning proposition was ultimately Okada rather than Yokoi.
What was the concept of Gunpei Yokoi?
In its original design, Yokoi also did not want to put in place the famous connecting cable, which made it possible to connect two consoles to play. Its idea as a successor to the Game & Watch was to use dot-matrix displays instead of fixed graphics with a segment decoder. What he had used so far. This is why Game Boy game code started with DMG, which corresponds to Dot matrix game. Yokoi’s idea was to sell their concept to the senior market so they could play fast-paced games, as is the case with mobile games today.
Unsurprisingly, the first two games he created for the Game Boy release in Japan were an Arkanoid clone called Alleway and a Mahjong game. Instead, Okada’s studio created something more complex, a scaled down version of Super Mario Bros and a game of baseball, a very popular sport in Japan. As you can see, there were two opposing concepts and two ways of understanding what the Nintendo machine was going to do, so the story could have been very different.
