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Is the Game Boy the Toughest Product Ever Made?
An anonymous reader writes "CNET is running an article about tough technology, which aptly includes the Nintendo Game Boy, a device so tough that mine still works after many years. 'There's no two ways about it: the original Game Boy is one of the hardest gadgets ever conceived. Rumor has it this beige behemoth isn't made of plastic, but from the skulls of fallen Gurkhas. If you ever saw one that was broken, it's because it lost a boxing match with a nuclear bomb — on points.' So do you agree that the Game Boy is the toughest consumer electronics device ever made?"
Back in the stone age when you didn't own your phone, but just leased it from the phone company, those things were darn near indestructible.
Subscribers can see articles in the future? So what? Everyone gets to see them in the future.
http://www.aqualion.com/blog/uploaded_images/football-777893.jpg
I've had this for over 25 years. Still works.
I remember my brother dropped his Gameboy in a lake accidentally when he was younger. It was under water for a week until friends of ours with scuba gear found it.
That damn thing worked after we dried it out for a couple days and popped fresh batteries in it. It was missing a couple lines on the display, but it worked.
Granted, it was fresh water, but still.
I remember reading a blurb in an issue of Nintendo Power (I want to say sometime in the early 90's) that featured a picture of a Game Boy that had supposedly been in a house fire. They were able to fit the Tetris cartridge back into the slot, turn the game on, and actually play it (albeit, with some loss in the pixels) even though the shell of the system was almost completely charred.
I think that's pretty hardcore.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
A bit lightly toasted. The page has a link to a YouTube video on it as well.
Engadget report here: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/02/iphone-takes-on-semi-lives-to-tell-the-tale/
One iPhone, gets left out... and flattened by a Semi tractor trailer. Took a lickin', kept on tickin'.
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
It may not be a nuke, but there's a gameboy in Nintendo's NYC store that survived a barracks bombing (no clue as to which side's barracks it was, though.) It's on display there, still playing Tetris to this day.
here's a pic and a flash video of it:
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/video-fully-functional-gulf-war-gameboy#more-6645
Pretty badass...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I got my first gameboy when I was about 8 years old when I was going on a flight by myself to see my mom in FL. That one lasted me probably about 8 months. I remember the first time I broke it, I dropped it down the front steps at my gramma's house. The device stayed intact, but the screen wouldn't display anything except for a couple of horizontal black lines.
I got a new unit a couple months later from my dad which lasted me close to a year before it finally wouldn't turn on one day. We tried replacing the batteries, but nothing would fix it. I remember seeing my dad with it open on his desk doing some kind of surgery to it. He wound up taking the screen out of that one and transplanting it into my first one, thereby fixing it (I had to do a similar thing with my PSP, but that's another story). That gameboy still works to this day, although I made the mistake of putting the majority of my gameboy and gamegear games into the same drawer as this 8" speaker magnet that I had and none of them work anymore.
I've got really bad luck with electronics... Not including the normal upgrade process, only replacements for faulty units, I've had about 6 ipods, more than 10 cell phones, 3 palm pilots, 2 PSPs, 3 xbox360s, 2 Wiis, about 6 Laptops, a dozen monitors (CRT), countless harddrives (well over 20), and several new headphones, keyboards, mice, digital cameras, drive enclosures and powerbricks. Many were replaced under warranty, but still.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
My Son has a GBA, GBA SP and GBA DS. They all still work despite being dropped, crushed in backpacks, and having been loaned to a two year old nephew. Pretty hard to beat that sort of treatment.
With the exception of the absolutely completely f9(^*(%'n useless screen on the GBA, I've been very impressed with Nintendo game machines.
Seriously, what idiot released the original GBA?
Brad
Remember the Gamecube car test we posted a few years ago?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEvlWQ5ULCg
Same with original Nintendo DS, when closed mode it will withstand most drops.
That's odd. Me, and almost everyone I know, had exactly the opposite experience. The joysticks that came with the Atari for were notorious for being easy to break. The problem was the plastic 'spring' that they used inside was prone to snapping. And, unfortunately the plastic was too oily for glue to fix. Many of the third party controllers of the day were extremely durable though. The Wico bat stick, and the slick stick come to mind. The slick stick actually used auto parts in it's construction. The handle was a tire valve. The paddles were even worse. Luckily, the paddles were just a generic off the shelf potentiometer, so they were (and still are) super easy to repair.
I don't know about everyone else but my Ti-83 still works after 10 years of abuse. Those are some hard calculators to break.
Has anyone mentioned these yet?
I heard one of the 9/11 rescue workers found one in the rubble, and it was still working.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
What's the last Microsoft project that Bill Gates spent considerable time writing code for before his managerial duties took away his time for coding?
:)
The portable, handheld battery-operated TRS-80.
