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Nintendo Game Boy

Nintendo's Game Boy was released in 1989 and was an immediate success, putting the pack-in game Tetris in the hands of children, office workers, moms, and nearly everybody else as well. Nintendo dominated handheld gaming in the 1990s and early 2000s with the Game Boy and its later iterations, with pretty much direct throughlines and wide compatibility across different variations.

Game Boy variations

Nintendo released a variety of different variations on the Game Boy handheld over the years, including some add-ons for their home consoles that enabled playing Game Boy games on a television.

Year	Name	Description
1989	Game Boy	The original Game Boy, with classic green and grey screen
1994	Super Game Boy	Game Boy hardware in a Super Famicom/Super Nintendo cartridge that allowed for playing Game Boy games on a television
1995	Game Boy Bros./Play it Loud!	Later colorfully-shelled variations of the original Game Boy
1996	Game Boy Pocket	Smaller AAA-powered Game Boy with slightly larger (and actually black-and-white instead of green) screen
April 14 1998	Game Boy Light	Game Boy Pocket-style Game Boy with electroluminescent backlight, only released in Japan
late 1998	Game Boy Color	The first Game Boy with significantly different specifications, plays in color and at double the max clock speed of the original
2001	Game Boy Advance	Reformatted 32-bit Game Boy with backwards compatibility

Game Boy accessories

With the Game Boy being a huge success world-wide with entirely interchangeable hardware between regions (remember that the Famicom, the North American and some PAL region NESes, and some other PAL region NESes all had different controller ports/standards, not to mention television standards!), a wide range of accessories were released by Nintendo and third-parties to enhance the usability of the Game Boy

Year	Name	Description
1989	Game Link Cable	Nintendo's head-to-head cable for connecting multiple Game Boys
1990	Four Player Adapter	Four-player hub for game link games
1992	Game Genie
2001	Pelican Monster Brain	Cheat device for first and second generation Pokémon games that also includes a save backup feature