The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy

Early video game engineers were absolutely cracked. Getting as much as you can from every byte is a lost art form.

Can't wait for the part where he explains how the Gameboy's blunt nose cone design holds up to mach 25 reentry.

It’s amazing to think that the Gameboy was a low-powered budget game console when it appeared in 1989 and yet it was an expensive and coveted piece of tech for me as an Eastern European kid in the mid-90s. I was so happy to get a Gameboy in 1996 after years of saving my pocket money! When I saw a Sega Game Gear my classmate had (whose family emigrated to Canada and then came back for some reason) I wasn’t even envious, it was straight up sci-fi. I couldn’t believe that such a backlit color screen could exist in the real world.

My parents always had to read me what to do during Link to the Past because I couldn't read yet. My 86-year-old grandfather now uses my Gameboy and plays Tetris every day. It still works.I also still play Gameboy, but on emulators.

The 3D art in this episode is absolutely epic!

The production quality in this video is insane. From the 8 bit pixel graphics for explaining the display to the game boy model that I could only tell wasn’t real because it was floating in separate pieces; it’s been so cool to watch this channel grow.

My grandfather was one of the electrical engineers that designed gameboy, and I loved the small stories he would tell me about designing this when I played with it. They weren’t anything technical, but stories about how he sometimes clashed and sometimes worked together with his team to design what they believed as the perfect portable gaming device. One of the best story I still remember was when my father bought me the Wii U and how my grandfather told me that Wii U was designed by one of his juniors(?) that he mentored. He would tell me how his junior would again, sometimes clash with him, sometimes work together as a team. But I knew he was unique to my grandfather as he was crying unlike when we told all the other stories. When my grandfather eventually died, that junior came to his funeral and I, as a child just went up to him and told him about how grandfather described him. I can’t remember if he was crying, but now that I look back at it he probably was and trying to hide it. When it was time to bury my grandfather, me and the junior put the gameboy I played with as a child in the coffin together. That junior would also go on to design the Switch. Sorry if my English is not as good, I wanted to share how a small gaming device has so many stories around it, and how it brought people together.

I don't need 50 Shades of Grey. I only need 4 shades of green. 😍

What made the Gameboy superior was that it was actually doing what people bought it for. it was small enough to fit in a pocket, sturdy enough to withstand rough handling, efficient enough to last a whole road trip and cheap enough people felt comfortable taking it with them in places where it could get damaged.

I left my gameboy on pause overnight to finish Super Mario Land. That thing was a beast. I got it in 1990, still works.

Insane production values. Excellent video. I’m a 25 year VFX veteran and can fully appreciate the amount or work this video required.

This was one of the best videos about the Game Boy's hardware. Few notes: 1: channel 3 is the wave channel and channel 4 is the noise channel (not sure why they were swapped in the video) 2: that explanation of Game Boy rendering is overly simplified. 3: if you wanted to store the Game Boy screen as bitmap data, you could! And it would take up 5760 Bytes, or 8.7% of the entire addressable memory. (144 * 160 * 2 (bit) * 1/8 (byte/bit) = 5760 Bytes) 4: the trademark defense didn't work as it was not enforceable by law (Sega v. Accolade) 5: Game Boy read the Nintendo logo twice first time to display it, second time to check it, some unlicensed games sent their own logo when it was first read to display their own logo and sent Nintendo logo data for the checking process.

Regarding the trademark defense mentioned at 9:02, it turns out Sega did a similar thing for their Genesis / Mega Drive system, but when they took Accolade to court over it, they lost, establishing the precedent that it's not trademark infringement if technical aspects of the system force you to use that trademark. But of course that was after the introduction of the Game Boy, so Nintendo wouldn't have had that precedent at the time. Still, it's an annoying thing for homebrewers, who have to put a big "just kidding, not actually licensed by Nintendo" screen after the boot up sequence.

While this was a fantastically put together short documentary, I must say I was more blown away by the photorealistic, pristine as hell 3D renders of everything that were presented on screen. From the Gameboy itself, the Game Gear, and all the way to the AAA Energizer battery.

Even to this day, economics and convenience are something a lot of tech companies forget about when designing new hardware. Most people don’t want bleeding edge devices, they want something practical and durable that makes sense within their budget.

Gunpei Yokoi was so pivotal in establishing the Nintendo philosophy in its most important early years. He not only established the philosophy of hardware design that made the NES and GameBoy so popular and so profitable, but also in game design by mentoring Shigeru Miyamoto, who still practices the philosophies of his mentor

Meanwhile current game developer: ok we will use 100GB of your storage space, and we need 32GB of memory, latest gen CPU, and 4080 at minimum to run our game. Oh, and there's 65GB update that you need to install. Optimization? Whats that?

Really fantastic video! The little animations made it all super easy to understand. Thanks for the upload!

The way you animated the GameBoy and the use of authentic clips from its time made this video a very enjoyable watch. Thank you!

A real engineer finally giving a deep-dive of Game Boy's technological marvel, and the constraints of Nintendo engineers were working on. Another outstanding gem from this channel.