I remember my grandpa getting a Game Boy for his birthday one year. He was apprehensive about it at first, but after a couple sessions of Tetris- he was hooked and even got the Shuttle ending once! I ended up inheriting it after he passed and once in awhile, I still take it out to play it for awhile and think back on those memories. Miss you Grandpa.
The Game Boy's middle years are a stretch of history that I'm kind of interested in seeing in more depth. I feel like people have kind of forgotten how disregarded the Game Boy was in the mainstream after its initial years but before the Pokemon renaissance, and that was a *long* stretch of time, basically an entire 5-year console generation in itself. EGM would do year-end reviews of every platform in their magazine, and I have vivid memories of them saying things like "we can't believe Nintendo hasn't put this thing out to pasture yet" year after year.
I actually just binge read/skimmed the first 100 issues of Nintendo Power semi-recently and up until around 1995 or so there was the Super Game Boy to give the Game Boy a bit of a second wind. That said, there wasn't a whole lot new being released. I totally forgot how many SNES and GB games got re-releases in 95 and especially 96 though.
I'm fully of the mind that we're at the age of long-tenure journalists and content creators revisiting some of their older work. And that is not a bad thing at all-you've improved so much in ten years, and here's to another ten! It's worth it to shine that newfound experience, time, and knowledge upon old topics. The "What did Nintendo Power Say" and the mention of other systems is a perfect example of that. Great video, Jeremy.
1:37 Good to see Japanese marketing at the time was on point when depicting the average American boy's life: A combination of 'Stand by Me' and 'Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?'
Yeah it's genuinely the game boy's best game, and the best ever version of Donkey Kong. And led to the Mario vs Donkey Kong series, which Nintendo have now revived on the Switch. So this handheld game from 1994 is still making waves today.
The beauty of this series was always your historical look at stuff, its inspired me for a decade. As a viewer it was never really about whether you have the cart or box (although the photography always looks nice!). The coverage of those non English games always blew me away. Over at RetroAchievements we have been slowly trying to build out sets for the entire Game Boy lineup, inspired to hit the stuff the west never knew of like Yakuman or Cave Noire (You didn't get there yet but man what a gem that is). Cheers!
I spent most of Christmas in 1989 playing Tetris and Super Mario Land. Good times. Also, based on Jeremy’s recommendation I purchased a copy of Kung Fu Heroes yesterday. Thanks for letting me know about that one!
Happy 35th anniversary, Game Boy, and happy 10th to the Works series! While I never thought it strange as a kid, the fact that monochrome 8-bit games were still being produced as the rest of the gaming world was pushing polygons is absolutely wild, and creates some almost anachronistic games that apply mid and late-90s advances in design sensibilities to games for hardware that was already dated in the 80s. The Wario Land titles and of course Pokemon are fascinating to me as they never really feel limited at all, and Link's Awakening only ever feels limited by the amount of face buttons. Here's to you, Game Boy! Thanks for a decade plus of games, and many more of fun and discovery
24:33 I wonder if that's because of the Gameboy's absurd hardware ecosystem, with magnifiers and lights and battery packs and so on, not to mention official addons like the camera. It's always been a highly "modable" console. Also: It has been 0 days since this channel mentioned Heiankyo Alien. ;-)
When I was a kid my mom won me a gameboy when they first launched in Ireland. It was a competition to make a slogan for a brand of milk. I started off with game and watch donkey Kong, then NES, then Gameboy all the way up to Switch (minus the Wii u and virtual boy).
Gameboy world is my favorite series of yours... although for fairly shallow reasons. I collect gameboy games and I love watching people talk about them. Regardless I am excited for a follow up. And please... don't let the price of physical games get in the way of your amazing videos. You can have one collector friend lend you a copy or... you know... other methods that shall not be named.
Me too! My favorite videos from Jeremy are the obscure GB games from this series. I am so thankful I got to know gems like Amazing Penguin, Daedalian Opus, Godzilla and Mercenary Firce because of this series.
@@GabMacedoo Yeah totally... some games really don't get proper coverage outside of Jeremy Parish. At best you get like a shallow review/overview in some hidden gems video. Really sad that Jeremy Parish felt the need to start over, it will take a while before he is up to speed and we can get some new awesome recomendations!
In their yearly game console report cards, EGM said something along the lines of "This has to be the last year for the Game Boy" every year starting in, like, 1991 otr something. Sorry, nerds, it lasted forever. They covered handhelds like people whose jobs paid for their batteries.
