My Game Boy and Me: A Trip Down 90s Gaming Memory Lane

So the original classic Nintendo Game Boy turns 25, so I guess I should dedicate an article to the machine and its arsenal of games, am I right? After all, this system did start my love for Nintendo (even if it’s debatable that it also took me to a very rocky relationship with a frustrating Japanese company) and jump-started my interest in video games. Along with Nickelodeon, Kids WB, The Sosa/McGuire Home Run Chase, Michael Jordan, Disney Renaissance, and the Britney Spears Saga, the Nintendo Game Boy/Game Boy Color remains one of my fondest memories about my childhood and the 90s in general.

I was 5 when I got my first Game Boy. It was given to me by my uncle, and I couldn’t tell you what the reason was. Maybe he had no time for it. Maybe my cousins lost interest in it. Whatever the reason, he handed me the clunky device. There was a nice appeal to it however; there was something about the toy that was easy to grip, easy to handle, easy to play.


That being said, the first game was Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.



Home Alone 2 sucked. Royally. I mean, it was terrible. I couldn’t get out of the first level. I didn’t even understand what was going on, what I had to do, why I had to do it. Why were there evil vacuum cleaners? Why were there old women trying to hit me? What? Why? Whyyyyy? As a 5-year-old, I learned what a sucky game was, immediately.



I nearly quit on the system, honestly I did.

Then came Super Mario Land. And then I got Tetris.




The rest was history.


Super Mario Land is one of the oddest Mario games ever made because it was made by a totally different cast, excluding Miyamoto (who was working on the eventual masterpiece Super Mario World) and even Koji Kondo (Who is the John Williams of the gaming industry). Nonetheless, it was still very entertaining, quite tough, and kept you on your toes. It was a simple platformer, nothing more, nothing less. 12 levels full of the usual Mario gameplay mixed in with levels in which you could navigate a submarine and an airplane.

God, remember the good ol’ days when there was lots of emphasis on the cover box art in the Game Boy days? Just the image alone makes you excited to play.

Tetris however was a different beast. A beautiful beast. It remains one of the 20 greatest games you’ll ever play, and the absolutely perfect complement to everything the Game Boy represents: simple pick-up-and-play gaming. It was easy to learn, and yet remains interesting, exciting, and engaging every second you play. Tetris is currently in the 3DS, and it’s a shame that its legacy has waned a bit over the years (although the Tetris Company is partly to blame for failing to keep the momentum flowing). But if there is a game that saved me from potentially giving up on gaming early, it would be Tetris.



Home Alone 2, Super Mario Land, and Tetris were given to me by my uncle. The first video game I remember begging my mom to purchase was Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. The game looked like a legit Mario game, the box art looked awesome, and I remember being excited after going to Toys R Us (My has this place fallen hard in recent years after its peak in the 90s) and seeing the short trailer for it. I remember going to the store, and seeing a massive Nintendo-run touchscreen attached to a television. You pressed the button for what game you wanted to see a few moments of, and there it was. Nintendo used to market games, believe it or not.

Super Mario Land 2 was a phenomenal game by the way, remains one of the best handheld games ever made. It was a lengthy adventure with plenty of challenge, plenty of variety, and was just so much fun. My love for Mario Land 2 led to my eventual purchase for Mario Land 3---which turned out to be the original (and still awesome) Wario Land. As a 7-year-old however, it took me forever to understand why it was called Mario Land 3---even though Mario was nowhere to be found.

In the midst of the Nintendo Game Boy life, the Sega Game Gear had arrived attempting to nab some of the popularity. During the epic Sega/Nintendo war in the 90s, the Game Gear had become the latest chapter in the playground battles for gaming supremacy. But the Game Gear never ever took off with anyone in school because the battery life was absolute crap, the prices of the games were heavier, and the games just weren’t as entertaining. There was Sonic and then….and then……um……Sonic. So even with the Game Gear looking better thanks to the colors, that’s all it had. The playground battles between the Nintendo fans and the Sega fans were epic, but both sides did agree to the superiority of the Game Boy in the handheld field. It was too obvious.

