Game Boya portable game machine, that just by writing its name, like Pavlov’s dog, I automatically travel to the distant 1991, when my parents, after endless nagging, got us the first Game Boy.
I still remember the smell of the box with the ’80s futuristic cover, with the two robotic hands playing Tetris.
The Tetris it was the free game you got with the Game Boy. Our parents might have thought, that with her gaming machine Nintendo they would be spared apart from our muttering and many 20s that we threw in the summer at the “unfadikas”. They may have saved money on electronics, but the Game Boy “sucked up” the 4 batteries it took like lizards (I don’t know how this expression came about), let alone that to get a game you had to go and sing carols (ie 30,000 drachmas if I remember correctly) quite a large amount for the time.
The Game Boy had an awesome library (library-wise), with tons of addictive games like Super Mario Land, Metroid 2, Mega man V and more that you struggled to finish before your battery or game lives ran out.…
My personal collection
The Game Boy it was released 35 years ago, and those of us who got our hands on it at that time, suddenly feel “old”, but also happy to have lived through the first era of video games that you could have everywhere with you, like mobile phones now.
1.In 1993, Soviet cosmonaut Aleksandr A. Serebrov took his Game Boy into space on the TM-17 space mission. It was later auctioned for $1,220 and is said to have orbited the earth 3,000 times.
2.At the Nintendo World Store in New York, a Game Boy that survived a barracks bombing in the Gulf War is proudly on display. The jailbroken mobile device is still working.
3.Tetris, although released on the PC, was a huge hit on the Game Boy and sold 35 million copies.
4.The first Game Boy could run for 30 hours on two AA batteries, this was due to the fact that the screen only had 4 shades of gray and no backlight.
5.The Game Boy allowed for multiplayer via connection cables, usually up to 4 people. The handheld first-person shooter Faceball 2000 released in 1991 changed that, with a spaghetti junction-like cluster of cables and adapters, 16 players could connect and play together.
6.Nintendo announced, in 1995, that 46% of Game Boy players were women, the first time a console was so popular with women. A 2014 study found that 52% of gamers are women.
7.The Game Boy and Game Boy Color sold more than the Atari Lynx and Sega Genesis combined, 118.69 million units, before they were discontinued in 2000.
8. Satoshi Tajirri, inspired by the idea of monsters running through the Game Boy’s connecting cables, created the original trio of the famous Game Boy Pokémon series: Red, Green, and Blue. Green, due to poor image quality, was not available outside of Japan.
9. Released only in Japan, the Game Boy Light had a built-in backlit screen that allowed users to play in low light conditions
10. The Game Boy sold an external camera and printer, the camera took low-resolution images of the user, and in turn, the Game Boy may have been the first selfie device before cell phones.
11. The original Game Boy was more than twice as fast as the NES, as both had 8-bit CPUs and, with the NES’s 2kb and the Game Boy’s 8kb, had four times the RAM.
12. The Game Boy is the favorite instrument of “chiptune” artists – these are musicians who use old game hardware to create electronic music. With special sequencer cartridges, artists can make the device produce a series of strange sounds.
13.The Game Boy Color game Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble had a built-in accelerometer on the cartridge that recognized when the player moved the hand they were holding – this was then used to direct Kirby in the game.
14.Neil Young used the aforementioned Game Boy camera to create the Silver and Gold album artwork, the photo was taken by his daughter
15. The handy boy was a strange accessory for the Game Boy that included a magnifying glass, stereo speakers and a light, and when it was built it looked more like a spaceship than a games console.
