The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy

Links to everything I do:

Credits:
Producer/Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus
Head of Production: Mike Ridolfi
Editor: Dylan Hennessy
Writer/Research: Josi Gold
Animator: Eli Prenten
Animator: Stijn Orlans
Sound and Production Coordinator: Graham Haerther
Sound: Donovan Bullen
Thumbnail: Simon Buckmaster
Head of Moral: Shia LeWoof

References:

Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images
Thank you to AP Archive for access to their archival footage.

Thank you to my patreon supporters: Abdullah Alotaibi, Adam Flohr, Henning Basma, Hank Green, William Leu, Tristan Edwards, Ian Dundore, John & Becki Johnston. Nevin Spoljaric, Jason Clark, Thomas Barth, Johnny MacDonald, Stephen Foland, Alfred Holzheu, Abdulrahman Abdulaziz Binghaith, Brent Higgins, Dexter Appleberry, Alex Pavek, Marko Hirsch, Mikkel Johansen, Hibiyi Mori. Viktor Józsa, Ron Hochsprung

[RySoRy]

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

[douglascodes]

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

[HappyGM-R]

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.

[DoctorZacharySmith]

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.

[mugemobi]

The 3D art in this episode is absolutely epic!

[xpeterson]

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.

[Simon-jhhf]

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.

[kodoyama]

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

[MrMarinus]

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.

[alicethegrinsecatz]

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

[lordkrythic]

I used to wait until the batteries were low, and then switch them out with the batteries in the remote to the televisions throughout the house. My mom would go out and buy jumbo battery packs because the tv remotes "strangely died", and said jumbo battery packs would mysteriously go missing shortly afterwards. Fond memories.

[bananachild]

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.

[flipsolo]

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.

[WaterGuns]

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.

[ruediix]

The use of tile based graphics actually goes back to a hack on early computer. Most early video generators allowed you to move the pointer register for the text glyphs to move it from the system ROM to writable memory. This is a feature intended initially to allow using different fonts.

Developers (a field mostly filled with hobbyists at the time) realized this could be used to create various image tiles for the games, and of course for icons in productivity applications.

By the time video games were being commercialized and computers went from the hobbyist minicomputers to household microcomputers, video processor developers had noted this method and designed their chips to take advantage of the feature to a greater extent.

[Selendeki]

Most viewers will not appreciate how well researched this video is. I've dabbled quite a bit with coding GameBoy emulators and I'm extremely impressed by the information provided. And the production quality was just out of this world, well done!

[ShaneGoodson]

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

[leftyfourguns]

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

[Xerionius]

Absolutely incredible video. Never would have thought that the engineering behind the Gameboy would be so interesting and the 3D animations are amazing.

[prisonbread]

The visualizations in this video are TOP NOTCH. You really didn't have to go that hard, but as a 3d animator I am so glad you did. Really well done.