Not to make anyone feel old, but the Game Boy turned 35 at the weekend.
That small grey box was millions of peopleâs first introduction to video games. It was shared among families, played with equal enthusiasm by girls, boys, men and women. When I asked people for their most cherished Game Boy memories last week, almost a hundred people got in touch to share their reminiscences of playing it on the commute to work, on long car journeys, on family holidays and under the covers after bedtime (with a torch for the screen, naturally). The Game Boy liberated games from the TV and brought them into those pockets of free time in everyday life. It felt more intimate, and despite its rubbish screen and rather rudimentary tech, it acted as a private portal to other worlds.
You can read my thoughts on the Game Boy and its impact in this anniversary feature, so for todayâs newsletter, Iâm handing it over to readers. Here are your memories of the Game Boy. Thank you so much to everyone else who sent something in.
âI took batteries out of my granâs TV remote to playâ
âI grew up with the OG Game Boy and remember vividly the day I got it: my mum took me to G-Force on Union Street in Glasgow on my eighth birthday and got me a Game Boy and Tetris. We were visiting family and I hadnât brought batteries with me, so I took the ones out of my granâs TV remote. At Christmas that year I got Linkâs Awakening and it blew my mind having A Link to the Past (my favourite game of then and all time) on a handheld. My Game Boy came everywhere with me, from family holidays to Scarborough, playing by motorway lights in the car, to sitting with a towel over my head in Crete playing Super Mario Land 2. The system lives on for me and my Analogue Pocket is now my go-to travel device. â George
âIt makes me yearn to be nine years old againâ
âI had a yellow Game Boy that was stolen from a summer holiday daycare group. The culprit was never found. But it did mean I was bought a grey one, bundled with Tetris. That little plastic box is intrinsically linked with my childhood. Many of those memories are musical, playing on repeat in my head: the chirps of Super Mario Land, which I first finished before I was 10 (a feat I donât think I could replicate now); the map music of its sequel, 6 Golden Coins, and the heartbreak as it suddenly cut out after I went through another load of AA batteries; the sad âwalking awayâ music of Wave Race when you lost; the tiny chirrup when you hatched a Yoshi in Mario and Yoshi. I bought a magnifier with a torch so I could play it at night, huddled beneath the covers. I sat on a boat from Newcastle to Rotterdam, exchanging Pokémon with my brother with the link cable (he on Red, I on Blue). My Game Boy went everywhere with me. Even now, somewhere in my parentsâ house, thereâs a zipped-up Nintendo satchel full of games full of adventures waiting to be revisited. As dangerous as overdosing on nostalgia can be, looking back on it does make me yearn to be nine years old again, when my biggest trouble was a dust bunny in the cartridge slot.â â Jon
âI spent 25 years proving my dad wrongâ
I was eight when my dad said the Game Boy wasnât for girls because itâs called a Game Boy and not a Game Girl, and I spent the next 25 years proving him wrong by becoming a game dev. â Anisa Sanusi, game developer and founder of Limit Break
âThe Game Boy kept me gaming when I felt I shouldnât any moreâ
When the Pokémon craze was in full force just before Christmas 2000, I remember my mum asking me the strangest questions, and I kind of clocked on that I was probably getting a Game Boy for Christmas â but I played along. Now my mum is no longer here, Iâm glad I didnât say anything, because of the joy she got out of buying it for me. In the mid-00s, when I was a teen, I sold almost all my game consoles and games because I thought I should grow out of it. But I kept my Game Boy and games and looking back, that was because it was easy to be private with it â my secret hobby while, on the outside I was just the âregularâ music-loving, hanging-out-with-friends teen. The Game Boy kept me gaming when I felt I shouldnât any more. Eventually, towards the end of completing a masters degree, I spent the last bit of student loan buying back everything I sold. God, I love the Game Boy! It still works and I still buy games for it! â Helen
âThe OG had the best bassâ
Iâve got a red brick OG Game Boy. We got it for Pokémon, but I used to use it to do gigs with a nanoloop ROM. The back of the battery container fell off and I used to have to hold in the batteries while dancing around the stage. The OG had the best bass, too. â Tom Betts, artist, academic and coder
