Gameboys are still cool
It’s summer 1999, for some reason me and my older brother got our hands on a Gameboy Color. The Pokémon fever was just getting started. We watched the anime on TV, and we had been playing the TCG for a while already, so we had a pretty substantial collection of cards by the time. I even think my brother was able to sell some of them to buy the Gameboy Color.. but I cant say for sure. I was just 9 years old at the time, so my memories are a little fuzzy on the financial details.
That summer and the following one we drained batteries so hard my dad had to buy us a charger specifically for us to be able to play. Summer at our cousins (who also happened to have a Gameboy) were a constant rally of us training our Pokémons to the max level possible, so we could battle eachother trough link cable. We were fortunate to catch on some magazines that had the hidden items listed on every route, and even the MissingNo bug to clone our Rare Candies. AND, when things looked like they could not get any better, Gamefreak drops Gold and Silver in Japan. it was an absolute blast, we rented the cartridge on Blockbuster (in Japanese) and beat it on about a week or two. I dont remember if we ever returned the cartridge that time. Maybe not..
And on top of that there were more games than just Pokémon; The Legend of Zelda, the Mario ports from classic Arcades, random games like Killer Instinct, and sooo much more, have tailored some of my best gaming memories ever. The local games store was always out of cartridges stock so they were very precious, and you would end up playing the weirdest games just because you could not get your hands on anything else.
We had other consoles later, We bought a SEGA Genesis and we played a lot on there to; then we switched to a Sony Playstation 1, and then the PS2, and when we were able to afford internet at home, we played sooo many PC games.. But the Gameboy will always have that special spot in my heart.
Fastforward a few years later, around 2009, at the time I was heavily invested on the old GameMaker Forus, waaaay back when there was just Construct and GameMaker (I think I started using it on version 5 or when 6 came out), So as a Gameboy nostalgic I obviously had to try to make games for the Gameboy. I started making my own emulator on GameMaker, that could read up until the first screen of most games (for me that was incredible I could do that on my own back then, this was like 2009), then when I was confident I grabbed some tools available at the moment to write the ASM, write the sprites, etc.. I was .. mostly able to get a character walking around the screen with a sprited animation. But the job was so difficult that it kind of frustrated me. I also had no clue what to do with that knowledge, no game ideas that could easily translate to the console and be fun to play.
When COVID hit and I was able to land a remote job, I had time and money to buy dumb stuff I was not able to afford or do before, so I bought an old working GBC just to play some old games, because current games at the time just seemed boring, and most of the indie games scene was quiet. It started as a fun little project; initially I could not play on the original GBC screen.. my eyes just could not bear it! How did we ever managed to put 300 hours on this device when we were young?? So I bought a backlight mod kit and installed it on the GBC.
The feeling was just so extraordinarily different from what I remembered. The only games that could get me hooked up now were the classic Pokémon and Zeldas, those I did play for a few hundred hours on my new GBC, But once I was done with that I left it on a stand on the TV rack, to gather dust for a few years. Now just a relic of the past, a reminder of a memory of a time where things were overall, more analogic and less disturbed by the ways of the modern internet. A lot more social in the way we interacted with technology, even without social networks. Mostly a reminder of how good our childhood was back then, in spite of the hardships we had to endure.
Now, this was no surprise to me when I saw it recently online, that theres currently a very active community of game developers working and releasing games for the GB consoles; I found itch.io to be the place where they gathered to share their creations, and even saw the rise of GB Studio, when I checked recently theres more games there I could ever play on a lifetime being published! I picked up some titles recently, super simple games like Taiyaki Fabulous Museun of Fish feel so simple, lovely and engaging as the games of old, Other games like Sanctuary are crazy on how many details they manage to capture in just 4mb, incredible artwork, music and huge worlds to explore!
The funny thing is that there are more titles coming up all the time, so by the time I finish the games I got I will definitely have more games to explore, it feels like the console has come back to life, that its new and fresh again; And its really encouraging for guys like me who would love to make games on their favorite handheld device to know they will have an audience for their creations ♥
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