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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

What's absolutely brilliant about the development of the original Game Boy is that at the time, Gunpei Yokoi's team was facing significant incredulity. "Why play games when you're on the bus, or on the toilet? It's going to be so uncomfortable. Play at home on you couch in front of the TV with family and friends. Play at the arcade for cutting edge experience. Nobody wants to change batteries and see just a few shades of grey".

Their vision was to take "withered technology" and package it in a simple to use device, with simple, short games.

That team single handedly started mobile gaming. Much respect to everyone on it.

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> Gunpei Yokoi's team was facing significant incredulity. Why play games when you're on the bus, or on the toilet?

> That team single handedly started mobile gaming.

No. This is revisionist history.

Us kids in the 70s already had portable LED games by Mattel that we played on the bus and toilet. I had at least 6 of these, maybe 8. Here’s the earliest one, from 1976:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel_Auto_Race

The more popular ones were sports like football, baseball, basketball, etc and they had much more complex rule sets than Auto Race:

https://www.ebay.com/p/2255363696

Then in the early 80s we had a slew of portable LCD games like Dungeons and Dragons:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Compute... (1981)

“Mattel stated that the game immediately sold out.”

None used cartridges but they were so cheap and small (esp. the LCD games), it didn’t matter. You could own a bunch without breaking the bank.

Such games are now called “handhelds” to distinguish them from the GameBoy generation of portables, but we did not call them handhelds back then as I recall.

My point is a successful market already existed in the 70s and early 80s. Nintendo didn’t do that. They evolved what already existed by shrinking cartridge-based consoles into a portable form factor. Both were already successful, established markets before.

It's not "revisionist history", just a different take than yours.

I detailed in another answer that the Game and Watch and other past handheld didn't offer a console-like experience or one that you'd directly compare to a modern phone game.

I don’t know anything about Game and Watch. The mattel LED and LCD games I’m talking about were mobile predecessors with many of the same genres of today.

Game & Watch was first, still Gunpei Yokoi, but yeah I’d consider that the start of mobile gaming - at least that’s my memory!

Yeah Game & Watches predate Game Boy by quite a bit. And they were quite successful.

There’s a reason it was the DMG. Dot Matrix Game(?).

It was the first really successful portable system with interchangeable games and a dot matrix screen as opposed to custom LCDs per game like G&W.

The Milton Bradley MicroVision came first around 1980. Nintendo referenced it as a precursor. But the screen was 16x16 pixels so ‘graphics’ is kind of misnomer.

I think I remember seeing something once where the screen was included with the game, because it was a static LCD sort of like a Game and Watch game.

The GB was in the right place, at the right time, from the right company, with the right hardware and software, at the right price point. Instant success.

Same inventor indeed. However the games were mostly just one per device, and basically all used simple "sprites" that toggled on/off.

I think the Game & Watch gameplay feels a lot closer to an electronic toy from the early 80s than what people would consider console gaming.

Not to detract from its merit. It's just that the Game Boy wasich closer to a NES-like experience.

For anyone old enough for this to make sense but who hasn’t seen a Game and Watch game: they worked just like the cheap Tiger Electronics LCD games you could get.

Just like a simple digital watch, everything that could be on the screen was designed upfront and then the individual bits could just be shown or hidden.

Nintendo eventually made three collections of the Game and Watch games for the GB. Each collection was a ton of fun with each game available in classic (faithful) or updated (graphics replaced with sprites, same gameplay) modes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_&_Watch

There's a fighting game (I think a port of Street Fighter II) in this style and it's just wild how they make the static screen elements work with that type of game.

I had a watch with a car racing game like 6 years before Game Boy was a thing.

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