Introduced in 1989 as a big, neutral-grey brick of a B&W portable game machine, the Nintendo Game Boy may have been considered instantly obsolete by some. It was powered by a Z80 chip, something which had fallen out of use with personal computer manufacturers halfway through that decade. Its display was monochrome and LCD, and in an age when the NES and late 80s arcade games had spoiled players with stereo sound, the only way to get stereo out of the Game Boy was with its headphones.

But the "killer app" of the Nintendo Game Boy was its portability. But hadn't this been tried before, with the Milton-Bradley Microvision around 1982? Sure it had. But the Microvision didn't come packed with what was, at the time, the most popular game in the world: Tetris.

Nintendo and a few other manufacturers released a whole slew of Game Boy titles, and it seemed uncertain what genre of gaming would be the machine's strength: puzzle games, like Tetris? Decent classic arcade adaptations such as Qix and Super Mario Bros.?

This confusion was intensified by the Super Game Boy, a module fitting into the Super NES cartridge slot, allowing the machine to play Game Boy games encoded with minimal color schemes.

It was 1997 before the true compelling application of the Game Boy was discovered: a little Japanese creation which every child in America now knows as Pokèmon.

The Game Boy Color was introduced in 1999, sprucing up the same basic machine with a non-backlit color LCD display, and with the arrival of the Game Boy Advance - a much more powerful but, very wisely on Nintendo's part so as not to alienate a dozen years worth of loyal customers, backward-compatible color handheld - it seems as though this platform is joining the hallowed and rarified ranks of game consoles that can survive a decade. The Game Boy shares this distinction only with Atari 2600.

With the 2004 release of the Nintendo DS handheld system, however, Nintendo seems to be moving away from the Game Boy legacy. The DS includes a secondary cartridge slot that allows it to play Game Boy Advance games, but this time backward compatibility only goes so far - the ability to play the original monochrome Game Boy games or Game Boy Color titles has been left behind. There will continue to be software produced for both systems, though Nintendo has clearly signaled that its emphasis will shift to the DS system. With the end of the Game Boy line in sight, it's possible now to look back and see the system for what it has been - a trendsetting game machine which has become nothing short of a cultural icon unto itself, and a machine that has set a new benchmark for the longevity of a single family of hardware (at least 16 years). The Game Boy also boasts one of the most widely varied game libraries of any platform, ranging from the 80s arcade simplicity of its launch titles to the deeply immersive quest games of the Game Boy Advance's heyday, with stops at nearly every gaming trend that has emerged along the way. It truly is the sole survivor of the classic 80s video game systems, coming to rest at a time when gamers are starting to wax nostalgic about its very first games.

A note about screen shots in this section: At long last, the Game Boy section of Phosphor Dot Fossils has real live screen shots to accompany its game reviews. These have been generated by using the Game Boy Player peripheral for the Nintendo Game Cube, though they've been cropped to show only what is seen on the Game Boy screen (the Game Boy Player shows its games within a "frame" image designed to imitate the look of a Game Boy Advance screen). Games hailing from the monochrome Game Boy era have, for authenticity's sake, been reduced to greyscale images and then tinted to a yellow approximating the background of the original Game Boy's screen. Some of these games have color encoding intended for the SNES Super Game Boy module, the first gadget that would let players put their handheld favorites on TV screens, but I've elected to take the greyscale-and-tint approach to preserve the flavor of the hardware of that time.