MUSEUM OF THE FALLEN
Dominance is not eternal.
The Wall/ Lost Technology/ The Game Boy
The original Nintendo Game Boy handheld console in grey, with D-pad, A/B buttons and a monochrome LCD screen.

Evan-Amos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Lost Technology

The Game Boy

1989 CE 2003 CE

The grey brick with the green-grey screen that put Tetris in millions of pockets on a few AA batteries.

Born
1989 CE
Died
2003 CE
Lived
14 years
Dead for
23 yrs
At its peak
Over 118 million Game Boy and Game Boy Color units sold
Cause of death
Replaced
Replaced by
Nintendo DS and smartphone gaming
The Obituary

Nintendo’s Game Boy, released in 1989, won the handheld market not on power but on battery life and games. Its dot-matrix screen showed four shades of green-grey, it ran for hours on four AA batteries, and it shrugged off the colour screens of the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear that drained their cells. Bundling Tetris made it a phenomenon across ages, and the line with Game Boy Color sold over 118 million units. The Game Boy Advance and then the dual-screen Nintendo DS succeeded it, and Nintendo discontinued the original line in 2003.

Worth remembering

  • Bundling Tetris with the launch turned the handheld into an all-ages phenomenon.
  • Its monochrome screen and four AA batteries let it run for many hours, beating flashier rivals.

Sources

  1. Nintendo released the Game Boy in 1989; the line sold over 118 million units with Game Boy Color Wikipedia
  2. The original Game Boy line was succeeded by the Game Boy Advance and discontinued in 2003 Wikipedia

A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.

Buried nearby
Dead Companies
Bethlehem Steel
1857 CE — 2003 CE
Dead Companies
Blockbuster
1985 CE — 2010 CE
Lost Technology
Netscape Navigator
1994 CE — 2008 CE
← Back to the Wall