As my time on this Earth goes on and my age starts climbing closer to 40, I tend to find myself looking back at the games I played as a kid with a lot of fondness. Sure, you could put this down to a case of mid-life crisis since I’m also going back to school for the first time in over 10 years and also my obsession with comic books; but there is much more to it than that.
More to the point, I love looking back at the days when I first got really into gaming and the games I loved to play back then, as you might have seen my “Ode to the Playstation” article I posted here a few years ago. But that wasn’t when I first got into gaming. My first time getting into gaming was with a grey brick known as the Nintendo Game Boy.
Unlike many other kids at the time, I never had a gaming console. So while other kids were playing with things like the Master System, Genesis, NES or even the SNES, I was at home playing with a more vast collection of toys like Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Bravestarr. I was using my imagination instead of running a plumber through worlds to save a princess that was always in another castle, or speeding through robots that contained trapped animals as a blue hedgehog with red shoes. Nope, I was happy playing good vs evil with nothing more than a few dozen action figures and my imagination.
As many things tended to do with my family back in those days, my mother and her (now former) gambling addiction resulted in a good birthday for me one year (not sure which, but it was early in the Game Boy life cycle) as she won big and had enough spare money to get me a Game Boy and one extra game; that extra game being Super Mario Land.
There was nothing more exciting to me than being able to sit down in my room and play Tetris, Super Mario Land, and many other games that would come about into my collection. As I had other friends who had Game Boy’s as well, it would be great when we would sit around in a group talking smack while enjoying laying against each other in Tetris, Street Fighter, F1 Racing and other games that would use the link cable. We would also loan each other games, swap them around without caring about the value or anything.
Back then, getting games was something to behold for me. Since I didn’t really get much in terms of pocket money (Only $5 a week or the choice of trading it in for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic), saving up for new games was a long and annoying process. I’d spend time looking through Toys R Us and Game Traders where I could see the new games in their boxes and then work out how long it would take for me to save up for them. The process would usually take about 3 months per game as we paid about $60 Australian per game, and at $5 a week, that was a long time to save. So by the time I would have enough for a new game, the game would usually be sold out with no more coming to the store.
So what could I do? Well, luckily my mother would always allow me to go to the Blockbuster Video on the way up to our usual camping site and get 6 games on loan from there for the low price of $20. Now the selection wasn’t huge by any means, about 30 or so games, and it never really got updated all that often since the SNES was the bigger thing at the time and people would get those over the Game Boy games. So I got to work my way through a lot of the games, sometimes hiring the same games weekend after weekend just so I could get that little bit further than I did the weekend before.
Through the Blockbuster Video store, I got to see a lot of games I couldn’t afford. Things like Burger Time, Bugs Bunny’s Crazy Castle, Amazing Spider-Man, NES World Cup, WWF Superstars, and many more. Eventually, I would find other shops and would still hire games from time to time and buy more as time when on. Hell, once I got my Playstation, I would still spend time playing my Game Boy games when I would be out of the house or traveling just because they were fun.
By the time I finally decided to trade in my Game Boy for a Nintendo DS (Yes, I held onto it for that long) I had spent so many hours on the old grey brick that it was pretty much on its last legs. The Game Boy library had long since stopped production and people no longer cared about it. I bid farewell to all my games one last time, going through about 6 sets of 4 AA batteries along the way, wiped the save files from things like Donkey Kong Land, Pokemon Red & Silver, saved the Princess one more time; placed them all back in their semi-clear cases and handed them over for trade in… Never to be seen again.
Since then, thanks to emulation, I still spend some time with those same games. Playing them on a 60 inch HDTV might be a bit of overkill, but it’s enough to bring a smile to my face. But still, nothing will ever replace the feeling of that gaming on the go that I had as a kid, and that makes me sad.
So just so things do not end on a downer, I’m going to celebrate my old gaming friend by giving you my personal Top 10 games for the Game Boy. Now each of these games I played as a kid, either through buying them or borrowing them from a friend or loaning them from Blockbuster Video. This isn’t stuff I discovered years later through emulation or anything, but a true recreation of what I enjoyed as a child.
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