Happy 32nd to Game Boy, which arrived on Japanese shelves April 21, 1989. (It would hit North America two months later in July, and Europe a year after that.) It wasn’t the first portable. It wasn’t even the best portable. But it profoundly transformed our lives nonetheless. (1/?

The Game Boy’s success proved a lot of things. One was that people wanted to game on the go, which sounds “duh” only because it paved the way for something we take for granted in the smartphone era. (GOD this box art is great) (2/

It also proved that customers didn’t care about specs. The Lynx and Game Gear were superior devices. But Game Boy boasted the superior library: Mario & other classics. You could play games you actually wanted to play. Turns out this was way, way more important than hardware. (3/

Which is good because that hardware was a mess. Slow processor. No color. No backlight. The screen was a blurry green soup at any speed. That screen so tormented designer Gunpei Yokoi that he literally nearly died of stress during the development. (4/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdbx7/how-gunpei-yokoi-reinvented-nintendo

But in every other way his creation was an incredible success. In comparison to the jet blacks and sleek looks of rival machines it was soft, rounded, kawaii. It was ergonomic, practically begging to be played. And indestructible. One even survived a Gulf War bombing. (5/

That combo of convenience and ease of use got it into some truly unusual places for a video game system, such as the White House (where Bush played while recovering from surgery) and later Air Force One. Talk about bipartisan appeal. (6/

Hillary wasn’t alone — by 1995, Nintendo estimated 46% of GB users were female (as compared to 29% for NES). This parity was another major breakthrough for the console, proving games appealed beyond age and gender lines. (7/

But perhaps most important of all was that link cable, something Yokoi refused to compromise on when he made the device. It made the Game Boy most folks’ window to portable multiplayer gaming. (8/

Here’s where it gets interesting. Steve Jobs was a keen student of Japanese consumer tech. Worshipped Sony, obsessed with the Walkman. The Game Boy naturally didn’t escape his gaze. Apple’s FireWire connector was inspired by Game Link. (9/

In a way, the iPhone synthesizes lessons from Walkman and Game Boy. (Tellingly, Jobs initially wanted to call the iMac the “MacMan” as an homage before being convinced otherwise.) Tempting to wonder if we’d have experienced smartphone revolution as quickly without WM & GB. (10