âThe mini-games were filled with strange humourâ
I donât think the Game Boy Camera gets enough praise as an incredible piece of kit. It was the first digital camera many of us will have had, a portable purikura device, and a way to edit and add filters to snaps on the go way before smartphones. The mini-games were imaginative and filled with strange humour, and the printer accessory offered some cool connections with other GB titles. Nintendo often winds up making interesting game/peripheral/accessory combinations; some become hugely popular, others are evolutionary cul-de-sacs. But you could give anyone a Game Boy Camera today and theyâd still have fun with it. â Rory
Keep safe
Thereâs a very high probability I was the first person to play a Game Boy on the bus in the UK. We got them very early as we were developing a game for Rare, and I got the bus to work in Manchester. I was shitting it in case someone robbed me. â Ste Pickford, game developer
And fail save
On a long holiday to France in the back of my dadâs car, I was playing Pokémon with my Game Boy plugged into the carâs cigarette lighter for power. After hours of not saving the game, he pulled over without warning and turned off the carâs engine, which killed power to my Game Boy. Safe to say I went ballistic. â Euan
âI was obsessed with the world of Linkâs Awakeningâ
My brother and I were raised by a single parent, and my mum would try to get things second-hand. A handheld console was the perfect way to placate us during long car journeys, so she went to a local supermarket in our small village to post an advert on the noticeboard, hoping to get two consoles for us. She did eventually find some second-hand Game Boys, as well as a big case of games and accessories. It came with the weird magnifier that made the screen bigger, and a worm light (the sun sets early in Scotland, so weâd often be driving while it was dark). My favourite game was Linkâs Awakening. I was obsessed with the world of that island, and I wasnât too surprised to learn that it was inspired by Twin Peaks, since that later became my favourite TV show. â Matt
âI thought if I could wipe out all the Metroids, it would wipe out my mumâs cancerâ
My parents bought me and my brother a Game Boy each for Christmas in 1989, the year it first came out ⦠My mum got sick with leukaemia in late 1991, and we spent a difficult and morbid Christmas together knowing it would be her last. She was in bed for most of it, and I retreated into playing Metroid II, thinking with my 12-year-old brain that if I could just wipe out all the Metroids on SR-388 that would somehow help the blood transfusions wipe out the cancerous cells in my motherâs blood. It didnât work â I completed the game (with 100% items), but she died the following January.
I was pretty miserable for the following year, and my dad didnât really know how to help. He would often just buy me things to try and cheer me up â often a new game when we went travelling. I remember finishing Kirbyâs Dream Land in about an hour during a trip to Holland, and reading about Super Mario Land 2 in a gaming magazine, only to find it in the airport that same day and getting him to buy it for me. The one game I loved the most on that old console was Linkâs Awakening. I remember buying a sheet of graph paper and making my own map of the overworld.
When my dad died and I had to go through all the old stuff in his home, deciding what to sell and what to keep, I found my old Game Boy (which still worked!) and its games (those mentioned above, plus Donkey Kong, Mega Man and Castlevania), along with the accessories and my carry-case. I ended up auctioning it off, along with loads of my dadâs stuff. I got more money for it than for any other single thing. â Mark Oosterveen, director of Grand Theft Hamlet
What to play
You can play many old Game Boy favourites today on your Switch, via the Nintendo Switch Online subscription â including Zelda: Linkâs Awakening, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons; Super Mario Land 2; Wario Land 3; BurgerTime (a lot of people have fond memories of that one); Metroid II; Pokémon Trading Card Game (I loved that as a child); and, of course, Tetris. Nostalgic screen filters bring that low-tech charm and, unlike in the late 1980s, you can rewind and retry tricky sections of games and save them any time. Donât sleep on Gargoyleâs Quest, either â itâs one of the most innovative games the Game Boy ever had.
Available on: Nintendo Switch
Approximate playtime: as long as your nostalgia trip lasts
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What to click
Question Block
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