When I think back to my original Nintendo Game Boy, I don’t just remember a piece of gaming hardware. I remember a specific time in my life, a season, a university campus, and a particular version of myself.
The Machine
I was at the University of Arizona in the fall of 1989 (Go Wildcats!), and the Nintendo Game Boy had just been released. With a birthday coming up, it felt like the perfect gift to mark the moment. I bought it for myself as a treat in the fall of 1989, a small celebration of making it through another year, and if memory serves, it was a little more than $90 after tax. That was real money when I was back in college, so it certainly was not an impulse buy. It was something I chose carefully, brought home proudly, and immediately knew I would get my money’s worth from.
My Nintendo Game Boy Handheld Console
The original Game Boy was not sleek or fancy. It was chunky, gray, and built like a brick, with that greenish screen that somehow made everything feel more magical, not less. It did not have a backlight. It did not have a color screen, just 4 levels of grey. But once you turned it on and heard the familiar click of the power switch, it became its own little world. That was all it needed to be.
The Games
Of course, like almost everyone who owned one, I loved Tetris. It was the pack-in title, and Tetris was the universal language of the Game Boy. You could hand it to almost anyone, and within seconds, they understood the goal. It was simple, addictive, and perfectly suited to the system. But for me, two other games became just as memorable, and in some ways even more personal: Super Mario Land and Boxxle.
Super Mario Land Cartridge and Manual
Super Mario Land was a wonderful game. It was clearly a Mario game, but it also felt like its own offbeat cousin. Instead of the usual Mushroom Kingdom atmosphere, it dropped you into Sarasaland, with giant stone heads, mysterious ruins, and enemies that felt unlike anything in the main Mario games. Even the music had a different personality. It was cheerful, slightly odd, and completely unforgettable. The levels moved quickly, and the whole thing had that great Game Boy quality of being easy to pick up for a few minutes but hard to put down once you started. It was Mario stripped down to essentials and somehow made more charming because of it.
Then there was Boxxle, which probably deserves even more credit than it usually gets. Boxxle was not flashy. Nobody would have called it a blockbuster. But it was the kind of game that quietly got its hooks into you and refused to let go. Based on the Japanese puzzle format later widely known through Sokoban-style gameplay, Boxxle challenged you to push crates into the correct storage locations in a warehouse-like maze.
That description sounds simple, maybe even dull, until you play it. Then you realize every move matters. Push a box into the wrong corner and you can ruin the entire puzzle. You have to think ahead, study the layout, and solve it with patience.
That was the beauty of Boxxle on the Game Boy. It did not rely on speed or reflexes. It invited concentration. It rewarded planning. In a college setting, that made it oddly perfect. You could play one puzzle while taking a break from studying, or you could hand it to a friend and watch them become unexpectedly obsessed.
A person might start out casually, convinced they would solve the level in thirty seconds, and five minutes later they would still be staring at the screen, determined not to lose to a tiny stack of virtual boxes.
Boxxle and Tetris for the Game Boy
The Memories
What I remember most, though, is how social that little machine became. Not many of my friends in college had game consoles then. A Game Boy was still a novelty, something that sparked curiosity the moment you took it out of your bookbag during a break on campus. Friends would stop by just to say hello, notice it sitting there, and ask, “Can I play a game?” The console would get passed around for a few minutes, one person taking a run at Tetris, another trying Mario, someone else getting trapped in Boxxle and refusing to give up. Then, just as casually as they had arrived, they would hand it back and say, “Thanks! Bye!”
That is the part I treasure most now. The Game Boy was not just a game machine. It was a small social magnet, a conversation starter, and a shared little escape during college life. Looking back, that humble gray handheld was never just a machine. It was a memory-maker, one borrowed round at a time.
And maybe that is why this particular Game Boy still means so much to me. This is not just an old handheld I picked up later for nostalgia’s sake. It is my original Game Boy from 1989, the very one I bought for myself that fall at the Tucson Mall while attending the U of A. Over the years, a lot of things from that era have disappeared, been replaced, or simply drifted away, which is how life tends to go.
But this is one of the very few vintage gaming items that is still truly original to me – a little beat up, missing a line or two on the display – but it has a direct path back to that moment in time. That makes it more than a collectible. It makes it personal. When I hold it now, I am not just holding a classic game system. I am holding a small, durable piece of my own history.
William W. Winter is the creator of Apple II Adventure Studio, where you can try your hand at making text adventures with a modern web-based design tool. You can try it out and make your own text adventures at: https://textadventurestudio.com
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The post One of My Own – Original Game Boy Still Holds The Best Memories appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.