Regarding GB vs GBC, at least here in Europe it was the upgrade we always wanted, a TFT screen that didn't wash out the graphics. Sure, still no backlight, but it ran the around the same amount of time on two AAs instead of four, was a bit smaller and, thanks to a memory and CPU upgrade, bigger games. I doubt that a Heroes of Might and Magic in all its glory for example would have been possible without any simplifications on the classic GB. This way we had an 8-Bit version with at least the feature set of HOMM 1, to stay with my example.
He1l yes, GameBoy World is back, Baby! I've watched so many of your old episodes over the years to learn about possible obscure cartridge pickups, so thanks a bunch for those! Just the other day I watched the episode on 'Koro DIce', subsequently picked up the cart, and it's actually really fun, almost a sleeper hit (for such an early game, which is also a puzzle game.)
The first handheld system to offer a link cable was actually Redline Drag racing by Kenner, in 1980. It used essentially a head phone Jack to connect the games together. Allowing for simultaneous drag races.
I preferred Nintendo Power's limited Gameboy coverage. As I knew I wouldn't be owning a Gameboy any time soon, I would have hated for Nintendo Power to suddenly start devoting half its space to Gameboy titles that I wouldn't be playing. I hated when magazines would immediately commit significant space to whatever the new hotness was, whether it warranted it or not. For the Gameboy, NP told you enough to know why you might want it and what you'd be getting, and from their you could look at a demo model in a store or just pick one up. Once the system became a hit, and once its games started getting more complex, NP gave its titles more coverage.
I remember brother getting the system on launch. Which was funny because he didn't have job. Turns out he stole it, and my parents made him let me play for a bit before he had to give it up. I wasnt impressed and stuck with my NES. I think this is why i never gave it a chance.
A GameBoy running on four AA batteries is functional for more hours a day than either candidate for president. Holy crap, am I about to write in GameBoy on my ballot?!
I've had a question for years that you might not be able to answer. Many years ago on Retronauts, Shane Bettenhausen mentioned that Mark Macdonald once compared playing decent games on the not-so-decent original Game Boy screen to "drinking a fine wine through.....something you wouldn't want to drink a fine wine through." I've been a fan of Mark's since I was a 13 year old kid reading EGM (I'm 38 now). I've been dying to know what, exactly, Gaming Jesus said about the Game Boy. 😂 I'm so sorry to bring this up here on your monumentous Game Boy Works relaunch. As always, incredible work from the Toastiest of Frogs. We appreciate everything you do here and everywhere else, Jeremy!
Love how Jeremy's going to essentially redo his old Game Boy World series, effectively responding to people's long term cries for him to return to Game Boy Works with "OK!", followed by whiners responding in turn with "No, not like that!". That's why Parish rules.
All this Game Boy coverage on RU-vid lately has motivated me to pick up an original DMG model with a backlight mod. I've been playing it nightly before bed for the last couple of weeks. Who'd ever think this is the sort of gaming relaxation I'd need in 2024?
The Game Boy is a good example of utilizing a principle of consumerism: PRICE IS KING. By utilizing cheaper components and giving it longer battery life, the savings went in the buyers pockets and they responded by making it a success. Having a killer pack in game: Tetris helped as well. I had a Lynx and Game Gear, the color and backlit screens were much better... But the short battery lifes killed them. I got power packs for each one, but by then, it was too late, Nintendo was the handheld king and still is. The lack of a backlit screen was my major frustration with GB.
@@Tirgo69 it’s meant to be a jab at the fact that Jeremy has referenced Strider NES (which takes place in Eurasia) as the next video for the past couple of weeks but another video comes up instead like he doesn’t want to talk about it
I can still remember my family getting a Game Boy for Christmas of 1989. Initially my parents bought it more for my younger sister since I got my NES for Christmas of 1987 and had almost exclusively played on it. However, our father ended up spending more time with the family Game Boy than anyone else! He loved the selection of puzzle games and was quite fond of sitting in his recliner after a hard day of work to read the daily newspaper and play a few games on the Game Boy. Thankfully many of my friends in school also had Game Boys so it was easy to get my fix of gaming on the go. The Game Boy became so popular for a time in the early 90s when I was in middle school that the school formally asked that students to refrain from bringing them to school. A number of students had their Game Boys stolen while at school or taken by force, usually around the end of the school day. My own parents out right banned my sister or I from taking our family Game Boy to school. However, they had no issue with me taking the Sony Walkman that cost more than the Game Boy and I had saved up for a year in order to buy to and from school on a daily basis. Along with that Walkman was a set of $40 Radio Shack headphones I used with it. So go figure.
Jeremy, your videos are always great, informative, entertaining, and full of wit & charm, but I wanted to let you know you've been on fire of late!. (We even got a Heiankyo Alien mention this episode.) Thanks for all that you do!