Solid as a rock. There are tales of people skipping them across concrete and they still work.
And as far as the code? Bill must have done something right, because as of a few years ago (I last heard this in 2005 or 2004) there are still some of these beasts in use. Not much computing power, but they have an RS-232 port. The O/S is flexible enough that there are corporations using the device still. Apparently, the thing is so tough that there are off-shore oil platforms running some ancient equipment that dumps data through an RS-232 port, and the crews that have to service them use the portable TRS-80's to grab the data and take it back to their offices where they upload it to their PC's. More modern equipment apparently chokes after constant exposure to salt air, constant shock, and, well, oil workers. They're tough guys, you know.
While someone has mentioned the zippo, where's the love for maglites? I've literally seen someone turn one on WHILE it was on fire. That's hardxcore.
The original Blackberries, the Mobitex 850s, were bricks. Back at RIM we used to drop-kick them across the office for testing.
Thanks to a cheaply designed holster, my Blackberry 7510 underwent daily "is local gravity still in effect?" testing, sometimes many times a day.
No problems with it, the casing is scratched up badly, but it still works.
My replacement 7520 undergoes a similar test every couple weeks, and holds up just fine.
From the lowly 850 to the 8700...dropped numerous times on concrete, off subway platforms, high speed flying out of pockets into stone walls, rolled over by cars, dropped into toilets...
Still worked. Have to give a vote to this one.
I'd vote for this as one of the toughest ever made. One time I got home late at night and somehow left the phone on the roof of the car. Overnight, it snowed about five inches. I didn't feel like shoveling the driveway, so I just got in, gunned the engine and after a few back-and-forth runs, made it out onto the road. Got to work, couldn't find the phone. Finally, after I got home again, I took my cordless house phone outside and dialed the Nokia. Underneath the packed snow, under the car, there was a green glow and a faint ring. I dug the Nokia out, wiped it off, and it still worked. Sure, the stubby antenna had broken (easily replaced) but the screen wasn't cracked and it could still make calls. I still have that phone in a drawer somewhere and in the battery on the back there are still deep grooves from the grit on the tires rubbing through the plastic.
What really got me was that I figured I had driven over the thing about eight times.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
For modern kit, I'd put some money on The TDS Recon http://www.tdsway.com/products/recon. I have seen one thrown off a building and they keep one in a fish tank in their lobby http://www.tdsway.com/products/nomad/fish_tank2
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Mine still works. I bought it in '90, just before heading over for Desert Shield/Storm. I was on the ground the whole time and it worked fine, even with all the dust and grit. I left some regular batteries in it, around '98 and had to clean up the mess a couple years ago but after that, is still working ok. Had to get it working so I could introduce my daughter to it. After 6 months, she was bugging me for a DS.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I have an original Fisher Price Garage. The thing was bought in the mid 70s for my older brother and it was handed down to me. It's now over 30 years old. It's been played with by countless numbers of children over the years and apart from being very scuffed up is in working order. My own kids love it. I suspect my own grandkids will be playing with it many years from now.
That, or my vote would be for anything Tonka made in the 70s. Still have several examples of those as well.
I worked at a GameStop for a couple years and we basically stopped testing Nintendo systems when they came in for trade because it was not worth the time to check. The Nintendo systems always worked. The PS2 on the other hand... we had to test the blue discs, the silver discs, the controllers, the memory card slots, etc...
Actually the GBC is almost as tough as the classic. It's a good thing too because my wife has a sewing machine where the computer control for advanced functions is a GBC. It was about 1/10th the cost of the next cheapest computer controlled sewing machine and could do quite a few thing that only the midpriced and higher models with dedicated computers could do. I figure if hers ever dies there will basically always be one available on ebay since Nintendo sold about a bajillion of them.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
As someone who bashed the living fuck out of his video games as a kid, I can attest to this. I threw the damn thing from the top floor window of a house on the top of a hill and didn't manage to scratch it. Nothing else I've owned has matched that thing in durability (though most of my other Nintendo products came close).
It's a shame more recent consoles aren't as durable with their clamshell designs and moving parts. Still, Nintendium is clearly one of the strongest materials known to man.
The original Game Boy has problems with the battery compartment. The battery connectors (springs) wear and it doesn't hold the batteries in securely to the point where you have to be careful you don't move it while playing and even more careful when you put it down that it does not loose power. I had my first Game Boy replaced under warranty because of this. The same problem happened to the replacement after the warranty expired. Nintendo have since addressed this and have been using better battery connectors in their more recent products (GBA, Wii remote).
I had another problem my second GB. I'm not sure how common this is but after many years of use, on the left-hand side of the screen a whole vertical bar of pixels disappeared. This later increased to a bar three pixels wide.
From my experience, every Nintendo product made after the GB has been far more reliable.