The Staying Power of the Game Boy
Originally posted on July 21, 2019 when this publication was hosted on WordPress.
As I mentioned in my first post on this blog, I am a Nintendo fanboy. I have had nearly every home console they have released in the US with the exception of the Wii U, and I love their handhelds.  For me that love started with the original Game Boy.
I can’t remember the year, though I think it was 1993 or 94 and my older sister got her Game Boy for Christmas. It was the same year I got a Sega Game Gear and I tell you what, I thought I had just hit the jackpot! Mine came with Sonic 2 and had a fully back lit LCD screen. She had a tiny green and black screen with no back light and it came with Tetris, so of course I was winning.Â
However it wasn’t long before I found myself tethered to the wall with the power adapter after having learned about the importance of battery life in portable gaming. And then my sister unboxed her copy of Super Mario Land and I realized that I had fallen into the classic blunder that so many kids were guilty of in the early-90’s. I had bet against Nintendo.
Super Mario Land was a lot of fun and while it wasn’t the same as the NES Mario games that I was used to, I often found myself wanting to play it rather than my copy of Sonic 2. I kind of lost interest in portable games at that point since we finally got an SNES but in the late 90’s I came back to it when my friends got into Pokemon and I picked up the Red version.Â
That’s right, I started way back in Gen 1, though I’m not like other Gen-1ers who hate all the subsequent games. In fact there are very few Pokemon games that I can say I didn’t really enjoy. As time went on I picked up other handheld titles like Final Fantasy Legend III, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, and more. As I grew older I couldn’t afford to pick up the newer hand held consoles as they came out but my old Game Boy Color stuck with me over the next 15 years.