GBC (Gameboy Colour)
Roms

The Gameboy single-handedly built the portable console industry. Previous to it the only portable systems were LCD keychain things which only played 1 game (any one familiar with Mr. Game & Watch in Super Smash Bros. Melee can guess what these looked like). These were a minor success, particularly for Nintendo and so their lead engineer designer, Gunpey Yokoi (rest his soul) built the all ready mega-popular NES into a small cut down package, known as the Gameboy. It was ugly, had monochrome graphics (tinted green to give the illusion of more colours) and had pretty bad screen visibility except in good lighting conditions. Despite these issues it exploded when it was released in 1989 for 2 very good reasons: the battery life was excellent (4 batteries lasting up to 30 hours) and it had the definitive version of that horribly addictive game known as Tetris as a pack-in. This was true mass-market bliss and both adults and kids were seen using them (almost 50% of adults buying them were buying for themselves). A few variations were released; most notably the Gameboy Pocket, which was much smaller, the Super Gameboy, which was essentially an emulator for the SNES which could also add colour, and the Gameboy light which was only released in Japan but had a nicer finish and a back-light. Its failure is likely responsible for the lack of a backlight until the GBA SP.

The final advancement of the Gameboy was the Gameboy colour in 1998. It was slightly more powerful than the original which meant that a very few games for it would not work on the older machine, but more importantly it had much better visibility and incorporated colour which had been common on competitor’s machines for years. This made the system even more popular than it had been with the recent influx of players of the massively popular Pokemon games (which were excellent despite many people saying that they were too cutesy). The system was finally discontinued in 2001 with the release of the 32 bit GBA (skipping over the 16 bit era entirely). At this point we know that at least 100,000,000 units were sold in total over all 3 revisions, making it the single most popular system ever, even more popular than the massive NES.

Picks: Tetris, Pokemon, Super Mario Land, Legend of Zelda Links Awakening (better than Ocarina of Time if you ask me, though no-one does), Game & Watch Gallery.