New on the Shelf: A British Game Boy Advert From the Marketing Blitz

It is easy to forget, now that the Game Boy's success looks inevitable, just how hard it was sold. Few electronic products of the early 1990s were advertised as relentlessly. This arrival is a single surviving page from that onslaught: a British magazine advertisement for the Game Boy, one voice in a very loud campaign.

What It Is

This is one of the British magazine advertisements from Nintendo's early-nineties Game Boy campaign, an official piece of marketing aimed at the UK audience. It joins a run of period Game Boy adverts in the collection, gathered from several countries, that together document how the console was pitched market by market. Where the hardware shows what Nintendo made, adverts like this show how the company persuaded millions of people they needed it.

British Game Boy magazine advertisement early 1990s

Selling a Phenomenon

Nintendo poured enormous resources into promoting the Game Boy, and the campaign became famous in its own right, blanketing magazines and television with a consistent, confident message. In the United States the handheld rode the slogan that you were now playing with power, portable power; across Europe the adverts hammered the same core promise of proper gaming that fit in your pocket. Seeing an individual page from that effort is a reminder that the Game Boy's triumph was not just a matter of good design, but of one of the most sustained marketing pushes the young games industry had ever mounted.

Adverts are also, paradoxically, among the hardest period print to preserve. They were bound into magazines destined for the recycling bin, valued by nobody at the time, so a clean, isolated example is a small rescue in itself. Gathered from country to country, the collection's run of Game Boy adverts becomes a comparative record of national taste and salesmanship, the same machine wearing subtly different clothes in Britain, America, Japan and beyond.

Why It Joined the Collection

To understand how the Game Boy conquered the world, you have to look at how it was sold, and advertising is the clearest record of that. This British advert adds another country to the collection's growing gallery of Game Boy marketing, and preserving it keeps a fragile piece of the campaign that turned a grey handheld into a household name.

This UK Game Boy advert is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Read the full story: Game Boy advertising.