Game Boy Review

By any technical measure this was the worst handheld of its moment. A 4.19 MHz Sharp core, an unlit dot-matrix screen showing four shades of green, and enough motion ghosting that fast sprites smeared into the background. The Atari Lynx had colour and a backlight, and the Game Gear followed with both. Gunpei Yokoi's lateral thinking with withered technology traded all of that away for the only specs that matter on a train: roughly thirty hours from four AA batteries against the Lynx's four or five, an $89 price, and a shell that survived being dropped down a staircase.

Bundling Tetris was the masterstroke, a game that sold hardware to adults who had never considered buying a console. What followed justified the whole approach: Link's Awakening, Metroid II, Super Mario Land 2, Kirby's Dream Land, and then Pokemon Red and Blue in 1996, which turned a seven-year-old platform on its deathbed into the best-selling thing Nintendo had. The screen is genuinely bad. Almost nothing else here was a mistake.