Tech Time Warp of the Week: 25 Years of Game Boy

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
If you can remember playing games on your brand new Game Boy, you are old, really old. :D Nintendo is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its first hand held gaming platform. Check out the first commercial showcasing the new Game Boy. Wow, now that was a long time ago. Ah, memories. :cool:
 
"When I was a kid..." "Video games only had 2 colors, 2 buttons and 1 d-pad and we LIKED it".
 
Still have mine too, most of my games went missing somehow but I remember "battling my neighbor with video link" was pretty sweet, lol.
 
I had the original NES, but never liked the Gameboy. I did get a technically superior Sega GameGear, but the less sophisticated games were a letdown.
 
I not only remember buying my brand new Gameboy, I remember having to buy a second one because my mom became a Tetris (then Dr. Mario) addict. I then had to buy her a second one because she wore the first one completely out.
 
That is nothing. I still had my Atari 2600 until a freak neighborhood flood destroyed it. I even had the paddle controller for Pong. I cannot even remember how much time was spent in my favorites like Pitfall and the original Mario Brothers game.
 
lol yea tetris is "OUTRAGEOUS"! i remember the day i got my first gameboy i loved it..
 
dandirk said:
"When I was a kid..." "Video games only had 2 colors, 2 buttons and 1 d-pad and we LIKED it".
Click to expand...

I was always jelly of those that had Gameboys when I was a youngin. Never got one one myself.
 
i had an NES -- but never had a gameboy. Cousins did and it was pretty cool.

Holy crap though -- that's what passed for a commercial back then? Hilarious looking back 25 years to stuff like that. (32 here)

I do remember wearing my "I saved the princess" shirt on school picture day one time, I thought I was the shit.
 
I didn't get into videogames until I was about 12 in 1999 so my first game system was a Game Boy Color. Still works just great too.
 
I know they were color matching with the NES but the Gameboy was an ugly little handheld. I have to believe they simply had bought way too much of that color and decided not to shell out for something a little nicer to look at.
 
Game boy, yeah, right -- your not old if you remember its launch!

My first game systems were a Sears Pong and a Magnavox Odyssey (followed by an Atari 2600 before it was called the 2600).

That one of my first gaming systems was an Odyssey was sort of ironic, in that one of the primary originators of the Odyssey (whose name appears on several of the related patents) ended up being my boss at Philips Consumer Electronics (aka Magnavox) around 15 years later -- and that I ended up working on a product that allowed OCV/Lodgenet boxes to pass Nintendo game control signals from in-room hotel boxes back to game systems located at the head end. What is also strange is that, at the same time, we were actively involved in suing Nintendo for not paying patent royalties to Philips (whose patents basically still covered ANY gaming device that could connect to a consumer television).

Anyone still around here who remembers the Mattel Intellivision or Colecovision?
 
Ha I remember that commercial, shit I think I still have a gameboy hiding a box somewhere, wonder if it's worth anything.
 
I went to a private school where we were all basically put in cubicles, graded our own work, and tested out from one subject to the next kind of like an office.
Best part, kid in the next cubicle had a Game Boy too and we played the living hell out of Tetris and Contra on link. Teachers didn't give a damn because we were both A students and finished out assignments before noon so they just let us go nuts.
I think I cost my parents a small fortune in batteries 3 straight years....
 
Anyone still around here who remembers the Mattel Intellivision or Colecovision?
I started off with the Bally Professional Arcade system.The cartridges were about the size of a 8 track tape. Then, I got a sears 6 switch system. But, after that. I stepped my game up, and I got a TI-99. I wonder how many people know what that is, or my trs-80. I wonder how many people remember when you could copy and play games off cassette tapes, or even know what system that was for?
 
My first computer was the TI-99/4A, I think I got it the Christmas of 1981... you could and I did program BASIC into it but the main attraction were those cartridge games. It was really amazing, especially when Tunnels of Doom came out the following year, which is still one of the best RPG games I've ever played and pretty much hooked me on video gaming for good. I had to load it off a cassette player. :)

Mobile gaming was where it was at though, and I looked in envy at the kids who brought their original Gameboys to school and played them in 1989, but though I had a Sega Genesis and N64 in the interim I didn't get a Gameboy of my own until the Advance came out many years later, around 2001. Since then I've always owned a Gameboy, and I still take my 3DS XL with me wherever I go.
 
