The IC monopoly is completed by Sharp on the secondary board, where a Sharp IR3E02 IC is found beneath a flex cable connected to the display. Judging by its position on the board, this was most probably an LCD voltage generator IC for the display.
What is intriguing about these findings is that Sharp had achieved major design wins in a single product that would end up selling in the millions of units over its lifetime.
The Game Boy's dot-matrix display, in all its gray-black and green glory, was a simple reflective LCD panel with 160 x 144 pixels. The screen was capable of displaying four shades of gray-black hues and, despite looking quite archaic today, had enough contrast differentiation to make characters and scenes on the screen look impressive at the time.
Reversed engineering schematic of the circuitry behind the Nintendo Game Boy. Source: www.devrs.com
Click on image to enlarge. |
Though the technology of the Game Boy was state of the art for its time, what established the system as the preeminent handheld portable was a shrewd business move by Nintendo. Through some clever negotiations and well-researched lawsuits, Nintendo scored a coup by being the only company to license what was, at the time, the world's most popular videogame: Tetris.
As a result, Game Boy units flew off the store shelves. According to Giles Slade's book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, Tetris alone brought Nintendo more than $80 million in revenue. Figuring a price of $35 a unit for the game, you can do the math and estimate how many units of the actual console were sold. To this day, my colleagues and I still hum the "Nintendo Tetris Theme" whenever we have some timely, menial work to get done.
The Nintendo Game Boy was a success from the moment it launched, warding off numerous contenders throughout its nine years on the market. Atari released the Lynx in the same year as the Game Boy but failed to make any impact because of hardware issues and a lack of support from game developers (most having chosen to align with Nintendo). Nintendo also fended off competition from systems such as NEC's TurboExpress (released in 1990) and the Neo Geo Pocket (released in 1998).
Only Sega's Game Gear (released in 1990) was able to make a significant dent in Nintendo's market dominance, selling 11 million systems over an eight-year span. Compared with the 75 million-plus Game Boy units sold worldwide, Game Gear rarely posed a threat to Nintendo, but Sega was happy to run a distant second.
Perhaps what was most amazing about the Game Boy's run was that the competition all featured color screens and, in some cases, much faster processors and better graphics--and yet Nintendo still outsold them. The common denominator among the Game Boy's competitors was that design issues and a lack of game developer support had resulted in a short shelf life.
