The Nintendo Game Boy turns 30 this week, April 21st to be specific and if you go by the Japanese launch. The web has been inundated with articles, podcasts, and videos celebrating this fact. Is RavenFist going to join that motley crew? Yep.
I remember the launch of Game Boy in the US in 1989. My memories consist of seeing display models at my local department stores and trying to convince my parents to let me stand there and play Super Mario Land. I was generally unsuccessful, logging only a few jumps before my parents encouraged me along. I was young, but smart enough to know that I wanted to own anything Nintendo created. I asked my parents for a Game Boy and … was completely shut down. Let me pause a moment and explain how monumental this was. I’ve written about my parents not buying video games on my whim before, which is fine and appropriate. All of those other instances were “Not right now,” or, “Save your money and you’ll have it soon enough.” This was, “No, under no circumstances will you ever own a Game Boy.”
My child-brain didn’t understand what my mother meant. “But,” I started, “I can save my money and buy a Game Boy right?” My mother responded that no, I couldn’t. “But,” I tried to regroup, “It’s my money!” Using an argument that my fifteen-year-old daughter is fond of using on me.
The ownership of funds was of no interest to my mother. “You have a Nintendo and that’s enough.”
“But what about car trips?” I asked. “I could play Game Boy in the car and I wouldn’t bother you.”
“No.” And then came the real reason: “You’ll ruin your eyes.”
The dreaded Optometrist Defense. I didn’t know if that was true or not. Pondering the idea, I was sure that I’d rather play a Game Boy today and worry about eye problems tomorrow, but my mother was sure that she was protecting my ocular future. I honestly thought that she would back off, and eventually I would own a Game Boy. My mother can be a very stubborn person. I was seventeen years old before I owned a Game Boy. It was 1997. Eight years after the Game Boy released. I bought one without even asking my mother. I worked and went to school and was one year from legally being an adult. I think the purchase still ticked my mother off a little bit.
Because I was late to the party, I never developed a large library of Game Boy games and indeed am not as familiar with that library as I am just about every other system. I remember having The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and being mightily impressed at the detail that game contained for being realized in four shades of green. I had The Empire Strikes Back, which was a direct port of the NES version. I am still impressed that they could push such a faithful port to the Game Boy, even if the frame rate frequently makes the game feel like you’re playing in slow motion. If you think of this as being a feature to heighten the drama, then I find it to be tolerable. Beyond that I had … probably Tetris, because everyone did.
The Game Boy was short lived with me because I ended up trading it for a Sega Saturn. That’s a story for another time. Even though the hardware was short lived, it was long loved because Game Boy really came alive for me with the release of the Game Boy Advance. That was a system that I took to immediately and because of the miracle of backwards compatibility I was able to go back into the Game Boy library and experience games like Super Mario Land 1 & 2, the Batman games, Boxxle, Revenge of the Gator, and many more. To this day I continue to explore the vastness of the Game Boy library, going through spurts of hungrily buying small gray carts at my local used gaming stores.
There are some truly amazing feats of game design in that library. Not to mention how the Game Boy laid the road for all handheld gaming to follow (don’t talk to me about the Lynx being released a month earlier, Game Boy blazed the trail).
Happy 30th birthday, Game Boy. You’ll still be relevant in another 30 years. I may wear glasses now, but I don’t blame you.
Sincerely,
The Storyteller
Thumbnail Photo credit: Evan Amos