The Gameboy turned 25 today, past the human age where one usually makes the decision to become a lifetime gamer or abandon the hobby for good. For most the path towards gaming immortality is taken during one's middle to late teenage years and solidified during college. If you can remain a gamer through college, you're probably going to remain one for life.

On April 21, 1989, the Gameboy was first introduced to Japan. It wasn't the first handheld gaming system, as the Next Web pointed out, but it was the first to catch on with a mass audience.

When the device was first introduced to North America a few months later, Nintendo bundled it with Tetris, the iconic game still played today.

Probably, many people still have the original gray Gameboys. Some of them likely even work. Such was the quality of the machine.

In response to time -- sped up by a series of negative ads placed by competitor Sega that mocked Gameboy's antiquated style -- Nintendo launched the Game Boy pocket in 1996, the Gameboy light in 1998 (only in Japan; it might be worth some money stateside), and, finally, Color in 1998. Also in 1998, Pokemon the game was introduced to the United States (two years prior in Japan). Color monitors and a new platform that both fed off a national craze and was a solid game in itself created something of a buying frenzy for Nintendo products. In total, about 118 million original and color Gameboy units have been sold worldwide.

Despite a name that would indicate otherwise, Gameboy achieved a 46 percent female audience, a significantly more even ratio than Nintendo's other video game systems such as Super Nintendo and the original Nintendo. There's a marketing lesson in there somewhere.

By 2004, the Gameboy was no longer after Nintendo began calling its handheld units "DS," as in dual screens. Appropriately, the device matured at 15 and moved on to sleeker and better things.