Ah yes, the dear TI-99 4A and the TRaSh-80's. One of my friends had one of the 4A's and we spent a lot of time playing on it and we had a lab full of CoCo's at my high school. Of course, there were also the Commodore VIC-20's and 128's. Personally, my first PC was an Apple ][ -- followed by a //e, //c and I upgraded the motherboard of my //e to the //gs -- at which point Apple abandoned me, so I abandoned them and switched over to the PC platform rather than the Mac. The scary part is, 30 years later, I still remember the command line options to drop into the monitor and still remember the 6502 assembly codes to load registers (A9 xx) and do print chars (20 FD ED) and return (60). I spent WAY too much time back then working in Merlin Assembler -- and wrote a commercial teleprompter in pure assembly that I sold to a local TV studio for a fair amount of money (which is how I helped fund my acquisition of my //gs upgrade and a fully loaded RamWorks card).
 
amdgamer said:
That is nothing. I still had my Atari 2600 until a freak neighborhood flood destroyed it. I even had the paddle controller for Pong.
Click to expand...

Still have my 2600, including a full set of controllers and around 30 games. All in good shape as it's been sitting in a box in the closet for at least the past 15 years.
 
Auburn_Tigers said:
Anyone still around here who remembers the Mattel Intellivision or Colecovision?
I started off with the Bally Professional Arcade system.The cartridges were about the size of a 8 track tape. Then, I got a sears 6 switch system. But, after that. I stepped my game up, and I got a TI-99. I wonder how many people know what that is, or my trs-80. I wonder how many people remember when you could copy and play games off cassette tapes, or even know what system that was for?
Click to expand...

Had a Radio Shack color computer with a cassette, and later floppies. It also had a slot for games cartridges. If you covered a couple of the pins with tape, the game wouldn't start automatically, and you could dump the cartridge memory to tape. Some games could be reloaded to a different spot in memory and run. Other games could only be run in the same memory space, so I did a memory mod that allowed the computer to see all 64KB, and then wrote a program that would map ram into the cartridge memory space and then load the game :)
 
Auburn_Tigers said:
Anyone still around here who remembers the Mattel Intellivision or Colecovision?
I started off with the Bally Professional Arcade system.The cartridges were about the size of a 8 track tape. Then, I got a sears 6 switch system. But, after that. I stepped my game up, and I got a TI-99. I wonder how many people know what that is, or my trs-80. I wonder how many people remember when you could copy and play games off cassette tapes, or even know what system that was for?
Click to expand...

I remember my first game system was a Coleco. I spent a lot of my young childhood playing Donkey Kong, Qbert, and Zaxxon on that system. It was so much better of a game system than what Atari had.
 
All my friends had a Game Boy, but I initially held out for the release of the Atari Lynx. I absolutely loved that system but never knew another person with one, so shortly afterwards I bought a Game Boy. I then bought a Game Gear and TurboExpress, but returned it before opening it.
My Game Boy still works, and I still have plenty of accessories such as the ginormous Handy Boy.
 
I had a Vectrex. It's super old but I loved it. You had to change the game and the screen overlay. Super classic.
 
XViper said:
I had a Vectrex. It's super old but I loved it. You had to change the game and the screen overlay. Super classic.
Click to expand...
I wanted one of those badly, based entirely on the Sears Christmas Catalog. Fortunately, my parents bought me a Commodore 64 with disk drive, printer, and monitor for Christmas instead. I'm pretty sure they were still paying for it by the time the Gameboy came out. ;)
 
Auburn_Tigers said:
Anyone still around here who remembers the Mattel Intellivision or Colecovision?
I started off with the Bally Professional Arcade system.The cartridges were about the size of a 8 track tape. Then, I got a sears 6 switch system. But, after that. I stepped my game up, and I got a TI-99. I wonder how many people know what that is, or my trs-80. I wonder how many people remember when you could copy and play games off cassette tapes, or even know what system that was for?
Click to expand...

Yes.
I had over a dozen Intellivisions when I was a kid (6 years old).
Mom and dad only bought me one, I bought the rest at yard sales.
For years I kept stripping them for parts to keep them working as I went from a dozen to eleven, to ten, to nine...ect ect, until my last one gave out when I was 18. Having a grandfather that was an electrician helped, he had me soldering almost as soon as I could walk.
I had shelves of games and those little insert cards for the controllers.
I was doomed to being a nerd before I could even walk.
But those were some fun old games, Mission X was my favorite, and the talking game Bombsquad was pretty fun too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top