The Game Boy officially turns 25 today — it is now a Game Man — and to celebrate, we want to hear your favourite memories of Nintendo’s influential handheld gaming system.
What were your favourite Game Boy games? Where did you play them? What kind of Game Boy(s) did you have? Which was your favourite?
I will never forget playing Final Fantasy Adventure on that giant grey brick of a system, then restarting from the beginning at least three times because every time I tried to do a figure-eight around those palm trees in the desert, it didn’t work. I also spent a ton of time with Link’s Awakening (amazing!), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (less amazing!), and tons of other games that seemed great just because I owned them. What about you?
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37 responses to “What’s Your Favourite Game Boy Memory?”
Tetris & Pokemon Blue.
Hmmm… So many!
1. The title screen and tune of Donkey Kong 2 – Diddy’s Kong Quest.
2. Portable Killer Instinct!
3. Pokemon Blue… Amazing for it’s time.
4. Picking up the Gameboy Color for my birthday, TECHNOLOGY!
Realizing that the Game Boy version of Mortal Kombat was fucking terrible, but playing it anyway.
And finishing Battletoads, which was brutal and awesome.
How the hell did you finish that!? Lol, I had it too, but I couldn’t get past the last level with the jetpack flying vertically up the screen from memory,… maybe I made it a few times to a beat em up section? I don’t recall.. just that I played it many times and never made it lol.
I loved True Lies, Hook and the novelty of a yellow Donkey Kong Country (or was it titled something else? Land?) cart.
Always wanted a Booster Boy – is that what the thing with the big magnifying glass and light was called?
I dunno man it was a long time ago, i remember playing the flying levels over and over and over, i didn’t play a lot of sport at or after school so that was definitely a factor in my success.
I bet if i went back these days and attempted it i would fail again and again and give up.
The 90’s ruled, man.
Also yeah the Booster Boy was rad, the light on it made all the difference!
Oh man! I had that DK game with the yellow cartridge!! Use to think I was the boss back in the school yard as nobody else had that game. I was told I had to do every chore asked of me for months leading up to my birthday in order to get it.
I think you’re right and it was Land instead of Country. Similar to how it was Super Mario Land on the gameboy.
Definitely full pokedex captured on Pokemon Blue. Close second I guess would be completing Kid Icarus.
My favourite is hard to pick
I have 2 very disticnt memories that jump out at me every time i think of Gameboy though.
1) Swiching on Donkey Kong land for the very first time and thinking i was in the future. the graphics coming out of my piddly little gameboy blew me away. (hey, the gameplay was also freaking awesome)
2) Pokemon blue. Spend 20 minutes in the first room before i realised that weird looking thing in the corner was a set of stairs i could walk into to use. then after that false start managing to get 150 pokemon in my dex 🙂 (I was only about 6-7 lol)
Hahaha, I saw the steps fine. However I actually restarted my game cause I didn’t realise where the door was and couldn’t leave the house.
I will never forget how utterly poor my mum was raising three kids by herself after a terrible divorce, moving interstate and then scrounging around to buy me a Gameboy that kept me so happy for so many years.
Awww maaaaaan :’)
My favourite Gameboy memory is Read Only.
Clocking Super Mario Land.
Beating Super Mario Land and then it sent you back to the start to play the game on a harder difficulty. Then beating it again and then playing it a third time in a row to see if anything different happened (nope). All of this in one sitting as there were obviously no saves back then.
I get the feeling I was a lot better at Mario back then than I am now.
Did the same with Kirby’s Dream land.. also nothing happened after 2 play throughs
Me and my sister each got one of the clear case Game Boys, with Donkey Kong Land and Wario Blast. Can still remember that Christmas morning, it was great 😛
I also remember working my way through Wario Blast as we drove around the winding roads of Tasmania, and getting further through the game than I ever had before and being sure to tell mum all about it. Also scribble down those passwords on the Notes page of the manual. Meanwhile my sister was constantly getting motion sick and having a terrible time.
Another would be in mid highschool when I decided to revisit TMNT2, and seeing parts of the game I’d never managed to reach before. That game had some really cool music.
The most recent is when I managed to procure a copy of X. Really really cool technical marvel, that.
I can remember playing some side-scrolling batman game. It used to keep me entertained while I was stuck out at my grandma’s place in the country.
I got one of the green Play It Loud! original Game Boys for my 7th birthday. I got Donkey Kong Land and Game Boy Gallery with it.
The whole Donkey Kong series then turned into my favourite games ever pretty much (aside from Banjo Kazooie).
When I was about 12, my Game Boy (along with Game Boy Gallery, which I’m guessing was in the console) went missing. We moved house a lot during that time, so it either went missing during that, or my cousins took it (which is what my parents reckon), or the next door neighbours kids took it.
Either way, I was super upset. :c My parents ended up buying me a Game Boy Colour with Donkey Kong Country as a replacement the next Christmas.
