How the Game Boy ᵃˡᵐᵒˢᵗ ruined Nintendo
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The Game Boy was a low spec machine that changed gaming, so why was it so hard to develop? And how did it almost destroyed Nintendo from the inside?
#gameboy #nintendo
En español: • Como la Game Boy ᶜᵃˢᶦ ...
Sources for how LCD work and their history:
Terry Scheffer, Jürgen Nehring (1997). Supertwisted nematic (STN) liquid crystal displays. Annual Review of Materials Research.
E P Raynes. C M Waters (1987). Supertwisted nematic liquid crystal displays.
Hirohisa Kawamoto (2012). The History of Liquid-Crystal Display and Its Industry. 2012 Third IEEE HISTory of ELectro-technology CONference (HISTELCON)
www.britannica...
web.media.mit....
Source for the historical bits:
History of Nintendo, Vol 4 by Florent Gorges
Source for the image of Uemura:
Famicom Tsushin magazine, July 1989. Scanned by: www.chrismcove...
The ultimate Game Boy talk: • The Ultimate Game Boy ...
Credits:
Most of the music and music timing by Roccow: / roccow
Other song by Epidemic Sound: epidemicsound.c...
Drawings by Maiku No Koe: / maiku_no_koe
3D animations by Windy.
Smash Intro by Dango
Join the community: / discord
/ lowspecgamer
Social media:
/ lowspec_gamer
/ thelowspecgamer
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It's funny how a lot of adult businessmen probably didn't realize what a big deal the long battery life was. As a kid, I had to use my allowance to buy batteries. I was simply too poor for a Game Gear!
Most Game Gear owners I knew (myself included) quickly picked up the official rechargeable battery pack. It was absurdly huge and heavy for a "portable" system, but could generally power the GG for around 4-5 hours. So that became the main power source, and the internal AAs were just there as a backup if the battery pack ran dry.
Oh how my dad lost his freaking mind when he came home one night and I had worked out I could 'charge' batteries by leaving them on the old range oven. Good times. And nothing exploded.
@@fracturedlife1393 I did this too! Left batteries on top of the radiator to get just that little bit more out of them until i discovered proper rechargeable Ni-Cd's
Yeah seriously.
Double digit battery life I'd argue is mandatory when using disposable batteries. I remember when I got my first Gameboy (a GBA) I used the batteries that came with the thing for the first day... and the next day I asked my dad for new batteries. He got really annoyed "Already!? How many batteries is this thing gonna eat through in a week!"
Happily it didn't take long to understand that the AA batteries that come with devices tend to be the cheapest of the cheap.
what's an allowance
-a late gen z/2010s kid
Since I have found no new games that I can make videos about and all hardware is almost impossible to hard I decided to take the opportunity to look a bit into the past and explore the low spec machine that started my obsession and thought me that higher specs are not always better. Hope you enjoy this new series.
12 seconds ago, nice
45sec ago nice
2 minutes ago, nice
Plzzzzzzzzzz make a video on any latest game.
Your fine
A fantastic video. Massive, massive props to you for basing this on Florent Gorges's book and for reaching out to him. Because his Nintendo books are French and the initial English translation was, as I understand, kinda bad, Gorges's work doesn't get nearly the amount exposure and recognition it deserves. Most documentaries and books on the subject of Nintendo's history pull from the same 2 or 3 American sources that I'm sure are fine in their own right, but Gorge's investigative work goes much further beyond, and uncovered many stories and details that were previously completely unknown. Not to mention that it helps dispel a number of myths, such as the notion that Gunpei Yokoi was some kind of infallible humble mastermind who spearheaded the Game Boy, when, as Gorge and you pointed out, it was actually Satoru Okada's pet project - if we have to attribute it to a single person, anyway.
Also, man, those production values. From the editing to the drawings to the footage to the 3D animations to even having the official Smash Bros. announcer voice a line for you. If this is your first short at this kind of work, you set the bar really high. Great work.
