Game Boy

The Game Boy launched in Japan on 21 April 1989 and in North America on 31 July 1989 at US$89.95; Europe waited until 28 September 1990. It came out of Nintendo's R&D1 under Gunpei Yokoi, with Satoru Okada as assistant director, and it is the clearest demonstration of Yokoi's "lateral thinking with withered technology" — deliberately cheap, proven parts arranged into something nobody else had. Its model number, DMG-01, came from the project codename: Dot Matrix Game.

The specs were the joke and the point. A 2.5-inch reflective STN LCD showed four shades of grey-green at 160×144, with no backlight at all — which is why every kid remembers tilting the thing toward a window, and why third-party clip-on lights and magnifiers sold so well. But it ran for up to 30 hours on four AAs while colour rivals drained batteries in a few, and outside Japan it came with Tetris in the box, which sold the console to people who had never bought a game in their life. Japanese buyers got Alleyway, Baseball, Super Mario Land and Yakuman instead. The Game Link Cable, Okada's work, turned into the thing nobody planned for: it made Pokémon's trading and battling possible a decade later.

The brick was superseded gradually rather than killed — the slimmer Game Boy Pocket arrived in 1996, the Japan-only Game Boy Light in 1998, and the Game Boy Color took over late that year. Nintendo has never published a sales figure for the original alone: its own investor page reports Game Boy and Game Boy Color together as a single line of 118.69 million units, and the only narrower number available, 64.42 million, covers every pre-Color model combined through late 1998. Nintendo retired the line on 31 March 2003, at which point it was the bestselling console ever made.