There was a time when Macaulay Culkin was the most famous 10-year-old on Earth - now it's a chunk of plastic called the Game Boy. But which is the better performer?
Steve Edwards

Overlooked by gamers in recent years, thanks to the domination of 32 and 64bit consoles, Nintendo's Game Boy continues to stand its ground as the most successful and enduring games system of all time. Last year was the Game Boy's most successful ever, and this year it looks set to do even better. The question is: how?

The console equivalent of the personal stereo, the Game Boy, hit the streets in 1989 when the NES was already a runaway success. You can have nothing but admiration for Gunpei Yokoi, the mastermind behind Nintendo's Game 'n' Watch hand-helds, who suggested Nintendo release a mono 8bit hand-held alongside the more powerful (and colourful) Sega Game Gear and 16bit Atari Lynx.

It was an insane plan. But it worked.

Logic dictated that the colour machines, with their backlit screens and potential for TV reception, would win out, but that began to change when consumers discovered that the battery life of the black-and-white Game Boy - the key to true portability - was over six times that of its rivals.

The other crucial factor was the software. Whether through sheer luck or utter brilliance, the Game Boy was bundled with Tetris, Alexei Pajitnov's puzzle game of falling blocks. It proved to be the most successful puzzle game of all time and shifted millions of Game Boys.

This success was compounded by a stream of quality titles; spearheaded by Nintendo, this deluge of software included, most notably, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, which remained in the charts for over five and a half years.

According to Nintendo, the life-cycle for a machine is six years, and predictably, 1995 looked like being the Game Boy's final year, a situation not helped by the presence of PlayStation and Saturn. However, support for Nintendo remained strong, one of the key reasons why the console is still around today.