So it was one of those hooks that we sort of grabbed onto as a thing to do.” And when they did do it, it was really fun. “Not that many people did it, but everyone imagined doing it. “Head-to-head play was this really aspirational thing,” says Coyner. Three of the five North American launch games - Tetris, Tennis, and Baseball - also supported one of the Game Boy’s most unusual features: the link cable that enabled head-to-head multiplayer between devices. “How many times can you play Tetris? Like forever.” “That’s what people want, right? That sustained gameplay that you can go back to it and go back to and go back to,” he says. What stood out, though, was the experience of playing it. He thought about the positives - a planned price of $89.95, a comfortable size and “good enough” graphics. This is the story of how the Game Boy made its way into North America, and of the debuts of the two games that defined the long-lived system’s identity.Ĭoyner’s first task was to identify what made the Game Boy special. well, that was Nintendo of America’s problem - a challenge NoA would prove more than capable of solving, with a little help along the way from Tetris and Pokémon. It was as perfect a device for children and the common salaryman, a system to play on the go in a fast-paced society. In Japan, the Game Boy would be an easy sell. The Game Boy would be that thing: a successor to the aging Game & Watch product line and a handheld sibling to the NES, with interchangeable cartridges, a stripped-back color palette, and a comparable button layout. To preserve momentum, Nintendo needed another thing - a new device that would expand the market and strengthen its grip on the youth of the world. But the NES was getting old, and Nintendo wasn’t ready to introduce its successor.
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And the previous year Nintendo had expanded its business with a hit magazine, Nintendo Power. Four years in on the company’s first console, the NES, it had racked up around 28 million system sales worldwide and almost single-handedly revived the failing American video game market. Nintendo couldn’t do much wrong, come 1989.