Happy Birthday from
Ars Technica Twenty years ago this week, Nintendo released the Game Boy, its first handheld video game console. Excited Japanese customers snatched up the innovative monochrome handheld by the thousands, which retailed for 12,500 yen (about $94 at 1989 rates) at launch—a small price to pay for what seemed to be an NES in your pocket. Nintendo initially offered four games for the new Game Boy:
Super Mario Land,
Baseball,
Alleyway, and
Yakuman (a mahjong game), but the number of available titles quickly grew into the hundreds.
Later that year, the Game Boy hit the US at $89.99 with a secret weapon—
Tetris as its pack-in game. Selling over a million units during the first Christmas season, the Game Boy proved equally successful in the US, and that success was by no means short-lived: to date, Nintendo has sold 118.69 million units of the original Game Boy line
Labels: game boy, nintendo, tech