Thank you for your kind words. I hope to do more of these soon with the same production level
You just have to do a similar video about Nintendo's meetings with Sony, Phillips and every other crazy move that led to the Playstation and N64
Not a bad idea at all
@@LowSpecGamer That whole period of history is really tangled up across the gaming companies. I don’t know if you could do it without talking about Sega, Sony, and Nintendo all in one video. For Sega, that time could be called “The Repeated Shitting-upon of Tom Kalinske”. The hardware that would ultimately become the Nintendo 64 was originally shopped to Sega of America by Silicon Graphics. Tom Kalinske thought it was great, and presented it to Sega Japan, but, as just one more instance in a long string of Sega Japan belligerently going against Kalinske, they turned it down, so Kalinske told Silicon Graphics that Nintendo was looking for new hardware. We very nearly had a generation with the Nintendo Playstation and the Sega 64, instead of the Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation, and Sega Saturn.
@@NoobixCube Sega would repeat that with the Dreamcast. The American branch had negotiated GPU supply with 3dfx while the Japanese branch was looking at PowerVR instead. 3dfx would break NDA to blab about it in their IPO and went bankrupt while PowerVR wound up in the mobile market, which is how they wound up becoming "the iPhone GPU" for almost a decade.
And throw in as much as you can find out about Sega turning Sony down too. Sony got screwed over not once, but twice! No wonder they came out for blood.
Like Michael said, Sega of Japan really should have listened to SoA.
@@NoobixCube and given the Nintendo Playstation had backwards compatibility, maybe the Sega 64 would’ve too? Disc AND cart slot combo might’ve been the standard for a generation.
It's been a while since LGR has put out a Tech Tales video. Glad Alex is filling in the void
He mostly sneaks them into Oddware now, since sadly the Tech Tales videos on their own weren't doing as well as other videos. And it's TH-cam, you can't have a series that underperforms, or the algorithm kills your channel.
@@mjc0961 it feels like the more structured videos would be more algorithm-friendly than the videos where he's just rambling over retro computer parts. Though that just may be my preference speaking.
Nintendo's facilitation of creativity is kinda what always draws me back to them. They are still a big company with big company problems, but you can sometimes just feel the passion and intent behind their more unconventional and unique decisions.
Nintendo of Japan is based, but Nintendo of America is a joke.
NOA don’t make anything. So what?
True, until Iwata's death, unfortunately
Nowadays, it's possible for the DMG to achieve even longer battery life. 14 hours was with alkaline cells from the 80s. I recently started a playthrough of Pokémon Blue with a fresh set of cheap alkaline batteries, and they lasted about 30 hours.
Now I need to test if it's possible to get 100 hours with non-rechargable lithium batteries.
This was actually discussed in the video about the Game Boy Pocket
Guess Alex is a HighspecDocumentarian now, and I couldn't be happier
"Uh... like pixels? Like, every screen you have ever used?"
*Laughs in Vectrex
*wheezes in Plasma*
Chuckles in scan lines...
@@twocatsinatrenchcoat2511 laughs in projector
*Cries in Tiger Electronics LCD game
@@shlokshah5379 digital or crt, digital projectors use square pixels, crt projectors uses several crt tubes, which do not used a fixed grid pixel format
Wow, imagine if the idea of internal fights inside Nintendo were still to this day, Nintendo is alive thanks to the handheld market, thanks to Iwata's idea to merge console and handheld teams and to stop screwing with others partners companies.
Iwatas was an amazing human being.
Breath of the Wild is the best portable Zelda game ever, think about that sentence.
I'm sure there's still corporate politics going on in Nintendo. Even if it isn't planned by their president like it used to be, it happens with every big company.
Links awakening is the best
Correction: Link's Awakening is the best handheld Zelda game
There are internal fights but it's more one sided. Miyamoto is considered god and cannot be overwritten. You can take that as you will but it's thanks to Miyamoto we never got Project HAMMER.
@@Tiosh And the Paper Mario tragedy is also mainly blamed on Miyamoto, even though I think it’s more Tanabe‘s fault. Even Mario frickin Golf has more original characters now
It's interesting that there was (and probably still are) so much infighting and corporate politics going on at Nintendo. Most videos present Nintendo's divisions as always in harmony. It's very interesting to see how Nintendo isn't that much different from any other company.
Nintendo realized that going with Citizen would be going behind the back of their established business partner Sharp and had to take a hit one way or the other preferring to keep the established relationship.
