In Chapter 5, “The Brain Age: Handheld Consoles and their Impact on Adult Gamers,” we discuss Nintendo’s early efforts to market video games to adult non-gamers, not as gifts for their children, but for their own enjoyment.
Nintendo launched its Game Boy in 1989 with a black and white screen, stereo sound and a communications port for multiplayer games. Many units came bundled with the popular puzzle game Tetris.
Tetris was the brainchild of Soviet computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov who developed the game while working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Under communist rule, developers did not own any rights to the intellectual property they created, and Pajitnov was never properly compensated for the work he did. That didn’t stop Nintendo from making millions from the game and establishing Nintendo as the leader in handheld games.
The following Nintendo advertisement featuring Tetris was targeted to executives.
Shortly afterward, Game Boy consoles became “frequent attachments to traveling executives who spend hours in first-class compartments dropping Tetris blocks,” observed Steven Levy of The New York Times (Hey, It’s More Than a Game, July 18, 1993).
“Although the NES never appealed to adults in the way it did to children, Nintendo believed the Game Boy could finally change the way adults perceived video games” (Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry: Avoiding the Performance Trap, p. 81)
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