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Tech

When I Was 5, I Was a Game Boy

And other thoughts on Nintendo's best gadget, which turned 25 today.
A Halloween costume that will possibly never be topped. Image: Beverly Palau

The Game Boy turned 25 today, a quarter century that has seen the grey rectangle with the purple buttons go from cutting-edge tech to an overweight bit of early handheld tech. We're not necessarily an overly nostalgic bunch here at Motherboard, but with Game Boy, it's another story—the thing was pretty formative for most of us. Here's some quick memories about the early days of the console that made gaming portable and eventually spawned all kinds of innovations, including a camera that let you take selfies that had the look and image quality of that one picture of the Loch Ness monster. Feel free to share your stories in the comments.

Who can forget the Game Boy Camera, or Kirby's Dream Land, or Donkey Kong Land's yellow cartridge? Or the Game Genie? Image: freespamfree/Flickr

I was not exactly an early adopter of the Game Boy, not in the traditional sense, at least. On this day, 25 years ago, Nintendo introduced the toy that would change the world, that would go on to sell 118 million units and become one of the most popular video game consoles of all time. I was 11 months old. I wouldn’t start playing Game Boy for another year or so.

Before babies were drooling on iPads, toddlers, including me, were banging on the Game Boy’s D pad and its A and B keys. Tetris was too hard for me and far too boring, but Mario kept me entertained as a three year old making the 20 hour car ride from Maryland to Disney World. One of my first memories is spending most of that trip fighting with my aunt, who is a good 20-something years older than me, over the huge grey rectangle with the greenish screen. That’s part of Nintendo’s huge win with the system—it wasn’t just the Game Boy, because there were plenty of Game Girls, too—roughly half of everyone who bought a Game Boy was a girl, which was, and still is, unprecedented.

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Eventually, I got a Sega Genesis, which I also played the hell out of, but Game Boy was certainly my first love. When I was five, my mom took a cardboard box, painted part of it, and made an early scene from Mario out of felt. It was, easily, my best ever Halloween costume—one that I'd love to show you a photo of, if requesting that your parents find an individual photo from the early 1990s on a moment's notice were a reasonable thing to do [Update: Apparently my family has great archiving skills].

On Christmas a few years later, I got my own Game Boy, so I didn’t have to keep using my dad’s. I had long since co-opted it, anyway. I got far more enjoyment than is reasonable out of that Game Boy and out of the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. Eventually, I stopped, becoming someone who is content playing free games littered with ads beamed to my smartphone. One of those people who takes the phone out on the train or the bus to play a few letters in Words With Friends, then gets back to listening to music or texting friends. One of those people who, experts say, will be the death of the Game Boy.

Jason Koebler

I was in the hospital having just gotten my tonsils taken out, which turned out to be a very gnarly surgery for my fragile little 5-year-old self. My dad came into the hospital room with a gift, a rectangle package and was like, "Here, I got you a book" and I was like, "Oh cool, a book" and then I opened it and it was a Game Boy and I was stoked. I was obsessed with it for years, and only ever played Mario and Tetris, which I ruled at (They're still pretty much the only video games I've ever played, in fact).

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We had just one (mine) in our tight-knit neighborhood of six kids. We brought it everywhere we went (aka the woods, the only place there was to go in my hickish New Hampshire town), because it was one of the first pieces of portable techie gadget we ever had. It felt like quite a novelty at the time, which I guess was in 1989.

Meghan Neal

I never actually owned a Game Boy, but my grandma did have one that was left behind by my Uncle John, who's a few years older than I am and always has been the cool guy in the family—or, at least to my 12-year-old eyes, cool enough to have owned an original Game Boy way back when.

I remember playing a volleyball game that was pretty confusing, but naturally my favorite game was the wonderfully-titled Skate or Die: Tour de Thrash, whose shred-tastic aesthetic was probably more important than the gameplay, which was largely confusing (I never could figure out the half pipe). But man, I did feel cool playing that crazy thing.

Derek Mead

I mostly played Tetris, Marble Madness, Pokémon, and Super Mario Land on the different Game Boys I had between ages 9 and 16. Between Game Boys and various CD Players, I easily consumed more AA batteries in a week as a kid than I do in a year as an adult. When my family was in the process of moving to the Seattle, we stopped by my dad’s office on a Sunday for a brief tour. As we left, I glimpsed the Nintendo of America building across the highway. Of course, my brother and I did what any self-respecting, Mario-playing kids would, and forced an inquiry with Nintendo’s weekend security guard for a tour. When the guard said “sure,” after a bit of hesitation, my brother and I instantly became cooler than any other kids in the world, and proceeded behind the gentleman through the hallways where dreams become pixels. We saw a number of desks with all sorts of non-retail Nintendo equipment, desks scattered with blank game cartridges, giant posters featuring Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros., and the employee cafeteria.

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I still have my original Game Boy to this day, with a copy of Tetris in its slot. It’s just been about a decade since I put some fresh AA’s in it. In recognition of the system's 25 year anniversary, I think I finally will.

Dan Stuckey

Image: William Warby/Flickr

Thinking back on the Game Boy, what impresses me most was how unobtrusive and durable it seemed; it so easily became a small part of everything. The grey, even drab little portal insinuated itself into all kinds of downtime: Bus rides to school, vacations, lazy Sundays. I played the thing almost everywhere, even if I never was really all that hooked on the games themselves.

Game Boy can lay a claim to being the first truly interactive mainstream gadget—the first screen-bearing device that we could carry with us, disappear into, and exert control over an insular world, all with a few button taps. A mobile machine that we glued ourselves to, passed back and forth, fought over. Thanks, maybe, to Game Boy, I'll always be a particular kind of game boy.

Brian Merchant

Depending on who you ask, Sega's answer to the Game Boy was either vastly ahead of its time, or a battery-draining monstrosity that put a generation of kids in glasses.

On paper (and in mean-spirited commercials) Game Gear really sounded good—better even than Game Boy: It was backlit! It was in full color! You could watch TV on it! But accomplishing these things required an astonishing 6 AA batteries for every three hours of play, which made your Game Gear both very heavy and very hot. I can still see the bright red power-indicating light beginning to flash and signal imminent death, as I try in vain for one more level in Sonic 2.

The Game Boy's triumph over the Game Gear is the triumph of manageable expectations and the knowledge that the secret of good design is creating something that works well. Nintendo knew its limits, while the competition went for broke before the tech was there. Which is why at 25, the Game Boy is being praised and looked back upon fondly, while the also-ran Game Gear is looked back on only through thick prescription lenses.

Ben Richmond