Feels very similar to how Nintendo runs it's own distribution almost everywhere but even after establishing Nintendo of Europe they still uses Bergsala for their Northern Europe distribution to this very day since Bergsala has been their Nordic distribution partner all the way back to Game and Watch days.
And they say there's no honor in business...
The fact that nintendo has been around for 131 years is just mind blowing and insane.
If that blows your mind, look up the company Kongo Gumi and check out the year it was founded in. :D
@@moonlitegram Holy Potato, Kongo Gumi makes Nintendo look like a child.
Toyota is the same way. They were established as a textile loom company in 1890 by Sakichi Toyoda. He went from automatic loom to automatic transmission.
@@billybbob18 Company's that stay around for this long typically have to do that for one reason or another.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Let's not forget that Nintendo was originally a family business. Although, Hiroshi Yamauchi was actually adopted into the family when he was a kid.
"Taki is not the type to make things up"
Man literally made up an elaborated dummy concept to ghost on his partner corp.
LOL
27:24 Apparently one relatively common point of failure in these units is the audio. I can't remember exactly why, but some part of the board's prone to corroding to the point the system thinks the audio jack's in use and permanently mutes the speaker until that gets cleaned out.
The electrolytic capacitors need replacing as they expire in about 20 years (documentation says 10, but they can hang on). Speaker can be damaged by being used after the capacitors are dud. The audio jack thing is a separate one.
The audio works for longer than a TurboExpress
@@tsutenkakurobo9642 standard audio jack problem, to be honest, not really specifc to DMG, or even Gameboy.
Nintendo making questionable hardware decisions???? Oh no, who would guess!
I though that would be Sega's speciality
@@Nordlicht05 Seha were just too insecure about their consoles so that they kept pumping out new ones way too fast, which is what actually ruined them. Nintendo has done stuff like the Virtual Boy.
Sega and Nintendo both have lots of questionable hardware decisions to their names. Sega just did a better job at maintaining an uninterrupted streak through the 90s into the 2000s when the company had to be bailed out of insolvency.
@@Nordlicht05 No Sega did a perfectly fine job with that. The problem that more or less killed their company was screwing with launch dates and then not having enough to go around to all of their distributors. This led to them being boycotted by a bunch of those same retailers the next generation and too few sales to continue.
You design some consoles and let's see how far you get.
Pretty much the Gameboy was everyone's childhood memory that almost destroyed it's own creators
Idk know that it's a miracle that the Game Boy brand lasted as long as it did.
Most of the line was post-Virtual Boy! The Game Boy’s 4MHz LR35902 CPU (an 8080 and Z80 hybrid) was mediocre at best in 1989, and the Color was still using it in 1998, just clocked at 8MHz! I think the short version is that low power consumption and cost carried the day for Game Boy through the 90s, with the library becoming an increasingly important factor over time. Competitor after competitor won big on technical specs but lost big on battery life, cost, and market penetration. The WonderSwan tried to fight Game Boy in the low cost, low power realm, with comparable battery life on half the batteries and a better (8086 derived) CPU to boot, but it was seemingly too little, too late.
@@SnakebitSTI It's not always about the best hardware, Nintendo was always known for poaching the very best game devs, so their libraries on all consoles always offered quality games.
@@alexanderarce3341 Why? it wasn't until nearly 30 years later that cellphones could start to do what a decent handheld device could. And even then, they were then competing with much more useful handhelds.
Amazing video! I love how you captured the cut-throat corporate culture of 80's Japan. I was a Gear Gear kid back in the 90's and missed out on the original Gameboy. I guess you could say it was one of my life's regrets.
This was so, so good. The kind of quality you'd expect to see on Netflix or something.
Big praise coming from you. Thanks Man
I really want to hear the story behind the Gameboy Color.
I think it's one of the weirdest handhelds of all time because of its rather late release, it being heavily based on the original Gameboy, and it having a staggering 6 different revisions of the main chipset!
It also has over a dozen unused or test pins that I am very curious to learn the purpose of from insider R&D stories!
Coming soon. I am editing the pocket and color videos in tandem
I've got one and I'd forgotten how useless it was without a light attached to it constantly. It is legit hard to play with unless you have a ton of light in the right position to see the screen.
Incredibly well made and researched video. Would love more like this.
Incredible presentation! This is on par with ModernVintageGamer's content.
