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noiseredux wrote:battery life was a very important thing to Nintendo's R&D... it's the reason the GB and later GBC were so underpowered compared to competition (Game Gear, Lynx, etc) but certainly their long lives and lack of need for constantly buying batteries was a huge deal to consumers.

Yeah, but no matter how important battery life is to portables, it's not a trump card. This is most notably represented by the NGPC's 40-hour battery life off 2 AA batteries.

lisalover1 wrote:

noiseredux wrote:battery life was a very important thing to Nintendo's R&D... it's the reason the GB and later GBC were so underpowered compared to competition (Game Gear, Lynx, etc) but certainly their long lives and lack of need for constantly buying batteries was a huge deal to consumers.

Yeah, but no matter how important battery life is to portables, it's not a trump card. This is most notably represented by the NGPC's 40-hour battery life off 2 AA batteries.

I agree but the Gameboy was already the dominant force at the time when the NGPC came out however what got it to that stage in the first place was the battery life verses the other hand helds at the time.
GB vs Game Gear and Lynx were out it was the least powerful but had the best battery life which made it come out on top at the time.
Bearing mind that the Game Gear did give the Gameboy some competition at the time as opposed to afterwards where everyone since got crushed.

plus if you're talking GB vs GG/Lynx, it's important to remember the insane killer app that Tetris really was at that time.

I know that Nintendo was pretty draconian in how they tied down developers to the NES, which made it really hard for the Master System and Turbografx to compete.

Did they do the same during the Gameboy days? And if so, I wonder how much of their success was due to that?

I can't remember reading one way or the other Flake. Good question though. BTW if anyone wants a great read about the Game Boy's (and to a lesser extent, the GBC's) history you really need to buy a copy of GameSpite Quarterly #1, which is basically a book on just that subject. I raved about it on my blog months ago: http://www.rfgeneration.com/blogs/noise ... 1-1317.php and actually I'm fairly certain you can read MOST of the book chapter by chapter on their website at this point. It's really a quick read, but loaded with great info and perspectives. I've read it 3 times.