The Game Boy’s late-stage success is remarkable. The original DMG and subsequent variants won out against its rivals despite poorer graphics thanks to an extended battery life and addictive games like Tetris and Super Mario Land (1 and 2). But by the mid-90s, sales were waning and the battery life was no longer a key USP. So what did Nintendo do? They made a smaller version.
But the rest of the story is a lot more dramatic than that and it involves a controversial proposal: what if they removed the link cable port? Watch the video to find out how the idea came, and thankfully, went, and how the Pokémon games helped made the Game Boy a comeback console king.
(Header photo: “Ryu” by Nathan Rupert is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