MVG is good at what he does, but this is far more like Gaming Historian. I was not expecting to hear something I hadn't heard before, and I was pleasantly surprised. :-)
I remember the first time I saw a Game Boy screen... this was after years of playing games on the Apple II, Amiga, ST etc. All I thought was "this is garbage, nobody could play a game on this".
Then again, I also thought the iPhone wouldn't sell because it was grossly expensive.
Shows how much I know about market behaviour.
I just played an original game boy and I can barely see the screen. Between lack of color and ghosting it's borderline unplayable. It is so horrible compared to modern screens I can't believe it was so popular!
I was just thinking recently how I wish I had an original gameboy just so I could play my old games the way they were meant to be lol. It’s all nostalgia though. It looks bad but thats what I want. I could easily play on a modern screen but why?
@@snorman1911 adjust the contrast
You remind me of my grandma, she thought that microwaves we're ridiculous and wouldn't catch on, she also thought that Apple and Microsoft were going to flop (which is surprising because she worked with computers)
@@Daizedd Difference is I was a game developer, not your luddite grannie. :)
As a Frenchman, my immediate reaction was "hope this guy heard about Florent Gorges, or he'll be missing tons of super useful information". Was not disappointed.
One of THE BEST videos you have ever made Alex, great job!!!
3d on GB advanced really was really impressive.
*Advance
There even was some really primitive "pre-rendered" 3D on the Game Boy Colour. Toy Story Racing has that.
Agreed
That ARM7TDMI cpu was quite impressive for the time. One of the first properly mobile CPUs to start to incorporate features used in their older brethren such as a pipeline. The system wasn’t a portable SNES, but rather leapfrogged it.
I’d wager CPU performance to not be far off from the PS1, though the GBA lacks 3d extensions, forcing the cpu to take up the load.
The fact that in 2002 you could play Doom on a relatively inexpensive machine that fit in your pocket still blows my mind to this day.
I really really liked this video and would love to see more of this when the usual content isnt an option.
Actaully i just want to see more period, haha. Love the branching out.
Wait... So the screen we ultimately got was the improvement?! Man, the original screen must've been rough!! Though the main problem with the final screen is the terrible refresh time, not viewing angles, IIRC. It's been a while since I last played anything on an original Game Boy.
If you do plan on it, you should probably get the screen refurbished. The LCDs get blurrier over time.
"like the one that your using to watch this right now"
Jokes on you. I'm watching this on a CRT!
How?
@@daklhs6460 Just using the ps3. It's still got the av out port.
A CRT still has a matrix of pixels.
@@MyNameIsBucket Litterally can't have pixels.
@@deterlanglytone Literally use your literal eyes and literally look at the literal screen of the literal tube television. It's literally got literal pixels on it. Literally.
The dot matrix screen was pretty amazing for the cost to consumer at the time. Laptops with lcd matrix screens were thousands of dollars.. the gameboy was less than 200$
This documentary is way too good for the tiny amount of views. Subbed!
Unbelievably professional-quality video containing a ton of information I never knew, and I consider myself very knowledgable about retro game stuff. Excellent work!
Great video! It was interesting finding out the Gamegear may have been accidentally created by someone at Nintendo. Had a good laugh at the irony if it was true.
It is indeed a tremendous irony
Wow, great video! The story had me on the edge of my seat and I learned some details I genuinely didn't know before. The screen shenanigans in particular! Also I feel so much for Gunpei, working on the screen for 3 months in secret, he must have been so emotional and nervous when the fateful day came that saved the Gameboy
Truly awesome video. I would love to hear more on the technicalities and internal key moments like the Sharp meeting or the communication between employees of different companies (sometimes about secret projects) that enabled a new product to be made or prototyped
28:38
Yamauchi: "Mr. Yokoi, I need you."
Yokoi: "You liar!"
*sounds of shooting*
Low spec hardware is always more interesting
Le Florent s'exporte à l'international ! Florent Gorges is a national treasure. I'm glad you had an interview with him.
@Jui Fn Yep.
