The heaviest competition it had was SEGA's Game Gear. The Game Boy was inexpensive, conveniently smaller, used less power than any of the other portables on the market, had NES games, and that is what the consumer wanted  Who would have guessed, and I don't think that even Nintendo realized it, that the work of Gunpei Yokoi would result in the biggest selling and most successful portable gaming console in the history of video games. No portable has topped it yet.
      It was first priced at $109 USD, when it dropped to $89 USD I had to have one. It was my first portable cart based gaming system. It was not the first cart based gaming system in portable video games, the Microvision by Milton Bradley holds that title. But Gameboy was the first successful cart based portable.
      I have fond memories of sitting out in the yard, in a lawn chair relaxing, and playing a game of Tetris or Nemesis on my Original Gameboy. The batteries seemed to last forever. It was very fascinating technology and fun. I will have to say that it was at that point that I was totally hooked on portable gaming.

     I have not pulled out my "Original Game Boy" for some time. Mine is still in very good shape. My niece was over recently and had her own "Original Game Boy" that her parents had picked up for her at a used video game shop. She is only 3 years old. It looked as if it had been through a war, maybe several of them. But amazingly it still played as well as if it was new. These things are built pretty good, built like a tank.
      This system has, if you can find them all, literally hundreds of games for it. And I am not exaggerating on that, not even a little. What I am saying is that because of the long life span of this system there are a ton of games, more than any of the other portables out there. The most amazing thing about the games for this system is that I can get up from typing this and drive to my local video game store and still find used games available for purchase. You cannot find any of the competitor's games like that! At least not in my local area. You can still find them at yard sells and flea markets, but not in a Game store.
     What really added to the popularity of this system is the very deep game library. Anyone can find something within their interest on the Game Boy. Shooting, racing, puzzle, arcade, RPG, sports, platformer, you name it, it is there. Third party support was very heavy for it. It even has a 3D game called "Face Ball 2000." You ran through a maze and it was multi player through the link cable. It plays like the game Doom only you play as a Happy Face ball. From Tetris to Donkey Kong Land, this little system has it all. There are a lot of ports from the NES, so you might even find an old favorite here. Many of the games, though simple in graphics, has that addicting quality of game play.
      The graphics and sounds are typical of NES 8 bit gaming of that period. The graphics are as good as 4 shades of gray can get. As an example Donkey Kong Land looks great, better than most games on the system. With simple hardware, the focus was game play and the game library shows it. The games are still great fun to play even though they are not up to the present generation standards in graphics and sound.
     At the end of its lifespan, which overlapped the new upgraded Pocket version, came the game that help push the Game Boy into bigger sells. That game was Pokemon. The successors to this system probably received the biggest push in sells from this game series alone.
     Nintendo, at one point, came out with a converter for the SNES that enabled you to play your Game Boy carts on the TV. It had a new technology that gave you the choice to pick different color palettes that assigned colors to the four different shades of gray giving you color for the first time for the GB games.. Later this technology would be used in the GB Color. After the Super Game Boy converter was released, a select number of games began to come out that had special color palettes designed for them. Our desire and taste for color portable Nintendo games grew even stronger. We wanted more, we wanted a color Gameboy. We had a need.