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RetroMo: Game Boy
Written by Chris Buffa on Thursday, June 22, 2006
The little system that could still outmuscled its color competition for almost seven years...
The first time that I ever saw a Game Boy was during the late eighties at my cousin Willy's house. Nintendo had just released the system along with a handful of games, and because he usually got the hottest game systems I was always eager to make the long ass trip to his place, even for just ten minutes of Super Mario Bros. This time, however, the trek was especially worth it because the Game Boy was at the time a very unique product. Nintendo had somehow managed to capture the magic of the NES and transfer it to a hand held device, which was something that I just had to see for myself.
At the time, my portable gaming library consisted of Tiger's weak sauce hand held games, these LCD devices that had very limited movement, sort of similar to Nintendo's Game & Watch series. But Game & Watch had debuted several years prior and the line had run its course. I was fumbling around with dated technology, games that were maddeningly difficult and just not that much fun. Tiger had managed to secure some key licenses such as Castlevania, Afterburner, Double Dragon, and Shinobi, but these games were a far cry from their console counterparts. Looking back I can appreciate what I had at the time and I'm grateful that my parents decided to buy me anything, but at 11 I was too busy trying to keep up with the joneses and losing miserably. I craved next generation technology.
As soon as I picked up the Game Boy I was immediately hooked. It was clunky as all hell and the screen wasn't especially sharp, but none of that really mattered at the time. All I knew was whenever I pressed left and right on the d-pad Mario would run in that direction and the background scrolled along with him. It was at that point when I realized that Tiger could no longer quench my thirst for portable gaming.
