These are some of the fondest video game memories that I have in this old skull of mine because I was there for ALL of the home gaming events in history. From the Pong Machine to the PS5 and a bit of high-end PC gaming in-between, I kept up with all of it. I have kind of fallen out of touch recently but there was a time when I was on the cutting edge of everything that was happening in the gaming world.
There are a lot of big events that happened in my gaming life but one really sticks out as being one of the most special and that was the release of the Game Boy by Nintendo.
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I don't remember what it cost, but I know it was very reasonably priced when it was released. It was under basically everyone's Christmas tree the year it was released and as the top gamer in my family, it was under mine as well.
I don't often think about how huge the release of the Game Boy was but recently watched a movie called Tetris and at the end of it they talk about the Game Boy and how it brought Tetris to everyone in the world just about. That was the game that came bundled with the Game Boy, but getting other titles was a cheap affair because the games were priced at about half what it cost for an NES game.
My first bought game was likely the same as most other people's first GB purchase and that was Super MarioLand.
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I remember first breaking this one in and remembering how at first it was a little difficult to focus on such a tiny screen but if you were young and had good eyes you adjusted. I also recall how the music on this game was actually better than most of the NES music at the time and I was instantly hooked.
The game was basically linear like the original game on the NES, but there were ways to skip certain levels in a way that was very similar to the first title.
I found this game to be really inventive and just played and played and played it until I went from running out of lives to being able to go all the way through the game and never dying and having something crazy like 42 lives by the time I finished it.
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When kids of today look at this game they might think to themselves "good grief, how could anyone stay interested in that" and to this group I say that we were alive in a different time and our entertainment needs were far less demanding.
I will say this though, exactly ZERO games went to market in a broken state. All games were thoroughly tested and were the finished product back in those days because there was no such thing as DLC or even the internet to do so with. A glitched game just stayed a glitched game forever and the producers would likely be shamed out of business.
The Game Boy as far as I know, never had a defective title, or at least, none of the major releases did and on my bus ride to school you could see a number of kids with their headphones in playing a game on their way to and from school. Nobody dared to play it in school though the way that kids are using their phones in classes these days, because a teacher in those days would just take your property away from you and that was that. Maybe you would get it back someday, maybe you wouldn't.
I tore through batteries back in those days and I think that out of a fresh pack of "real brand" batteries you would get maybe 8 hours out of them.
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you would get significantly fewer hours out of a pack of rechargeable batteries, and my family was a rechargeable battery family. It was pretty lame because the machine wouldn't just shut straight off when the power dipped, your screen would get lighter and lighter the lower the batteries got and that was how they let you know that you needed to wrap things up and save it is was possible, or just to plan on losing all of your progress. This was still an age where you couldn't just save all games and especially because of the small size of the cartridges, most games didn't even have a save option.
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One of the only games I recall having a save option that was in my arsenal was Metroid 2 and it is a good thing that this was an option. Just a few years prior to the release of this game the original Metroid appeared on the NES and while saving your progress was technically possible, it involved writing down a very long code where if you weren't very careful to have good penmanship, all of your progress was lost.
The screen on the original Game Boy was similar to early Kindle machines in that it had no backlight in order to preserve battery life. There was one night during a sleep over that I remember hovering over my friend with a flashlight while he played his Game Boy. They also sold battery powered light systems because the screen was reflective to a degree and unless you were in pretty perfect lighting, the screen could end up getting a bit wonky and difficult to see. In direct light is was great, in low light it was basically useless.
I don't recall how long I held on to my Game Boy but I think it was a while. There were plenty of other handheld machines that I had after that, but none of the ones I ever owned got anywhere near as much use as my original Game Boy.
We didn't mind the black and white display back then because simply having the ability to play videogames anywhere that you wanted was simply mind-blowing to us at the time.
Do you have Game Boy memories? If so let's hear about them in the comments.