In 1992, my grandmother, my cousin and I were in a mall someplace in Bromley, Kent, England. At eight years old I was developing a burgeoning appreciation for visiting the mall with my grandmother; as a New Zealander who visited her in the UK once a year, she had a tendency to spoil me. During this particular mall visit, my cousin told her he wanted a Game Boy, Nintendo’s handheld console that had been released in Europe a couple of years prior. I didn’t know what a “Game Boy” was at that time, but I knew that if my cousin wanted one, then I wanted one too.

The Game Boy, an innocuous purchase for a kid who only really wanted one out of FOMO, changed my life.

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Prior to the little grey brick, my only exposure to video games had been Alex Kidd on my neighbor’s SEGA Master System. But he wanted me to watch him play – which was boring – and I was far more interested in his trampoline. The Game Boy, however, was different from watching Stephen’s SEGA speedruns. I was often alone as a kid, and I loved the Game Boy because it suited that lifestyle. It was private, mine. I could take it anywhere, like a book. Worlds exploded in light, queasy green.

I began with Tetris and moved quickly to The New Ghostbusters 2, where I religiously played as Ray and Peter (the best characters). Once back in New Zealand, my grandma would send me Game Boy games she would arbitrarily choose for birthdays and Christmas. Some were absolute bangers (Kirby’s Dream Land) while some were total duds (Dr. Franken, Bart vs The Juggernauts), but I loved them all. When you’re only able to play one or two games a year, you play the goddamn shit out of them. My grandma was, to me, a god, sending me small square packages from on high.

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At the time of my Game Boy obsession, my sister was in and out of the hospital; she was a sick kid. I lived with my nana a lot while she was treated, and vividly remember playing Super Mario Land 2:

Six Golden Coins under the covers of the small bed in her spare room. I was too young to understand what was really going on, my world in a strange limbo. But the battery in my Game Boy didn’t die. It was indestructible and constant.

Six Golden Coins was weird. It was different from anything I’d played before, it didn’t follow the rules of what I understood to be a “normal” video game. Mario was shrunk, and thrown into a giant mechanical version of himself. He was flung into space. He had to navigate a level full of floating, pulsating blobs of good. It was Nintendo unleashed, and I loved it, lost in that world under those covers for hours.

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My sister eventually got better, and I was no longer indulged. In New Zealand, the SEGA Mega Drive had exploded as the must-have console. I was distracted by the graphics and the color; Sonic the Hedgehog in technicolor blue made my Game Boy feel drab and tired in comparison. I stopped playing it, lured by a technically bigger and better console.

But I’ll never forget my Game Boy, and my generous grandma, who died in the late 90s, who at first inadvertently and then determinedly instilled a love of video games into my impressionable brain. It set me on a road that would eventually lead me to where I am in the present day, still in love with the worlds it taught me could exist.

Happy 30th birthday, Game Boy.

Lucy O’Brien is Executive Editor of Features at IGN. Follow her on Twitter.



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