RETROSPECTIVE
Nintendo’s Umbilical Cord
The iconic Game Link cable kicked off portable multiplayer gaming
I used to load my games as though my Game Boy was a rifle, the cartridge its magazine. A rush of nostalgia sends warm bolts of electricity right to my fingertips. The little grey brick has found a home on one of my cupboard shelves. Powering it up brings me back to simpler times — back when Pokémon and Mario Kart were all the rage. They still are, of course, even more so than before.
But there’s been one quantum shift: I used to wait for opportunities to meet my friends just so I could trade Pokémon or duke it out in a friendly match. These days, multiplayer no longer requires that kind of commitment.
Park bench co-op
My fourth-grade school trip. I was excited, though not for the reason you might think. It wasn’t destination itself that excited me; it was the thought that my friends would all bring their Game Boys and link cables along that made me weak in the knees.
And the reality was glorious. Better than I could have imagined. Game Boys of all colours and sizes dotted the park. Our teachers cast disapproving eyes across the sea of pupils glued to their little entertainment slabs, but fortunately they didn’t intervene. At any rate, the Nintendo Game Link cable could only support up to four players — so we had to split up. It was as though the park was dotted with dozens of little campfires, in which all kinds of stories were being told.
I traded a couple of legendary Pokémon on the Emerald version (the progress we’ve made from then is dizzying) before testing my mettle against’s a friend’s Pokémon team.
It wasn’t just the encounters themselves, it was talking about the encounters. One friend ranted about how his affinity to a specific type of Pokémon gave him a tough time with one of the game’s gym leaders. Another claimed to have confronted a shiny legendary Pokémon (which sounded bonkers at the time). Hushed whispers told tales of fantastical, mysterious Pokémon I had yet to witness. The lack of widespread internet facilitated a kind of natural discovery that modern titles try to deliberately engineer.
It’s a shame that none of us knew that some games only required one of us to own the cartridge to play.
Bringing back the glory days
Modern platforms have attempted, in some ways, to try to replicate the experience I described above. Steam’s Remote Play feature seems like a direct callback to it. In any case, it’s possible now to effortlessly search Google for the answer to any problem you may have in a video game. It’s not that the internet didn’t exist at all in my childhood, it’s just that fourth-graders didn’t have the kind of access then that they do now. But I’m thankful for that, in the end. I’m grateful that there was a need to cultivate a kind of perseverance and resourcefulness, and to leverage conversation and friendships to overcome shared challenges.
It’s great to see newer games that are highly-connected online experiences (like Fortnite for example). They bring their own kind of fun to the table. But I do miss those simpler times, when conversations with friends would often end with the phrase “bring your link cable next time.”
