Gaming

Gunpei Yokoi's team at Nintendo built the Game Boy around a monochrome screen and four AA batteries, and when it launched in 1989 that cheap, tough setup beat color rivals on battery life. Gaming looks at consoles as design objects and at the culture that grew up around them. Tetris shipped with the Game Boy in North America and became the reason many people bought one. Sony launched the PlayStation in Japan on December 3, 1994, after a planned partnership with Nintendo fell apart, and Ken Kutaragi's machine ran games from CDs while Nintendo stuck with cartridges. The design story covers the gray box, the controller with its two grips and the four shapes on its buttons, which became a graphic in their own right. Teenage Engineering, better known for synthesizers, helped design Panic's Playdate handheld, which shipped in 2022 with a crank on its side. Each article covers the hardware and the designers, and what to look for before buying an older console used. Original Game Boys still turn up at flea markets, and a cleaned cartridge slot revives most of the ones that seem dead.