Il s'exporte clairement pas encore assez, quand tu vois que même les historiens américains du jeu vidéo les plus connus continuent d'ignorer son travail et de réciter les mêmes poncifs que Florent Gorges a démontés... D'ailleurs, j'ai hâte qu'il s'attaque à l'histoire de la Super Nintendo et au chapitre "Nintendo Playstation". L'idée reçue veut que c'est une trahison unilatérale de Nintendo envers Sony, mais je crois me souvenir que la réalité est un peu plus complexe que ça.
I would love to see you do a Game & Watch follow-up to this video, or just more retro tech docs, you are pretty good at this!
I love it how Nintendo had to reverse engineer the code on some of the games made for their own console to figure out how it was pulling off some of the crazy things that it was doing.
The video was really great!
The explanation you have of liquid crystal displays isn't entirely correct, they are not made of crystals suspended in liquid.
Something this is very minor is that what is called dot matrix displays in this video are more commonly referred to as matrix displays, or when transitors are attached active matrix displays.
Yeah the tech explanations are terribly simplified for clarity
If these LCD calculators weren't invented, "80085" would just be a random number.
I LOVE documentaries about Nintendo history. I'm definitely looking forward to a future video of this format, maybe about the Gameboy Color? :)
Oh hey, it's been a year since this came out. I'm so happy that you found a new format that you enjoyed and that an audience found it(myself included)! It's always interesting to learn this stuff, and your recent video on Sierra's rise is one of my favorite stories ever told. Thank you for creating your art.
22:56 "Get in The Robot, Shinji"
Meme
So Yokoi went from hating the project to fighting in secret to keep it alive? Must have been a humbling experience.
This video was crazy, so many interesting stories that I never heard about. I hope you will continue with the Game Boy Color and Game & Watch
You know I feel bad for the poor marketing of the PSP, which was far beyond its time.
Thank god for this man documenting these events in his journal.
This is seriously the best Gaming Console Documentary I've ever seen, and I'm a Glutton for this sort of content. Just amazing. So well done. I can only imagine how long this took, getting in contact with the sources & interviewing them, having the custom CGi made, having the custom drawings made, editing, music, etc.
If LSG is reading, maybe consider republishing this video under another title, as the first in a new series maybe, making it more clear this is a full documentary on the making of the GameBoy, as this video's viewcount is WAY too low for the quality of this content. People need to see this. You deserve so much attention for this. This is DigitalFoundry level work.
Thank you! View count is low because TH-cam algo tends to do that to new series. I expected that, this will make its views on the long term and I am already working on the next one of this series.
English subtitles at 22:11. In both cases, it should be "worse," not "worst."
worst = opposite of "best"
worse = opposite of "better"
The audio is different, but also wrong. For that, you said "the worse the contrast" (correct) "the worst the viewing angle" (incorrect).
Subtitles at 25:22: "where" (location) should be "were" (past tense of "to be"). Audio is correct.
Subtitles at 25:41: "doble" should be "double" (but audio is correct).
Audio at 25:52 "developed on" should be "develop on" (but subtitles are correct)
Subtitles at 26:10 "they had to developed" should be "they had developed." (but audio is correct)
Subtitles at 26:46 remove incorrectly used semicolon.
Subtitles at 27:10 Semicolon should be a comma.
TH-cam subtitles sure are weird
@@KingpinCarlito That's not TH-cam fault, because the subs weren't auto-generated. They are brought you by LowSpecGamer or some other dude who collaborated on it.
At least give your opinion on this great video after such a douchebag comment.
grammar nazis still exist? from what hole did u crawl out of? lol
Touch grass
When I was a kid I, my dad went to a garage sale and bought a Gameboy for me with 12 games, the AC adaptor, carrying case, and official headphones too for 50 bucks.
For reference this was back in 1991.
A year later I bought the screen magnifier / light to play in the dark.
I always made sure to have 8 AA batteries at all times with the original white Gameboy. 🙂
the Game Gear experience with none of the advantages!
@@LowSpecGamer lol
A++ documentary. This is a 10million view kind of video.
I have seen a lot of videos about the origin of the Gameboy over the years, this one has some great angles on the story I had never seen or heard before the production quality and delivery was really top notch you coul tell this was a passion project. Really great work, liked and subbed keep it up can't wait to see more!
Florent Georges has an amazing channel (Petits Secrets de Playhistoire) and a criminally underrated series called "Collector's Quest" (specifically Season 3) where he travels Japan and showcases amazing video game collections and arcades. I highly recommend checking those videos out, especially if you like arcade games. The videos are in French, but have English subtitles.