History would repeat itself when the severely underpowered Nintendo Wii took out the far-better-looking competitors in the mid-2000s. Back to topic.


The next major event in my Game Boy life was the great Christmas of 1995, when Donkey Kong Land was arriving at stores and was getting the attention of all the kids because of the yellow cartridge and we were still absolutely stunned at how good Donkey Kong Country looked compared to any game out there. It was on my Christmas list, and my parents knew that this was it—this was the big game to get. When Christmas morning arrived I knew that the smaller box had my game. I knew it was a Game Boy game.




But it wasn’t Donkey Kong Land.



It was Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong was basically the original arcade game on pure steroids. You get the original 4 levels, and then they added 90 more, making this one of the lengthiest handheld games ever made. It was fun, it was good, but it wasn’t the game I had wanted. So after a little scrambling, my loving parents got me Donkey Kong Land. The entire thing became a blessing in disguise as I wound up getting multiple games in the same Christmas season. That was also the year I got my Super Nintendo. This definitely made up for my lack of friends.


1995 was a good Christmas.

But the Super Nintendo was the most beautiful toy in the history of my childhood. So many great games, so many instant classics, it consumed all our time. With the help of Blockbuster, within the first year we had Donkey Kong Country, Country 2, NBA Jam, Ken Griffey Jr. Slugfest, Super Mario Kart, Link to the Past, Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, among many others. The Game Boy was a wonderful device but was definitely losing steam. We had the Game Boy Pocket to allow my brothers a chance to play when I wasn’t hogging the original Boy.



1998 changed everything.

Wario Land II came out in March of 1998 and I got it the first day. But I remember not being able to play it until that evening because my family and I were attending some sort of Dominican music festival. It did not matter in the least bit what was going on, all I wanted to do was go home and play that game, the sequel to one of my favorite games. Wario Land II was a gem. A very tough gem. It didn’t really have the popularity of the N64/PSX games that were dominating the charts at the time, but it was still a great game that consumed my entire summer.

Then came the Pokemon.


Pokemon Red/Blue conquered, dominated, and eradicated every other video game from any system in the Fall of 1998 in Hunter’s Creek Middle School. It was the one and only conversation in playgrounds, in classrooms, in cafeterias, and in every hangout spot within the vicinity of the school. Pokemon struck like a tidal wave and swept up all the children and teenagers along the way to financial heights that no video game franchise had seen since 1989 Super Mario.


The biggest difference between phenomenons and permanent staples to the culture is the way the first blockade of success if handled. The IPod was handled well because Apple continued finding ways to evolve the product and make it far more than just a music player. It easily could have been something like AOL---a device stuck in the past, and totally devoid of improvement. The Wii became a fad because it alienated its audience and didn’t attempt to enhance what made it a hit in the first place. Pokemon’s phenomenon was taken advantage of to the full extent of economic law without much glimpsing into the future. I am almost positive that if it had been handled correctly, Pokemon would be the biggest moneymaker in any form of entertainment year in and year out. Darn it, I am off-topic again…..

There was Pokemon Pinball, Pokemon Yellow, Pokemon Trading Card Game, Pokemon Silver, Pokemon Gold, Pokemon Diamond within the next 4 years. We were being delivered an extreme arsenal of Pokemon goodness and although it was very much appreciated it was also met with a backlash. During 1998/1999 the Game Boy was catapulted back into the market, back into gaming conversations, and became a staple to my middle school and high school years. And not only were these games part of a big fad that eventually condensed to a consistent success for Nintendo, they were all very good games.



The cards were also fun; the television show was extremely repetitive but still enjoyable. The movies were….well, they happened. This was all part of the Game Boy’s re-emergence and transition from former hit into newfound glory. By around this time, the Game Boy Color was also finding its way into stores along with remakes of the original-original Super Mario Bros. (The DX version has one of the greatest hidden secrets in gaming history, with the entire Super Mario Bros. 2 JP game packed in) and Link’s Awakening—one of the great Zelda games during the epic, epic 10-year run of Zelda from 1991-2001 (Link to the Past, Awakening, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Oracle of Seasons, Oracle of Ages).

