The Four AA Batteries That Changed Everything

The Four AA Batteries That Changed Everything

The Game Boy went on sale in Japan in April 1989. It ran on four AA batteries, and Nintendo's manual gave about fifteen hours of play from one set. The screen was black and white, with no light behind it. The processor inside was a custom chip built on an instruction set from the 1970s.

The black and white was a choice. Gunpei Yokoi, who headed the team that made the machine, said so in a 1997 interview: "The technology was there to do color. But I wanted us to do black and white anyway." Once you start playing, he said, "the colors aren't important."

Colour handhelds did come. The Atari Lynx and Sega's Game Gear both had colour screens with a backlight. The Game Gear needed six AA batteries, and they lasted three to five hours.

The small port on the side of the Game Boy has its own story, and it belongs to a different person. Satoru Okada, who built the first Game Boy with Yokoi and handled its internal systems, championed the Game Link Cable. Others on the team worried it would be too complicated and hardly used. Okada pushed ahead and developed it himself. Yakuman, a mahjong game and one of the four Japanese launch titles, already used it for two players. In 1996, Pokémon Red and Green used that same cable to let two children trade their Pokémon.

I don't repair these machines myself; a friend of mine, a certified engineer, does that work. Thirty-seven years on, a working Game Boy that leaves our shop still runs on four ordinary AA batteries.