Remember the days before the Xbox? Or the Wii’s or DS’S and so on? If you look back far enough, you’ll probably remember a simpler time of gaming; the Gameboy. It came out just at the dawn of my childhood, and was the driving force of entertainment. It was one of, if not my absolute favorite toy of my young adolescent life.
I remember first getting mine. I was in Japan, visiting my family while I was in first grade. My grandmother gave it to me as a sort of parting gift. I remember opening the box on the slightly stinky train, and setting aside all the seemingly useless papers and instruction manuals and pulling out my brand new Gameboy advance. It was one of those ones that looked like a box that you flipped open. It was a dark shade of black, and boy did I think it was the coolest thing since sliced bread!
The nice thing about these new game boys was not only could you play the regular games, but you could also “experience” the classic Gameboy color games. You could play anything from Zelda to Donkey Kong to golfing. By far my favorite was Pokémon. I thought one of the awesome parts was being able to fight and trade with my friends. I remember this one time my best friend and I playing on our Gameboys, and fighting with our Pokémon. We both had eventually cheated to get our Pokémon, but it didn’t really matter, because we had so much fun. I remember my friend bringing out his strongest one and me just swatting it down. We were doing all this while trying to keep my brother out of my room, so we were yelling at the top of our lungs “I CHOOSE YOU!!!” while shoving the door as hard as possible. My Gameboy was definitely my favorite toy growing up.
Can you believe the advancements since then like Portable 3-D? New games on your device at the touch of a button! Even using the internet on a handheld game device would have blown my mind. Now, I play other things like Xbox, but sometimes I like to revisit my childhood.
So, I hope with people reading this, I have retrieved some fond memories. Like maybe the entertainment games have provided for long car rides, smashing barrels in donkey Kong, or smashing Goombas Mario. Maybe even of trying to pry the game system off of a child just to release the trance of the gaming so (s) he could pay attention, or maybe something entirely different like getting an important gift. Those simple moments were some of the highlights in my childhood, and I hope you remember those times too.