The design philosophy and engineering of the Gameboy including energy efficiency, screen breakthroughs, audio, and memory management.
The Launch of the Original Game Boy | 0:00:00 - 0:00:40
The original Game Boy was launched in 1989 and was received with mixed reviews. While it’s success is ingrained in our cultural memory now, when it was launched it was a technologically inferior product. The Game Boy was designed to be a cheap, low powered, portable gaming system. It was limited in many ways. No backlight for the screen, and incredibly low installed memory available for coding games. Review magazines of the time viewed these features as a negative, but these compromises in design were exactly why the Gameboy succeeded.
The Insane Engineering of the Nintendo Game Boy | 0:00:40 - 0:01:40
This was a console for the masses. Even with these limitations, engineers and programmers came up with ingenious methods to create games that have not only stood the test of time, but launched some of the most valuable franchises in the history of the entertainment industry, i.e., TV shows, movies, toys and even theme parks.
The Game Boy’s simple design borrows much of its success from its older brother, the NES. A straightforward and familiar controller setup, Nintendo knew that size Size and weight were the most important factors for a system to be portable. The Gameboy was almost half the size and half the weight of its competitors. Just under 15cm in height and 3cm thick, it weighed only 220 grams.
This 35 year old console doesn’t feel oversized like the mobile phones of this era. Gameboy focused on user experience from the get go, an ethos that has defined Nintendo to this very day. But how did Nintendo manage to make the Gameboy so much smaller and lighter?
Nintendo’s Battery Efficiency Advantage | 0:01:40 - 0:04:40
To begin, one of the primary technological limitations of the early 90s was the ubiquity of alkaline batteries. To our Gen Z audience, these may just be the batteries replaced in TV remotes once in a blue moon, yet in the 90s, they were in virtually everything. Costing about 50 cents each, or about $1.16 in today’s money, I would spend all my pocket money on these to power my Gameboy. These batteries were large, bulky, non-rechargeable, and expensive. Minimizing their usage was therefore a strategic move to give Nintendo an edge over their competitors.
The Gameboy’s main competitor, the Sega Game Gear, used 6 AA batteries, while the Gameboy only needed half that. Naturally, this made the Gameboy more compact and cost-effective for the consumer. Especially when you consider that the Gameboy’s batteries lasted significantly longer, despite having less energy available. The Game Gear’s 6 AA battery supplied 4.5 watts to power its electronics, draining the batteries in just 3 hours at a cost of about $2.30 per hour of gameplay. In contrast, the Gameboy, with its 4 batteries, allowed up to 30 hours of gameplay, costing just 16 cents per hour.
Imagine explaining to my father who recalls when the first car arrived in his village that I needed money for a new set of batteries every two weeks. For the Sega Game Gear, that would have been closer to daily. Recognizing and navigating this limitation was one of the keys to Nintendo’s success. The Game Gear sported a fully-lit colored LCD screen, while the Game Boy had a monochrome screen that displayed only four shades of green and lacked a backlight making it impossible to see in darkness. The Game Gear might have garnered better reviews with its power-hungry electronics, but it was the Game Boy that won over customers with a system that drew just 0.7 watts.
The Gameboy’s engineers were resolved to use low-powered screens. Despite the screen being a significant part of our nostalgia today, it almost led to the cancellation of the entire project. The best available low-powered LCD screens in the 80s worked by having a passive matrix of electrodes control a grid of pixels. A pixel consisted of liquid crystals sandwiched between perpendicular polarizing filters.
At rest, these crystals twisted the light that bounced off the backplate, permitting the light to pass through the filters. In response to voltage changes, these crystals would untwist, allowing less light to pass through.
Super Twisted Pneumatics Screen, Bootup Logo, and Tile Graphics | 0:04:40 - 0:12:20
Early prototypes of the original Gameboy utilized liquid crystals that naturally twisted at 90 degrees when at rest. When voltage was applied, these structures would gradually untwist, and the amount of transmitted light was proportionate to the applied voltage. However, the degree of untwist was insufficient for the low-power passive grid matrix displays used in early versions of the Gameboy. This was mainly because the difference in required voltage to switch pixels on and off was too large. Consequently, this resulted in low contrast, and the problem was compounded by neighboring pixels being inadvertently activated due to voltage leakage, thus producing blurred images.
When Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, tested this version of the Gameboy, he discontinued the entire project. However, in the late 1980s, Sharp perfected a Super Twisted Pneumatic LCD screen, which used crystals that twisted between 180 and 270 degrees, enabling a sharper pixel transition between on and off. This advancement resulted in clearer black and white pixels, with the Gameboy’s green hue emanating from the polarizing filter’s tint.
Interestingly, the Gameboy produced four shades of green by rapidly pulsing pixels on and off, with faster pulses rendering darker shades, and slower pulses, lighter shades. We cannot perceive this pulsing, but cameras can capture it.
The priority assigned to keeping the system affordable, however, caused limitations in other areas. For instance, the Gameboy’s CPU could only handle 64 kilobytes of memory. Programming a game like Super Mario Land required creative problem-solving, given the limited memory. Included in the Gameboy’s functions were math and logic operations that took place within its 4 kilobytes of memory. Some of these processes read from the Gameboy itself, whereas others read from the inserted game cartridge.
The Gameboy featured a nostalgia-inducing logo and a series of numbers that were crucial during the boot up process. The logo would be displayed on the screen as the numbers were analyzed and compared. If a faulty connection resulted in incorrect data reading, the Gameboy would not start. The reason for using the iconic Nintendo logo during this byte-by-byte comparison was to discourage the production of bootleg games. Unlicensed game developers were forced to display Nintendo’s logo, which, without Nintendo’s express permission, was a violation of trademark laws.
However, dedicating individual bytes per pixel to display images, as was done with the Nintendo logo, was impractical for game design on the 160 by 144 pixel Gameboy screen.
To address this issue and create graphical content, the Gameboy’s developers used tiles, a square 8 by 8 pixel patterns arranged in specific configurations. The system’s CPU would first compile a background made up of 32 by 32 tiles, then place a viewing box atop this background, which was moved about for smooth scrolling.
Mobile objects such as characters were called sprites. These were essentially tiles that could be manipulated. Larger characters were comprised of sets of four sprites. Once the frame was ready to be visualized, the Gameboy would initiate a line scan to set pixel values onto the screen. Programmers were allowed to pause the scanning mid-frame to adjust the view window’s position, which facilitated the creation of animations.
This design approach extended to the console’s audio system as well.
Music, Sound Channels, Chip Control, and Memory Banks | 0:12:20 - 0:15:00
The Gameboy was equipped with a single speaker, controlled by four channels: two square wave tone generators, one white noise maker, and a separate channel capable of loading any custom waveform stored in the game cartridge. We could create a tune by directing the desired frequencies and timings to the square wave channels, and then add a triangle 5 waveform to the 4th channel, complete with its unique frequency and timing parameters.
To top it off, we would incorporate a bit of percussion using the white noise channel for an element of rhythm. This sound composition technique has instilled a nostalgic love for the Gameboy in many of us. Personally, I still have the Pokemon intro jingle fresh in my mind.
However, games are more than just picture and sound; they are full-fledged narratives needing data and space for logical progression. The Gameboy could handle 65,000 numbers, but only half of them were read from the cartridge itself. This limitation posed no issue for simpler games like Tetris, where the game instructions and data required less than 32,000 numbers.
Given data restrictions common in the 1980s, game developers adopted a technique known as memory banking. This involved dividing game data into smaller sections, or banks, allowing the game to switch dynamically between different memory banks, thereby enabling access to a larger pool of data than the original hardware could support.
For instance, the Gameboy could only read 32 kilobytes of data, yet Pokemon Red and Blue required a 373-kilobyte memory. Hence, the data needed to be segmented into 44 banks, allowing the game to seamlessly transition between the memory banks, loading and unloading relevant data as the player explores different environments.
This process was facilitated by a dedicated chip inside the cartridge. For example, when a player opened the Pokedex, the chip would access bank 2B, where each of the 151 Pokemon had a 100-character description ready to be displayed on-screen via tiles. If the player visited a store, the chip would switch to bank 1 to provide the prices of each item. The game continuously manages these memory banks dynamically as players navigate towns, locations, and activities.
Nintendo’s Impact on Gaming Design Evolution | 0:15:00 -
Nintendo engineers made a choice that enabled consoles to reach gamers worldwide. For many, including me, it was the first encounter with video games. With a launch price of only $89, it was significantly cheaper than its two main competitors, making it much more affordable. This player-first ethos defined Nintendo as a company, while competitors focused on increasing hardware specifications, Nintendo emphasized accessibility. The Nintendo Wii, with its motion controllers, introduced gaming to hundreds of thousands of older users unfamiliar with standard game controls.