What if the Gameboy was the only one gaming system?

[plasturion]

Imagine reality where only Gameboy exist in the world of electronic entertainment. Let's say now in 2021 we can buy Duck Tales 11, or Super Mario Land 16 still looking the same with only different level design. Would you like to still play and buy that kind of games?

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Human nature always goes for improvement, change, curiosity, inventing. Hard to imagine this would not apply to electronic devices and therefore gaming consoles.

Nevertheless: My answer is: Yes, I would. Even more than "would". I actually do play and like games from the 1980s and 1990s regularly. The invention of new things doesn't make old things magically disappear. I also play chess – a really old game.

 

[Chary]

The GameBoy really struggled to do a lot, but I think with enough time that we could maybe get crazy stuff that we never could have dreamed on the platform. If we're still playing purely the same 2D Super Mario Land style of game and only that, though, I would have gone crazy, 100%

 

[FAST6191]

Piecing together different aspects of games seen on the device* and homebrew later I doubt it would be glorified reskins, and more powerful devices did not necessarily make it easier to do things that later got refined and ported to lesser devices.

*most look at the rather linear nature of things and compare it to later devices where go anywhere, do anything. However it was apparent then and no real technical limitations.

The GB/GBC also saw memory bank controllers in play, which is a slightly lesser version of the NES mappers and SNES special chips wherein the cartridges themselves provide extra hardware to play with. In theory these could be extended massively and even if I have to imagine a world where chips stayed at the same level (never mind that probably putting a massive damper on the world economy to make an unrecognisable world compared to today) I can't see economies of scale not being a thing and thus every little indy dev could probably afford mbc 5 million with as much storage as they more or less need and maybe some memory expansions and other bits.

I can't see fighting games being much of a thing, and maybe we would have better AI rather than bullet hell approaches to enemies on screen. Timelines would probably be slower as you can't get nice programming languages make things quicker to do (you can do a FPS in procedural languages like C but they are so much nicer with object oriented approaches like C++ that the GB/GBC would never really be able to sensibly use) but I can still see all manner of 8-16 and even early 32 bit style game design concepts making their way to things.

 

[KimKong]

I make GameBoy / GBColor homebrew games right now! Still new games coming out all the time, I love it!

Check out my game here if you want: https://skrap-klan.itch.io/bulb

 

[BlazeMasterBM]

that would suck.
Also we wouldn't have Call of Duty

 

[Julie_Pilgrim]

Honestly, no, since 90% of what i play is rtyhm games

 

[Jayro]

It was, for me as a kid.

 

[DKB]

god can it at least be a game boy advance

 

[Xzi]

Only if it was GBA would I still buy some games for it, and I'd still prefer if it wasn't the only gaming system available.