Memorable Game Boy Christmas

When I was a child I was incredibly lucky to have a dad who loves gaming, as every weekend we would go out and rent games. After a while, we accumulated a pretty large game collection! Whenever a new console would come out during the year we had a huge stack of games to play and we weren’t in a huge rush to get the next big console as soon as it hit the shelves; we would wait until later, once it came down in price. My parents always loved tricking us come Christmas time — Just because a present had your name on it didn’t mean it was actually yours. For days you would be shaking presents trying to figure out what was hiding inside of them then when it was time to open they would tell you to trade with someone else. So I had no clue what I was going to get that year, but it ended up being a great surprise.

The only year I got a console for Christmas was the year my brother and I each got our own Game Boy, with two games each. It seemed crazy that we each got our own system that we didn’t have to share! The games I got with my system were: Tetris (which came bundled with the Game Boy), Super Mario Brothers 2: 6 Golden Coins, and Mega Man III. Back in 1989, the Game Boy cost $99.99 US, with inflation it would be around $160 US now.

To a lot of readers here, this handheld system sounds ancient, but for me as a child at the time, the Game Boy was unlike anything I had seen. The fact that you could carry it around anywhere you wanted and didn’t need it to be hooked up to the television was great! As long as you had enough batteries, that is. Oh, and having decent light always helped, since the original Game Boy wasn’t backlit, so you couldn’t do things like play under the covers late at night. Unless you were lucky enough to have one of those attachments that plugged into the side of the system that you could position over the screen; I’m not sure how good they worked since I didn’t have one, but I am sure they ate through batteries like crazy!

On the Game Boy there was a dial on the side where you could adjust the contrast on the screen to make the greenish-coloured picture a bit easier to see, especially when the sun was too bright. The fact that the graphics weren’t in colour wasn’t the biggest deal to me at the time. I was used to a 13-inch television that would switch between a colour picture and black and white whenever it wanted, so this wasn’t anything new. I learned as a kid that if the sound cuts out on the television, all you need to do is hit it with your hand to bring it back. Electronics were so much easier to fix back then!

The Game Boy system was great to bring along for long car rides when my family would drive for 14 hours to get to my grandparent’s house. I’m sure my parents were very happy that the game system came with earphones packed in the box, because having to listen to the music of two different games at the same time would be incredibly annoying! After burning through a lot of AA batteries, my parents invested in a battery pack that could be charged just by plugging it into the wall, which was one of the most useful accessories ever!

Looking back, the tiny screen on the Game Boy may seem small for games like Mega Man, where there are a lot of enemies on screen to avoid. This definitely was tricky as a lot of the jumps you would make were blind, since you wouldn’t be able to see the platform you were jumping to on the next screen over. But somehow they managed to make this work and recreated the magic from Mega Man from the NES, on a little screen all in green. The chiptune music on the Game Boy was amazing considering its tiny speakers! One of my favourite games was Tetris, this highly addictive puzzle game looked and sounded great on the Game Boy. It was especially cool that you could attach a cord between two systems and play against one another. My dad always kicked my butt, he was and still is the master at Tetris, although I may be able to give him a bit more of a challenge now!

The first game I remember completing for the Game Boy system was Kirby’s Dreamland. Sure it may seem like a little kid’s game, but it was so fun and cute, I adored it! Even now I still play through the game every couple of years just to remind myself of the stuff I loved as a child.

To this day I still have that Game Boy with the original box, and everything that came with it. I also have my brother’s old system too, since I seem to have a lot more nostalgia for the now retro stuff we grew up with. At one point I remember decorating the console with stickers that came in a Nintendo Power Magazine. At the time it seemed really cool, but I have since taken them all off to get the console back to its original grey brick look.

Because of that Christmas, I have been able to experience a ton of great games on that little grey console. To this day I still collect some of the amazing titles that were released for it, so I can enjoy them on the original Game Boy like they were meant to be! After 32 years, my Game Boy still works great and I’m sure it could survive through anything, this tiny console is a tank! This was one of my most loved and memorable Christmas gifts from my childhood!