Game Boy: the 30th Anniversary
The Blind Eternities forum
Posted on April 17, 2019, 10:18 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Game Boy, one of Nintendo's best-known consoles. It was not Nintendo's first handheld console, but it was, with very little question, their best-known handheld, and also one of the most famous video game consoles of all time. The Game Boy certainly had competitors (most notably the Sega Game Gear and the Atari Lynx), but it was definitely the most popular handheld system of its time, because its games were such amazing games.
I never owned an original Game Boy, but I did own a Game Boy Pocket and a Game Boy Advance (I skipped the Game Boy Color), which were actually the only video game consoles that I have ever owned, other than my various computers, and I remember spending many hours playing them.
There were so many awesome games for that system, that I cannot list all of them, here, but some of my favorites are Super Mario Land, Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins, Wario Land, Wario Land II, and Kirby's Dreamland 2. I played each of those games so many times that I have each one nearly memorized and can play through them with little difficulty. One game that I feel is severely under appreciated is the 1994 Donkey Kong, which is a very awesome game that is definitely not a traditional platformer. I played it partially in my childhood, but never completed it, so I recently played it through in its entirety, and enjoyed it, immensely.
Although the original model was discontinued after several years, the entire Game Boy family had an impressive lifespan, with the final model, the Game Boy Micro, being released in 2005, sixteen years after the original model. One major factor that contributed to the system's longevity was the fact that each new model, apart from the Micro, was backwards-compatible with its predecessors, a feature that is surprisingly rare among consoles; even the Game Boy's successor, the DS (which was not the first dual-screen console that Nintendo produced), featured backward compatibility for Game Boy Advance games. As a side note, the fact that the SNES was not backwards-compatible with the NES, that the N64 was not backwards-compatible with its predecessors, or that the newer models of the Playstation and Xbox had only partial backward compatibility with their predecessors, is very puzzling and certainly not helpful for those systems (computers, however, do not have that problem).
I sold my Game Boy and its games many years ago, because I had lost interest in them, but I now wish that I had not, because I am now feeling nostalgia for them, but, thankfully, I have an emulator for the system on my computer, which had enabled my to replay some of my favorite games from my childhood, as well as discover new games that I somehow never played before.
What does everyone else say about this? What are your thoughts about this year being the 30th anniversary of the Game Boy?
DemonDragonJ says... #3
PlatinumOne, no, I simply was never a hardcore gamer, but I did play many games for DOS and Windows in my childhood and adolescence: for me, games such as Comander Keen, Bio Menace, Major Stryker, Jazz Jackrabbit, or the original Duke Nukem were the equivalent of the various Mario, Zelda, Kirby, or Sonic games.
PlatinumOne says... #2
you've never had a playstation or xbox?
April 17, 2019 10:32 p.m.