I still have my original model Gameboy that I got around 5 years old. I'm 38 now and it still works perfectly and despite having modern consoles I still play it very often. Everytime I go to my local game store I check out the Gameboy games case to see if anything catches my attention. The variety of titles on GB is just amazing. You have the classics, Mario land 1 2 and 3, Kirby Dreamland games and the absolutely amazing "Metroid 2". But there's so much more. Incredibly impressive faux 3d titles like "Super battle tank: war in the Gulf", f14 combat simulator "turn and burn", and my most recent acquisition, "Radar Mission" , which is a submarine combat game. These pull off first person views competently and are such a technical marvel that deserves much praise. "turn and burn" actually does this TOO WELL. You feel like you are in a 3d space and have to use actual cockpit dials with altitude and headings being so complicated and accurate that it makes the game nearly impossible to play lol. It's too similar to all random dude trying to fly a jet fighter haha. Super Battle tanks: war in the Gulf" is MUCH more simplified and is damn good gun. Radar Mission is my favorite though, the water surface design is genius and makes the illusion of depth far better than what should even be possible. It's an absolute joy to judge distance in a micro second and fire torpedos in proper trajectory to connect with where the target will be. It's an absolutely astounding technical achievement imo.
This is the best explanation of LCD screens I've ever seen! Nice work!
I'm so happy that I came across your channel and this video. Thanks for putting so much time into it. The information given was very interesting and I look forward to watching more of your content. Being one of those kids who had the original Game Boys, I can say that it was a beloved system and having a cousin who had a Sega Game Gear, I was happy with the battery life my system got over his.
Key take away: My sunglasses are gameboys, and gameboys are sharp calculators for businessmen.
Also there’s a speaker.
You can't talk about GameBoy without mentioning the pack-in Tetris. This made the GameBoy appealing to kids parents because here was a game everyone loved and it gave parents an excuse to buy the GameBoy for their kids when they already had a NES.
Damn, Yamauchi looked like a Yakuza boss with those shades
There is a long-standing rumor that Nintendo had indeed ties to the Yakuza. Also that ties in with Yokoi untimely death and how bizarre it was.
Given Nintendo's history (playing cards=gambling; gambling=Yakuza) he might as well have been...
He was. Who do you think put the hit on Yokoi after Virtual Boy's failure?
You don't really believe that him dying in a 'car accident' after going to work for bandai on the Wonder Swan was a coincidence, do you?
1:58 I was half expecting him to say "Liquid Chris" for a moment there.
I remember that I wanted the gameboy color as young child ah good times.
Nepgear is cool
Thank you, very well put documentary. Also, a second document about japanese R&D, what I have seen, where cancelled project is continued in secret. The other is about creating blue led
I absolutely loved this video
I knew a lot about Gunpei Yokoi's ousting after the disaster that is the Virtual Boy and his subsequent accidental death (that many people still claim was Nintendo assassinating him but that's really unproven), but I had no idea how stressful and awful the initial development and internal politics of the Gameboy were. It's no wonder he was driven out. The creator of Kid Icarus and Metroid. He could well have thrown himself into traffic based on how he was here. Absolutely tragic.
13:03 - Yup; Nintendo has a habit of stabbing business-partners in the back. They did it to Atari, Citizen, and Sony that I can think of just off the top of my head, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are other cases as well. They've _always_ been a prick. ¬_¬
Absolutely amazing video, I can feel the passion here! As someone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s with the NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gamegear and Megadrive etc all vying control, as well as the PC with the likes of Doom, Xwing/Tie Fighter, Magic Carpet etc this was an insane time of rapid advancement. Look at what we had then, vs what we had now, and the difference is insane. There are video games, even indie ones, that look better now, than full production movies did back then!
My dude, you disappeared from my recommendations awhile ago, until I saw your "End of Low Spec" video about ten minutes ago, where you mentioned starting this. I could not be happier to have found that you've pivoted here.
I love these documentary style videos and it's crazy how using limited technology turned into something like the Gameboy I do remember my Gameboy color last a long time i know it was limited hardware still impress though.