Fast forward 17 years, last year on my 24th birthday, my boyfriend gives me my present. I open it – a Mario Game Boy bag filled with about 30 original Game Boy games..and right down the bottom was a green Play It Loud! original Game Boy. 🙂 Best present ever. 😀
I feel your pain, I was so stoked to actually get my own Gameboy (the original brick), and then soul-crushingly devastated when my little brother took it school 2 days later, where it was stolen. It’s pretty cool you got another one eventually though!
Link’s Awakening – finding all of the pieces of heart and secret seashells all on my own, without any hints. And finishing it without any continues so that I got to see the final end-credits easter egg. Such a great game.
Gargoyle’s Quest – I got stuck on the second boss for almost a full year. Then, one day, it just clicked and the rest of the game seemed much easier. This game is still burnt into my muscle memory, I went back and ran through it in a single session only last year.
Link’s Awakening is the greatest Zelda game.
My favourite Gameboy memory is of all the feels from finishing that at my Grandma’s place and being very thankful that I was alone in a room at the time so that others could not see my unmanly moist eyes.
(And yes. That end-credit easter egg was Important, dammit.)
First memory, the first time I ever saw this brick was when my mom used to leave me over at one of her friends houses when she had important errands to run(Mom always made friends with ladies that were a lot older). Well this lady had her youngest son still living at home, he happened to be maybe around 4 – 5 years older than I. This particular day Rolando had recently gotten a Sega Saturn and he kept wearing it out; I’m pretty sure he wasn’t about to start sharing with a kid that was 5 years younger. The difference between 8 and 13 is huge. Anyways.. since I kept nagging him about getting a turn, he went into the closet and pulled out this big old dusty ass box, and out of it came this huge brick, and eventually I figured out it was the original Gameboy. Popped a game called Street Fighter and this became my first experience with a Gameboy, as well as my first time playing Street Fighter outside of an arcade.
In my really early teens, my step-sister went on a school trip Japan and brought back their J-league game. It was amazing.
By far Pokemon Yellow.
I nearly missed an entire overseas trip because I was too busy playing Metroid 2. Those sweet sweet memories.
Having a chart my parents did up put on our fridge at the start of the year when I started grade 6 so… 1997! The chart had everyday chores that me and my two sisters had to do throughout the WHOLE YEAR and if we did so, would be given a Gameboy for christmas. We all got one and the Game Boy Gallery game with it.
They pulled the same trick with me over a shorter period of time the next year so that I could get the DK Land game.
If only parents still did this kind of thing with their kids. I literally have parents come into my store and say they are after X game for their child because he/she has been screaming fot it…
Reward charts were awesome. The desire for a set of Constructicons to form Devastator got a hell of a lot of chores done around our place.
I’ll be using the same method for my future kid/s that’s for sure!
I won the Game Boy surfboard when I bought my Game Boy as a 4 year old. It was a little too big for me as a kid haha. I still have the board and use it every now and then. (Using it atm because I snapped my other shortboard)… and my Game Boy still works.
Apart from Tetris first game I got was Motocross Maniacs good times.
Pokemon Blue was the only game I truely loved on the gameboy. Yes I am weird and still enjoy listening to the music every now and then 😛
Winning one from a Disney batteries promo when I was a kid.
Zelda 4, Wario land, Kirby 2, Road Rash, Tetris.
If you could only have five game boy titles, those would serve you very, very well.
Honourable mention to Bomberman, and to Pokemon – which I never actually played on the original GB.
I forgot about Wario land! I did a temporary trade with a friend, my DKL for his WL, couldn’t put it down. It was because of that game that I would eventually go onto to use Wario as my regular character in Mario Kart 64.
Best memory is maybe the first time I ever saw one, one of my friends was Japanese so got one when it came out there and brought it to Australia, well before it had been released here. Can’t remember what the game I played was, I think it was a top down ninja or samurai game.
Worst memory, when going on holidays in QLD and at the ferry terminal, left my little bag with Game Boy and bunch of games on it on the bench where all my family’s bags were and went off with my mum, came back and the bag had been stolen. 🙁 Fortunately my parents bought me a Game Boy Colour for my birthday a few months later, but still… RIP Mega Man and all the other games I never played again, where ever you are.
Wario land or super Mario land 1 or 2
Skate or die was totally rad back in the day.
Quix was good fun for short bursts.
We had so many games. It was pretty great. Until it all disappeared one day. Sad day
Damn thieves everywhere! Cut off their hands!
actually finishing Pop-up, go look it up if you don’t know what it is.
The first time I paused Kirby’s Dreamland for more than a few seconds and Kirby started dancing.
Oh and pretty much all of Mario Land 2: the 7 Gold Coins.
Probably getting Pokemon gold from my parents then playing from the start to Mr. Pokemon over and over and over again because my cartridge wouldn’t save and battery’s were hard to come by living in the middle of nowhere.