My Experience with the Game Boy

The Game Boy came out in 1989 but it was a few years before I got one. While some kids were getting a Game Boy for Christmas to add to their NES, we were just getting the NES (the purpose of this statement is not to complain that my parents were not spoiling us enough – just to establish the time frame). We got Game Boys in Spring of 1993, about a year and a half after getting the SNES.

Until that time, I had a couple of occasions to play one here and there, but not for very long. It wasn’t until we actually got Game Boys that I really got to play it often. Two of my brothers and I share consecutive birthdays, and when I was in 8th grade about to turn 14 (1993), my parents decided we were going to take a week off of school and go to California to do the whole Disneyland/Universal/Sea World thing. To keep us occupied during the plane rides, car trips, and long lines, my parents bought 3 Game Boys to use between the 5 of us (really 4, since the youngest wasn’t really old enough to play). Initially they bought the ones that came with Tetris, headphones, and the link cable. But soon after they returned two of them for the basic set since we didn’t need 3 copies of Tetris. The only downside was not being able to do 2-player Tetris. But along with the systems, they got 5 more games: Yoshi, RC Pro-Am, NFL Football, Mega Man 3, and Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters. In my mind I paired them into 3 groups: Sports (Football/ProAm), Puzzle (Yoshi/Tetris), and Platformers (MegaMan/KidIcarus). They also got rechargeable battery packs for us so they wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money on batteries. They weren’t official Nintendo equipment, and they stuck out from the back of the Game Boy, but it was actually good for me. It made the “circumference” of the device bigger and I could interlock my fingers more comfortably.

My dad pulled a cruel prank on us and told us about the Game Boys about 6 weeks early but told us we couldn’t use them until the trip. To be honest, I was looking forward to the Game Boys more than the Disneyland trip. We snuck them out here and there and got caught once. My mom admitted to playing Kid Icarus once or twice just to see what the fuss was about.

At home we set up little charging stations with the battery paks using little slots on our bunkbeds that happened to be the right size to hold the batteries, and the cords were held in place with masking tape (kid engineering at its finest).

After the initial novelty wore off a little, we didn’t play them as much as the SNES. I don’t know if it’s because we got a later run of them, or if we just got lucky, but the “puke green” colored background was actually more of a, “bespeckled gold” color on our models.

I later bought Metroid II: Return of Samus used from the card shop, then added Super Mario Land 3, Donkey Kong ’94, and Space Invaders to my collection. Obviously I got The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening when it came out.

After having those for a while, I bought the Super Game Boy Adapter. After that, I rarely used the Game Boys, as it was easier to play it on a TV (unless said TV was already being used or I was away from home). I guess I didn’t appreciate the portability aspect of it, as we only brought them on special occasions, like long trips. Mostly I thought of it as another console that happened to be smaller. To me the biggest advantage to having a Game Boy was not that I could take it on the go, or that I had portable versions of my favorite games, but just that I could play certain games that I would be otherwise unable to play.

For example, puzzle games like Yoshi, Dr. Mario, and Tetris were pretty much the same on NES or Game Boy. Games like Mega Man and Kid Icarus were slightly different from their NES counterparts, but pretty much the same thing. If given the choice between playing a game on the NES or Game Boy (provided they were similar), I would always choose the NES. I liked playing the games where a chapter of the story happened to be on the Game Boy (i.e. Metroid 2, Zelda 4, etc.) rather than a Game Boy translation/port.

I didn’t take the Game Boy with me to my first year of college or Japan (obviously), nor did I really do much with them when I got back. I was aware of the recent updates with the Game Boy Pocket but wasn’t super impressed - not enough to warrant buying one. The Game Boy Color came out when I was in Japan but I wasn’t really allowed to play it, nor did I have much inclination as I just assumed it was a 4-color adaptation, like how the Super Game Boy worked and didn’t think much of it. When I got back to the states, my friend bought a Game Boy Color to play Link’s Awakening DX. I didn’t pay much attention to it seeing as how I already owned that game. But looking back I wish I had noticed how much of an improvement it was. 

When I left to live on my own I didn’t take one of the Game Boys with me (something I regret now). I figured that I had the Super Game Boy and left the others for my brothers. Years later when my kids got to be old enough to play games, we had a bit of a renewed interest in playing these older games. My younger brother Matt also happened to have a co-worker who was getting rid of a bunch of GB accessories which he gave to me. So I ended up with a really big case, a magnifier, and a battery pack. This has been great to keep all of the GB and GBC games I've acquired over the years.