I fully understand what you mean. These Gameboy videos are full of life force. I support your pursuit of this as a fan of Gameboy and as a fellow human being. You deserve to be happy while working.
I also think many don't look at size. The size of the Gameboy also gave it a massive edge because it can fit in a standard jeans or coat pocket while the Gamegear can't.
And you can tell how important that is by the amount of people who own both a mobile phone and a tablet. They are pretty much the exact same thing with the tablet superior in every way except for one: It can't fit in a standard pocket.
Sega messed up even harder with the Nomad. Since that one is not only too wide to fit in a pocket but too thick as well. But even worse it used Sega Genesis cartridges. A single one of those already pretty much fills up a pocket. While with the Gameboy you can take several games with you easily.
Plus the Nomad, just like any handheld that plays a Famicom or NES cartridge, can't be moved around much while you're playing or the cartridge will shift and the game will disappear.
@@customsongmaker Yeah but the size already makes taking it with you impractical. People didn't buy a gameboy to have the best possible gaming experience. If that was their goal they would have bought a Genesis or SNES. They buy a gameboy to be able to game while on a trip and doing that with the Nomad is not an easy task. The shorter battery life was also critical, a gameboy could last for a roadtrip reliably while the Gamegear/Nomad could not.
Amazing video! I hope you continue making more of these, more history on the rest of the GB line would be awesome!
I remember reading about Gunpei in a Video Game Magazine, maybe EGM or GamePro, when I was in 6th grade in 2001. How Nintendo punished him for the Virtual Boy and his sad departure, with his death following shortly after that, is very tragic.
Thank you for all that you've contributed to the world, Gunpei!
I had both a Game Boy and a Game Gear. While I thought the Game Gear was cool as shit, the battery life was terrible.
As lousy as the Game Boy might have looked in comparison, the battery life is what sealed the deal back then. A portable device just isn't portable if you have to keep it plugged into the wall.
I'm all about more video game documentaries. Thanks for this one LowSpecGamer. Out of the many GameBoy documentaries I've seen this one sticks out for being humorous and an interesting take on the subject.
7:11 wtf i have that exact same clock except black instead of white
anyway, i love your narration and editing, it's quite soothing. you just earned yourself another sub!
What an amazing video! You just flew by MooresLawIsDead in quality and the length... I could have watched an hour of this easy. Thank you LowSpec!
Thank you sir for pointing me out to see this side of your productions and future as well! This was a joy to watch and an informative one as well. Please keep on doing what you feel like you do best!
Awaiting your take on FSR on the Gameboy
I still remember when my cousin got her 1st gen GameBoy... it was a magical time. She had 3 games--Super Mario World, Popeye, & Tetris. The ability to save games is such a breakthrough compared to Game&Watch.
Fast forward many years later, I now own a GPD Win Max 2020 version, GPD Win 3, ONEXPLAYER, and I have AYA NEO, GPD Win Max 2021, & Steam Deck 512GB on preorder. What a time to be a gamer! 😁
I remember the first time I played the gameboy in the 90's I was totaly blown away to be able to play multiple games on the same hardware 🤩
I will always consider the gray little brick my favorite console as it was also my first. It shaped my childhood and forever change my perception of what a portable console could be.
You explained polarization so so well. Great work LowSpecGamer!
Love your work mate. thanks for the free videos. I know alot of what you talk about already but the way you tell the story, how well you put emphasis on the topic and the artwork
Hey this lowspeclore is awesome, man. This series makes me appreciate more what gaming technology that I have right now, even though it's not a newer or better one. Thanks, I learn a bit of history about gaming because of your videos!
Yes, I would LOVE to hear about Game And Watch history!
Battery life was amazing on the Game Boy. No color display, but the display was still descent for the time. The games were so much fun. Launching it with Tetris didn't hurt either. Nintendo is a master at taking something that isn't cutting edge and still making it successful.
Just came from your other video. It shows that you have passion for this. Keep doing what makes you happy.
If you keep making these types of video I'll keep watching, your older different content doesn't matter as any retro hand-held, console or computer is relevant to this channel.
Do what you love because that's what makes you happy 😁
Mighty fine ad integration there at the end
I suppose I should have learned by now, but I still find it amazing how many business projects succeed in spite of the egos of those involved rather than because of them.
