Of Game Boys and Hospitals
How an unexpected trip to the hospital reminded me of my first experience with the Nintendo Game Boy
It’s a cold and dreary morning in November. One of those days when the clouds are looming over the Okanagan Valley like a blanket about to suffocate the city in a cold-blooded murder. And that’s why so many residents run for the hills here — the ski hills.
The mountains offer a stark contrast to the gloominess in the valley below. Rising above the cloud cover, the sun is bright and glorious, shining down on the white powder crystal snow that’s accumulated there like Nature’s Dandruff. The crisp air bites at your cheeks up there, but the discomfort is easily offset by the many smiling faces, winter sporting activities, and tasty hot drinks that help you forget about all that dreariness below.
Today, however, we’re stuck in a hospital, staring out at a thick cloud of ‘meh’, waiting for the surgeon to beckon us in to his evil laboratory, where he will proceed to gas my daughter, cut open her finger, and add some strange contraptions to the inner workings of her hand. I’m told that they’re doing this to somehow help her bones heal, yet I’m still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of anyone giving my 12-year old a boatload of drugs.
We’re in the old paediatric wing of the hospital, a dreadful place full of skin-coloured bed frames and terrifying mechanical devices surrounding the area. The friendly children’s paintings on the walls do little to distract from the icy mood of this archaic room, a lifeless and functional place that’s been stripped of its humanity by years and years of repeated sterilization. I’m sure Ian Curtis would have recorded a Joy Division record here.
As terrible as it is to be stuck here waiting with stomachs growling, it could be much worse. Thirty years ago, this would have been much more boring and tedious, with only playing cards and books to distract our brains from the fear of a pending surgery.
Today I am thankful for one of the first inventions that helped me through many hospital visits — the Nintendo Game Boy.
It was the summer of 1989, just a few months before the release of the Game Boy. I just found out that we were about to move across the country to a small town nearly 4,000 kilometres (2,400 miles) away. I’d never heard of this little town called Kelowna. All I knew was that I was leaving my friends, all my familiar stores and shops, and my parents, behind.
For the majority of my childhood, I had lived with my grandmother, who eventually moved in with a guy who worked at 3M. I only knew this because we had a seemingly endless supply of Scotch Tape, the best clear tape in the green spartan packaging. My grandma later told me that I was one of the reasons they didn’t work out.
We were promised a house in this small town thousands of miles away as an early inheritance. As it turns out, we ended up in a trailer instead. Our trailer was up in the east part of town, disconnected from any city bus routes, and an hour walk away from the mall. In other words, I was stranded. For a while, my grandmother didn’t know how to drive, and we didn’t have a car. To get groceries, my aunt had to drive us to the store. We were starting over. And I hated it.
Just two months after we moved from Ontario to B.C., the Nintendo Game Boy was released in North America. At the time, the only video game system I owned was my computer — a well-loved Commodore 128 that accompanied me through each major life transition over the last five years. My beloved Commodore was one of the only constants in my life, and I was glad to have it with me in this strange new place. But more on that in a future post.
The only downside was that I could only play games on my Commodore at home. Other kids in the neighbourhood had Nintendo Entertainment Systems, and they could just unscrew the RF switch from the back of their TV, pack up all the cables, and bring the console over to their friends’ places to play games. How convenient! You couldn’t do that with a Commodore computer. It had disk drives and monitors and all sorts of cables that made it tremendously difficult to shuttle around from place to place. It was the opposite of portable.
Enter the Game Boy. Suddenly, all you needed was this handheld console, a game or two, and some AA batteries. You didn’t need to unplug anything — you just took it with you. If you wanted to play Game Boy with multiple players, you just needed multiple consoles. The whole thing just made sense.
The 160x144 screen resolution and two-tone green graphics didn’t matter to me. What mattered was being able to take Mario with me on the go. Since I didn’t have an NES, I was desperate to play the new Mario games. I had heard all these stories about how great Super Mario Bros. was from kids in Ontario, but I still hadn’t had a chance to try it. I was determined to get my hands on a copy of any new Mario game, as I had only played Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. on my dad’s Atari 2600. I was behind the times.
Luckily, I convinced my grandma to get me a Game Boy that summer, just weeks after it was released. I playing Tetris on Gunpei Yokoi’s little cream-coloured invention for hours upon hours of road trips and bus rides, often resorting to taking Gravol to combat motion sickness so I could play for longer. I loved listening to the soothing tones of Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka’s musical arrangements through the tiny earbud headphones I carried with me in my grey fabric Game Boy carrying case. I remember being so excited when I finally reached the end screen with the rocket launching. It was a triumph! I had done it!
Over the next few years, I ended up with a healthy handful of titles for the Game Boy, including Super Mario Land, Qix, Tennis, Spider-Man, and Final Fantasy Legend II.
While some other people didn’t enjoy Super Mario Land, I was completely fascinated by the new characters and imaginative cover art. Sarasaland seemed like a far more compelling and intriguing game world than the universe ruled by Princess Toadstool (now known as Peach). The world of Sarasaland was full of fascinating new characters, like a fire-breathing sphinx, Moai heads, seahorses, and a new alien villain named Tatanga. It also featured a red-headed female love interest named Princess Daisy (obviously much cooler than your average run-of-the-mill blonde-haired love interest). Though each of these story ingredients seemed strange to Mario and Miyamoto purists, I preferred these more exotic elements over the more ordinary world of the Mushroom Kingdom (a universe that becomes less interesting to me with every subsequent Mario game, because let’s face it — we’re all tired of Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach).
The Game Boy became my primary go-to device as more in-depth games were released. In 1989, video games became the most important coping method for dealing with being a 10-year-old only child stranded in a small town with his grandmother. The same year, my dad sent me a Sega Genesis for Christmas, which gave me something to brag about with the other kids in the neighbourhood, as I was the only kid with a 16-bit system at that point.
Though I had a blast playing Altered Beast, Ghouls and Ghosts, and Space Harrier II, I ended up clocking more time playing on my Game Boy, since I could take it with me on the go.
Today at the hospital, the tradition of portable video gaming continues. I’m sitting here with my PS Vita, while my youngest is trying to distract herself from the fear of this pending surgery by playing Animal Crossing on a Nintendo 2DS. Next year, many kids will be playing Nintendo Switch in the hospital.
In the last thirty years since the Game Boy, Game Gear, and Lynx debuted on the scene, portable electronics have taken over the modern world. While we may not use our smartphones and tablets to play games exclusively now, the concept of portable electronics are becoming the first and in some cases only devices that some people own. The new, minimalist “digital nomads” tend to only own a laptop, a smartphone, and very few other possessions.
And while the devices have evolved, I’ll always have a soft spot for the Game Boy for the many hours of comfort it provided during those first few lonely years living in a new town. It was my first friend in Kelowna, and I kept it with me until the early 2000’s, when I decided to finally send it to a Value Village to find a new home. Hopefully the person who bought it found the same amount of joy in it as I did, or at least, it has helped them distract themselves while awaiting surgery in the hospital.
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