Nintendo's boss cancelled the Game Boy, and its creator quietly kept going
In the summer of 1988, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi looked at a Game Boy prototype, found the screen unreadable and cancelled it on the spot. Designer Gunpei Yokoi refused to give up. Three months later a better display won approval, and the humble grey handheld went on to sell, with its colour successor, nearly 119 million units.
The team behind it, Nintendo's R&D1, had already made the Game & Watch handhelds, but by 1983 Japanese sales were slipping and an in-house rival group had launched the Family Computer. On June 10, 1987, Yokoi told his team that Yamauchi wanted a Game & Watch successor for under 10,000 yen. They chose a dot-matrix screen from day one and codenamed the project Dot Matrix Game, which survives in the model number DMG-01. Yokoi's guiding idea was lateral thinking with withered technology: clever uses of cheap, proven parts. His assistant Satoru Okada pushed for something closer to a portable NES with swappable cartridges, and after a heated meeting Yokoi let him lead.
The screen caused endless trouble. Sharp's early displays ghosted badly, so a deal went to Citizen in September 1987, only for politics to push the work back toward Sharp, which could not deliver. Colleagues mocked the project as DameGame, from a Japanese word for hopeless. After the cancellation, Yokoi learned of a secret Sharp super-twisted nematic display with a wider viewing angle. Yamauchi, perhaps influenced by delays to the Super NES, approved it. The costlier screen pushed the price to 12,500 yen, so headphones and batteries were included to make it feel worth it.
It launched in Japan on April 21, 1989, and the first 300,000 sold out within two weeks. North America followed on July 31 at $89.95 with a $20 million marketing push. Okada insisted on development kits for outside studios, and the team spotted that Tetris, then being ported to the NES, would be perfect for a handheld. Bundling it in the West drew players far beyond the usual gamers.
Critics sniped at the monochrome screen and modest processor, but price, battery life and a huge library won out, and Pokémon kept it popular late into the 1990s. When discontinued in 2003, the Game Boy family was the best-selling console ever and remains fourth as of 2025, credited with making handheld gaming a mass market.
Source: Game Boy
