Mad2,
Please read through this article with particular attention to the final paragraph.
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Nearly 80 million Units Sold Worldwide as of May
Decade-Old Game Boy Still Popular
By Sarah Juon Redmond, Wash.
12:46 PM EST Fri., July 16, 1999
Turning 10 years old in August, Game Boy is a little like Yoshi, one of Nintendo's most endearing game characters: It has more than one life.
As of May, Nintendo had sold nearly 80 million Game Boy units worldwide in all versions. Consumers snapped up 7.5 million units of Game Boy Color (GBC) since its debut last November. Of those sales, the United States accounted for 2.5 million units.
"If you look at your normal life cycle of a product, [Game Boy] should have died long ago, yet it has continued to have an upward swing," said Perrin Kaplan, director of corporate affairs for Nintendo, Redmond. "For May, sales were up 350 percent over May of last year for Game Boy. And sales were up last year over the previous year."
Not only are the diminutive 3 x 5-inch handheld portables flying off the shelves faster than ever, but game publishers have been jumping on the new GBC platform in droves.
Since last fall, about 100 titles have appeared specifically for GBC, according to Jim Merrick, manager of software engineering for Nintendo. Dozens more are slated to be released this summer and fall by industry leaders such as THQ, Acclaim Entertainment, Activision, Crave Entertainments, Mindscape, Midway, Konami and Infogrames.
That is in addition to 450 current Game Boy titles that can be played on GBC.
At a time when flashy 64-bit play consoles and 400MHz computers dominate the industry's game platforms, what accounts for the renewed enthusiasm among game publishers for this humble 8MHz portable with a screen the size of a Post-It and a sound system that resembles a mosquito trapped in a can?
Game Boy's appeal, Merrick said, goes back to the original design by its creator, Gunpei Yokoi. "Mr. Yokoi designed a system that so perfectly addresses the handheld market," Merrick said. "The controller layout is intuitive for small or big hands. It has good battery life. The games are inexpensive."
Nintendo has done its part to keep the Game Boy momentum going by "reinvigorating" the form: streamlining the shape, adding color housing, and now notching up clock speed, memory and battery power with GBC. Nintendo also markets accessories such as Game Boy Camera, which comes with photo-editing software and a printer.
Reinvigorating can take a platform only so far, however. "The bottom line has to do with the games you play on [Game Boy]," Kaplan said, noting there are about 1,000 titles in the Game Boy library.
One reason publishers continue to add to that library, said Matthew Paul, a producer with Crave Entertainments, Ranchos Dominguez, Calif., is because Nintendo sets a high standard for quality.
"Other systems may look more technologically impressive on paper but aren't there when it comes to quality," Paul said. In addition, "Nintendo is so helpful to us as a third-party publisher, giving us help when we need it to finish games."
Crave has produced three titles for Game Boy Color: Men in Black, Pitfall and Gex. Upcoming titles include Babe And Friends, Earthworm Jim and Godzilla.
"We're eventually going to switch over to all GBC," Paul said. "Lots of genres [for GBC] haven't been tapped yet. We're hoping Babe will show that puzzle games are very large."
Mike Meyers, director of products for Acclaim Entertainment, Glen Cove, N.Y., agreed that GBC has the potential to appeal to a wider demographic than children. "Game Boy fits rather well in a briefcase," Meyers said. "I've burned many hours on airplanes playing Pokemon."
Acclaim has produced All Star Baseball 2000 and WWW Attitude specifically for GBC and has a number of upcoming titles, including a version of Jeremy McGrath Supercross 2000.
One company that stood by Game Boy when other publishers were abandoning the handheld platform was THQ, Calabasas, Calif. "We saw that there was no new replacement system for the handheld market," said Brian Farrell, chief executive of THQ. "We scratched our heads and said it looks like it's going to be a great market here. We were surprised to see everyone else going away from Game Boy."
Since its inception in 1991, THQ has published a number of popular titles for Game Boy, including Toy Story, Super Return Of The Jedi, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and "virtually all of the Electronic Arts sports titles," Farrell said.
For GBC, THQ launched Rug-
rats this spring, and will release in the fall A Bug's Life, Toy Story II, and Yoda Stories, in addition to new sports titles with EA.
Farrell predicts more competition from publishers during the next quarter. "We'll see a lot of people entering the market who don't really understand it," he said. "The Game Boy is not a high-margin business. You have to have a very expense-conscious business model and great titles with great licenses for it to be profitable."
THQ has stuck by Game Boy because of its impressive price/ performance ratio, its huge user base and Nintendo's continued support with first-party games.
"I don't think any independent publisher can keep a platform alive," Farrell said. "Nintendo kept promising to keep Game Boy alive, and we believed them. It turned out to be a very good decision."
Nintendo's own first-party publishing will continue to be strong, according to Kaplan. The company recently signed a deal with Disney that encompasses several platforms. Mickey's Racing Game will launch in November, Kaplan said. "This will be the first time Mickey is ever done in 3-D."
Alice In Wonderland, Beauty And The Beast and other Disney classics also will be produced for GBC. The Nintendo64 Star Wars Episode I: Racer with Lucas Arts is also in the works, according to Kaplan.
As for the popular Nintendo-published Pokemon, the Red and Blue versions will be joined by a Yellow version and by Pokemon Pinball this summer.
Retailers, needless to say, are thrilled. "The entire Game Boy category has been a bright spot in an otherwise flat industry," said Pete Rothmeyer, Electronics Boutique vice president of merchandising for electronic games. |
