Each Console Arrives with a Different Face

Each Console Arrives with a Different Face

I take Famicoms apart almost every day. Opened up, a Famicom, a Super Famicom and a Game Boy look like the same kind of thing at a glance: a circuit board, small parts, solder. The chips on those boards are entirely different designs, but you cannot tell that by looking. The outside is where the difference shows. On the shell, you can still see what the people who made each machine decided.

Start with the Famicom's red. Masayuki Uemura, who designed the machine, explained it in a 2013 interview with the Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream. Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, picked the colour himself. When Uemura asked, "Red?", Yamauchi told him it was not an ordinary red, and handed over his own scarf. Only the red came from Yamauchi. The rest of the body went white, and Uemura explains why: "Once you have been told it is red, you can't very well make the other parts blue or yellow." He also says cost had nothing to do with it.

The Super Famicom came out in Japan in 1990 with soft, rounded corners. When Nintendo prepared it for America, the case was redrawn by Lance Barr, the designer at Nintendo of America, and he did not like those curves. He said: "For the US, I felt that it was too soft and had no edge." He also thought it "didn't look good when stacked and even by itself, had a kind of 'bag of bread' look." That is why the American version, the Super Nintendo (SNES), is boxier, with straight lines. The rounded Japanese machine and the square American one are the same console inside.

The Game Boy, released in 1989, has a black-and-white screen. That was Gunpei Yokoi's choice, and he admitted it was hard to get the rest of Nintendo to agree. In a 1997 interview he said: "The technology was there to do color. But I wanted us to do black and white anyway." His reason was about the player's mind. Draw two circles on a blackboard, call it a snowman, and everyone sees white snow. "Once you start playing the game, the colors aren't important." Colour handhelds came after the Game Boy: the Atari Lynx later in 1989, and Sega's Game Gear in 1990.

The screen had no backlight, so it needed light from outside. My own best Game Boy memory is playing on the laundry deck at home, in the sun, where that small picture stood out clearly. It was black and white, nothing more. Once I started playing, I slipped straight into that small world anyway.

So each shell carries one person's decision: a president's scarf, a designer in America who wanted edges, an inventor who left colour out on purpose. If one of these faces is the one you grew up with, we still have them.