Satoru Okada in the context of "Game Boy Advance"

The Game Boy is a handheld game console developed by Nintendo, launched in the Japanese home market on April 21, 1989, followed by North America later that year and other territories from 1990 onwards. Following the success of the Game & Watch single-game handhelds, Nintendo developed the Game Boy to be a portable console, with interchangeable cartridges. The concept proved highly successful, and the Game Boy line became a cultural icon of the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Game Boy was designed by the Nintendo Research & Development 1 team, led by Gunpei Yokoi and Satoru Okada. The device features a dot-matrix display, a D-pad, four game buttons, a single speaker, and uses Game Pak cartridges. Its two-toned gray design included black, blue, and magenta accents, with softly rounded corners and a distinctive curved bottom-right edge. At launch in Japan it was sold as a standalone console, but in North America and Europe it came bundled with the wildly popular Tetris which fueled sales.

The Microvision (aka Milton Bradley Microvision or MB Microvision) is the first handheld game console that used interchangeable cartridges and in that sense is reprogrammable. It was released by the Milton Bradley Company in November 1979 for a retail price of $49.99, equivalent to $221.00 in 2025.

The Microvision was designed by Jay Smith, the engineer who later designed the Vectrex video game console. The Microvision's combination of portability and a cartridge-based system led to moderate success, with Smith Engineering grossing $15 million in the first year of the system's release. However, its small game library, its small screen, and a lack of support from established home video game companies led to its discontinuation in 1981. According to Satoru Okada, the former head of Nintendo's R&D1 Department, the Microvision inspired the Game Boy, the follow-up to Game & Watch, after Nintendo designed around Microvision's limitations.