NES vs Gameboy

[carlsson]

I think the two were engineered for different purposes so it really doesn't make sense to compare. For the Famicom, Nintendo wanted something state of the art. They may have looked at the two newly released formats ColecoVision and Commodore 64 and knew what they had to match or outperform. Fortunately for them, Sega went with the safe option and more or less reimplemented the already existing ColecoVision, something they eventually regretted so the Mark /// and SMS got quite beefed up.

 

For the Game Boy, I suppose Nintendo wanted a cheap but good enough handheld system that would not drain the battery. You can't really claim they had any competitor to match since the systems were released so close to eachother, but of course Nintendo had almost a decade of experience in LCD games, where they mastered the combination of technology and playability, something many of the other LCD game manufacturers didn't really reach. Also a lot of both technology advances and experiences in what people want in a system, from gameplay as well as development approaches had followed after the Famicom release so they could draw some from that.