What was the first video game system you owned? For me it was the Game Boy. My parents got it for me for my 10th birthday. Friends and cousins had the NES, so I had played my fair share of Mario. Our house didn’t have a dedicated gaming system, though. We had anApple Macintosh that my dad bought because he knew computers were going to be important in the future and wanted my sister and me to be exposed to it early. Also, he probably thought it would be cool. And it was.
By far, my favorite game on that old Mac was Crystal Quest. With the mouse, you would pilot a little circle that was your ship, maneuvering around obstacles and blasting enemies while trying to collect all the crystals on each screen. Once you have all the crystals, a door would open allowing you to pass on to the next stage.
But the NES was the thing. And the SNES was out at that point too. Financially, a dedicated gaming console wasn’t in the cards. I don’t remember if I had asked for the Game Boy specifically but as soon as it arrived it was my life. It was like having an NES wherever I went. I didn’t give the monochromatic display a second thought. Even today, the fact that those games only had four shades of green seems wild to me. The things you could do with that little machine impress me to this day.
The excitement of getting a new game was palpable. I remember going to Toys R Us and getting Kirby’s Dream Land.You didn’t wait to get home to play a new game. You hopped in the back of your mom’s car, popped that fresh cartridge in, and started sucking up the bad guys. My mom and I played Super Mario Land and Tetris to no end. Especially Tetris. We would challenge each other, passing the Game Boy back and forth or leaving notes for each other with our new high scores. My sister got a Game Boy of her own not long after. It was settled. We were a Game Boy house.
As I got older and especially as I started making money of my own, I ended up getting an NES, a SNES, and almost every console Nintendo released over the years. The SNES in particular was home to some of my favorite games of all time such as Super Mario World, Super Mario RPG, and Earthbound. With the release of the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo made many of their classic NES titles available on the handheld. Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 titles were ported to the Nintendo DS, successor to the GBA. My experience with those consoles was special and unique to their time, but once I could play them on the subway (or just in bed) I never wanted to go back.
Even with Nintendo’s newest console, the Switch, which is capable of being played as a standard home console on a tv, I most often defer to its portable mode. I probably played a few hours of Breath Of The Wild in dock-mode to get a real good look at the landscape of post-apocalypse Hyrule. Damn, that game is beautiful.But then I was back to playing the Switch as a handheld. I think I was programmed by the Game Boy. That was the way I learned to interface with games; as a personal, intimate experience, but one that I could share with a community of handheld gamers, be it through talking about games at school, swapping cartridges, or going head to head via link cable. I travel a lot now, and while I do have a home console or two with me, the majority of my gaming takes place on a clamshell I can fit in my pocket wherever I go.
That brings me to Handheld History. I love talking about my favorite games almost as much as I love playing them and that’s why people start blogs, right? Here you’ll find game reviews, (hopefully not too cringey) reminiscences, and a little history about portable consoles.
Thanks for stopping by. I’d love to know what your first console was – portable or not! Email handheldhistorygames@gmail.com or share your thoughts in the comments below.
Handheld History 