Only Nintendo could kill the Game Boy

The Game Boy was the most dominant line of products in the history of video games. Every iteration of Game Boy faced several competitors, often with greater technical capabilities. Yet, every time, Nintendo won out. This week marks three straight decades of handheld gaming supremacy from Kyoto. How did Nintendo do it? Over the past 30 years, it’s been pretty much the same story. Nintendo has competed the exact same way it always has: on price, simplicity, and sheer quality of its games. Take the Atari Lynx. Released just a few months after the Game Boy, it was technically superior in almost every way. It had a backlit color screen, and it was based around 16-bit architecture, making launch titles like Blue Lightning look impressive even... Continue reading…