"Let's make this thing as good/cheap as possible" is a pretty unambiguous and reasonable plan. But somehow it regularly ends up as:
"This thing had better be a reflection of my ego, all other considerations are of no relevance."
As a (thank God!) retired doctor if I had practiced medicine like that I would have left a trail of corpses behind me and would likely be in prison by now. I guess the business obsession with tempting doctors away from medicine is based in "Here's an intelligent, motivated, very hard working person who won't allow their ego to screw up what they are doing."
Half the reason of me starting this series is being fascinated of how many of the characteristic of iconic gadgets came down to ego decisions.
So interesting to learn what goes on behind the scenes of our most iconic consoles.
The GameGear was not developed by anyone at Nintendo. It is literally the same hardware that already existed as the Sega Master System since the mid 80's, only miniaturized and with an expanded color pallette. I think there may have been possible translation errors or language barriers standing between LowSpec, Florent Gorges, and Yoshihiro Taki, which in this case may have made for some misinformation. While it is a remote possibility that the Citizen-made LCD display and interface Sega used were similar to Taki's fake design, I highly doubt it was anything but a coincidence. The actual guts of the GameGear itself are a Sega product based on existing Sega hardware (the Master System) that had been on the market for the better part of a decade at that point.
I like how you interview the author who translates Japanese into French and your copy of the book is in Spanish.
And LOL at the girl who is photobombing the TV clip at 11:19. She is clearly just messing with those books to get herself into the scene, and it looks like she is fascinated and amazed by the whole thing like someone who has seen an alien or a mega celebrity.
Been some months since I last watched a video of yours (gotta love the YT algorithm) but damn your production quality has shot up. Great video!
Ugh I hate the lets make employees and departments fight against one another, I've worked at places liek that, it's not that productive, and all it does it create a sort of high-tension mildly-toxic atmosphere which usually causes high-turnover rate with employees ditching the job and taking a better one. One of my fondest memories was at a call center where they tried to pen employees against one another for sales and it just got stupid and many people left. Another memory I have is at retail where at the end of the day they'd rank employees and make some sort of job security threats to lower rank employees and all that did was create a pretty toxic atmosphere that encouraged lying and cheating and breaking the rules (stealing transactions to steal commissions which is theft, sneakily going in to get the customer to give you the transaction instead of the employee it should have gone to), one employee even started to break the law by applying all customers for a credit card while lying to them and saying their not applying for anything, it's just normal checkout questions. All just to get his numbers higher, again, most employees ended up leaving anyways. I've never seen that kindo f work atmosphere workout very well and in the case of the employee who broke the law for better numbers, could seriously hurt your business in legal trouble. Find other ways to get your numbers up instead of turning your workers on one another, creating a bad place to work in, and losing your workers.
I wasn't a fan of that monochrome low refresh LCD but I still enjoyed the unit.
I had a Game Gear. You got the better compromise.
I remember the first time I saw a Game Gear. It made me want to throw my Gameboy into the river. That is, until the kid that had it ran out of batteries right in the middle of a Sonic run. It just powered off. That's it. No more Sonic for you.
From my experience, people make that into a way bigger issue than it was. Back then every third party manufacturer around was making cheap car chargers, extra wall adapters, and rechargeable battery packs. There was no way my parents were buying even enough AAs for GameBoy, but plugging them into a car lighter or using my crappy, off-brand battery pack I had unlimited gaming anyway.
@@infasis 6 batteries for the GameGear. And it was too big to be conveniently portable anyway. We didn't have any outlets or car chargers in school, after school, on the bus, or even in the back seat of the car.
@@customsongmaker it actually was only a little bigger than the GameBoy. I think these days more people just remember the Pocket and Color better.
(The first time I actually played my Pocket was in the theater waiting for Mortal Kombat the movie to start and I remember being amazed that I could actually see the screen with just the pre-movie lights. It wasn't color or including lights, but the contrast and everything was way better then the original. That revision was fantastic.)
@@infasis the Game Gear is 21cm wide. The original GameBoy is 9cm wide.
@@customsongmaker Lol oh my bad I was just trying to reminisce about videogames and share perspective as someone who was there and owned all this stuff. I don't really care to argue over which ones were better though, since I enjoyed both.