A few decades ago the masses believed video games were a waste of time for lackadaisical youths to pacify themselves while ignoring their responsibilities as both kids and young adults. As more and more people started understanding the benefits of gaming so too did the perception of what a video game is and, most importantly, the benefits gaming can bestow on a person’s life changed. Hi, my name is James Bullock and I am a gamer who has spent the better part of his existence testing the laws of physics, exploring the vastness of a world ruined, and been a champion inside various arenas courtesy of digitized worlds both driven by reality and created through pure unbelievable ingenuity unlike anything seen by human eyes. And as a gamer I’ve discovered something else video games provide: life lessons. Today I celebrate thirty years of Nintendo’s Game Boy.
Great Things Can Come in Small Packages
In a time when people can pull out their phones, go to a store online and play a plethora of games for practically pennies, gamers old enough to remember handheld gaming in it infancy have a great appreciation for technological advancements. Back in the day, playing games in handheld fashion usually meant playing one of those mostly terrible LCD games found in the toy section of every grocery store – something I was very aware of and enjoyed to the best of my abilities. Then came the day I sat down with my friend in a room beside the cafeteria to see him pull out a rectangular device sporting the words “Nintendo” and “Game Boy”. With a button layout similar to the Nintendo Entertainment System’s controller, I gazed at the screen powering up “Tetris” to discover the only true way to play games on the go.
The years would pass with yours truly being able to get several iterations of Nintendo’s revolutionary device while amassing an impressive collection of games. The Game Boy’s library actually means more in the grand scheme of things than the system’s functionality & technical achievements during the early 1990s. The Game Boy didn’t have the most impressive specs even for the time including no backlit display, 8kB of internal RAM, and a color display only offering four shades of gray. Even at an economic-friendly price point Nintendo’s original handheld didn’t have the power needed to match its competitors such as Sega’s “Game Gear”.
But what the Game Boy did feature over the competition were so many incredible variations of games people praised previously released on consoles or arcades – “Donkey Kong”, “Super Mario”, the aforementioned “Tetris” & even some sports games. As the years progressed so did the exclusives and the franchises that revolutionized gaming such as “Pokemon”, as did the modifications to the system without it losing what made the handheld system so special: the software. With each Game Boy iteration came classic experiences that made Nintendo’s handheld as viable a gaming option as anything on the market be it Playstations, Xboxs or even Nintendo’s own consoles. There are times when the greatest things come in small packages and need at least four double-A batteries to operate.
Have you learned any major life lessons from playing Game Boy or any video game system for that matter? Leave them in the comments below and, as always, thanks for reading.
