Game Boy

The Game Boy was a handheld system manufactured by Nintendo. Released worldwide in 1989, it was the company's second portable system overall, following the Game & Watch lines of earlier years. Featuring a black and green LCD screen with an 8-way directional pad, two system control buttons, and two custom action buttons, players could play games stored on interchangeable cartridges (Game Paks) on 4 AA batteries for a stated 15 hours of run time. It was the first of four systems in a family produced for a total of 12 years, before it was ultimately discontinued and supplanted by its immediate successor, the Game Boy Advance. It was by far Nintendo's most successful handheld of its era.

Within the family, Nintendo released a variant model, the Game Boy Color, on or around 1998. This model upgraded various internal components to accommodate specially-designed games that took advantage of its foremost feature: a 16-bit color LCD capable of displaying up to 56 simultaneous colors per frame; yet it remained compatible with the original monochrome version's games. While Nintendo itself used variations in cartridge color and shape to identify Color-enabled and Color-exclusive games, other vendors reissued certain of their games to be adaptable to the system. The Game Boy Color also allowed the player to select from several preset color palettes for those games left unmodified.

Nintendo also released two separate add-ons for its home consoles that permitted the use of Game Boy Game Paks on each console. The first, dubbed the Super Game Boy, was a pass-through adapter released late in the SNES lifecycle. The second, the Game Boy Player, was a sidecar hardware kit for the GameCube that came in the middle of its lifecycle.