Guess what I got that Christmas…..

1998 gave us Ocarina of Time, Game Boy Color, Pokemon Red/Blue, Link’s Awakening DX, and the severely underrated Wario Land II. Arguably one of the greatest years of Nintendo history if you ask me, as they got everything right. But the beginning of the end was occurring.

The Game Boy Color wasn’t as powerful or as progressive a device as we anticipated. We were expecting the upgrade to be more…well….in terms of memory as opposed to just giving the games a color upgrade. Between 1999 and 2001 it seemed like Nintendo was focusing more on the move from the I-totally-lost-to-Sony N64 to the This-Better-Be-Good Gamecube. The amount of games released for the handhelds decreased dramatically.

We had the arguably-the-best-Nintendo-RPG-ever Pokemon Silver, Wario Land III, the Metal Gear Solid nobody bought, and lastly the Oracle of Ages/Seasons in 2001. All the other Game Boy Color games were pretty much filler or third-party garbage. Video games were starting to become a bit more expensive to Wario and Pokemon were the only two I was able to get in those entire three years. By the time the Sega Dreamcast (R.I.P. Sega/Nintendo Wars) and the Playstation 2 arrived, we really noticed the drastically dated look of the Game Boy games. The separation was far too big to not notice. As a teenager and seeing the upcoming Smash Brothers Melee, can you really go back to the Game Boy if not for nostalgia or some more Pokemon action?

2001: The End.



I didn’t know at the time, but Nintendo was also preparing for a new generation of handheld greatness. As great as the Game Boy had treated the company, it was time to change the image, change the cartridges, upgrade the visuals, and get some good-looking portable games. Right after my 14th birthday, my childhood was beginning the next stage of gaming---with the Game Boy Advance arriving on stores that summer. It was a fitting transition because at age 14 I was ready to enter high school, a brand new world. It was time to leave that other life behind, as I had International Baccalaureate programmed to go that fall (I never stood a chance, but I was too stubborn to notice it).

The instant the Game Boy Advance hit, my Game Boy era of the Clinton 90s had reached an end. All those car rides, all the doctor visits, all the elongated trips to Whole Foods in Downtown to get the potato bread for my Autistic brother (In the 90s, we firmly believe everything was causing this disability, and fought to the teeth for alternative diets and ways of life for him), and every lazy Saturday moment in between, I had the Game Boy to thank for being there with me. It put up with a lot of gameplay hours, a lot of abuse, a lot of gaming altogether.

I did get the Game Boy Advance, and it was a spectacular system, but I didn’t give it half the attention I gave the original Game Boy. School, the eventual job, the transitioning from one high school to the other, my increasing skills with computers, and the takeover of the Gamecube (short-lived takeover, by the way) all paraded ahead of my time with the Advance. Even when the new Pokemon games were hitting, it just didn’t feel the same. Life was transitioning into something bigger, something very different. My amount of free time was diminishing, my interests were widening elsewhere, and the carefree economically sturdy times were drawing to a close. Things were getting complicated.

From a poetic standpoint, the Nintendo Game Boy came at the right time, and got replaced at the adequate time. The original Game Boy represented the 90s quite well: not too extravagant, successful, simple, reliable, full of fun and enjoyment, and Pokemon. It was four buttons (three to be honest, as the select button was almost never used), a control pad, nothing more. Yet somehow, dozens of wonderful games came from this simple little device. Unlike your typical toy that loses appeal after a few weeks, the Game Boy was there to stay, there to consume your life, your down time, your sad time, your happy time.

The Game Boy was part of my 90s childhood, and it was such a beautiful time. From Super Mario Land’s infamous submarine level all the way up to Pokemon Silver’s shocking trip to Kanto.

Happy 25th Game Boy. Thanks for the memories buddy.