Game Boy
- Years active 1989 — 2003
- Units sold 118.7M
- Launch price $89
- NA library 501 games
The Game Boy is Nintendo's first cartridge-based handheld, released in 1989. It succeeded the Game & Watch line of dedicated electronics and competed with Sega's Game Gear, Atari's Lynx, and NEC's TurboExpress in the fourth generation of consoles.
While its rivals shipped with color screens and superior horsepower, the Game Boy's monochrome dot-matrix display drew vastly less power. A single set of four AAs could carry it through a transatlantic flight while the competition burned through batteries in hours. That tradeoff, paired with Tetris as a pack-in, made the Game Boy a runaway success and outlived every one of its early competitors by years.
Fun fact A Game Boy that survived a barracks fire during the 1991 Gulf War still booted up well enough to play Tetris. The scorched unit is on display at the Nintendo NY store to this day.