I'm a bit surprised. I've remembered the letter in Nintendo Power about it since the day it showed up in my mailbox, but never realized that it stuck in the memory of so many others as thoroughly as it did my own.
@@Belgand The circuit board survived, the aftermath of a missile strike, casing melted and screen busted, but still functioned. That cemented in my memory that I can trust their handhelds to survive a fall, from non extream hights.
I used my game boy earbuds for a very long time. There was nothing else quite like them at the time at least where I lived. You could put them in your pocket unlike the normal headphones with the metal strip on top
This is perfect timing; after a while of being subbed to your channel, I recently started Game Boy World last week and have been having a blast. Your videos are fantastic!
The way the early 90's had this seismic shift in handheld gaming after LCD games were the bleeding edge of handled games through the previous decade was nothing short of amazing. Though in the interests of full disclosure, I was one of those poor fools who backed the Lynx. I still have that battery-chugging chonky bludgeon.
I gotta say, I hated the GameBoy and didn't get one until the Play It Loud series. A LARGE argument which changed my mind was that business travelers were using them (like they would take to the DS Lite years later). It also helped that the Turbo GraFx portable with TV tuner and Sega Nomad cost way too much.
I was at the perfect age when the Gameboy and its competitors launched. I vividly remember all of the "hype" at the time (it's funny how little Nintendo themselves promoted it). But, it was certainly the talk of the playground, and I was able to see it for myself at the local toy store, along with the Atari Lynx, Turbo Express, and Sega Game Gear. I ended up with both the Gameboy and the Game Gear. My impression of the Lynx at the time was that it was huge, and even though they were promoting it as "16-bit", I was dubious, because the low resolution made the graphics look just a bit too blocky for my taste. It didn't look good to me. I have no evidence to support this, but from various articles I've read over the years, the developers of the Lynx purposefully designed it to be bigger, because they thought Americans wanted things to be big and bulky. I think that, along with the very low battery life, and the price, killed interest in the Lynx.
Currently playing Metroid 2 on NSO. It definitely is a good portable Metroid. Glad Game Boy Works is back, kinda sad that Japanese releases will be very few from now on in the series but I guess that's the price of progress.
I remember getting my Atomic Purple Gameboy Color for Christmas with Game & Watch Gallery 2, Pokemon Blue, and Donkey Kong Land 3 (my mom was really good at hiding stuff, so she hid it in the fridge. Imagine my surprise when I went to go get breakfast the next morning). Saying that I love Gameboy is an understatement, I ADORE IT! I love everything about it and I almost considered getting a modded Gameboy and a Everdrive Cart, but I went with an Emulator handheld and spend most of my time playing the Gameboy's library. While most of it's backlog is pure shovelware, there's just something about even the lowliest of games that irresistible
If your starting point was Pokémon, I salute you for bothering to go back and revisit the Game Boy’s earlier hits (some of which may be even older than you!)
In 1988 or so I remember a kid at school with the classic "my uncle that works at Nintendo" thing talking about how Nintendo was working on a miniature Nintendo you can take around with you and play. Of course everyone called him a liar, but when the Gameboy came out I feel like we kinda owed him an apology.
5:13 - The GameBoy version is a lot more faithful to the movie than the NES version. So sad how Nintendo treated Gunpei after the failure of the Virtual Boy. Even sadder is his untimely death. The WonderSwan looked awesome. A shame it was never released in the US.
Yeah, good point about Nintendo Power doing a lackluster job in promoting the Game Boy. For a long time, I considered the Game Boy as lesser, something that, if we had one, would be relegated to my little sister-not that she really cared about video games enough to be upset about it. It wasn’t until much later on that I realized that this was not the case at all; consider Metroid II, that not only was it just a well made game, but it improved on the original (one of my overall favorite games at the time) and introduced many elements that became standard for Samus in her subsequent subterranean assaults on the Space Pirates. Then there was Super Mario Land 2, which looked every bit as good as its contemporary, Super Mario World, just in a more compact, monochromatic package. And when it really comes down to it, after the initial entry price, it was a much better value than the cheap garbage LCD games from Tiger, et al., who were trying to cash in and call their shovelware an economic alternative. The game cartridges cost a bit more, but they provided far more entertainment than those pieces of junk. I was wrong with my original assessment of the Game Boy, and apparently so was Nintendo of America. Anyway, I have a lot of catching up to do on the Game Boy Works series, but that makes for a lot of Sunday Afternoon PBS-style viewing, meant in the best way possible.
Speaking of Hip Tanaka: while everyone loved Korobeyniki-and rightfully so-I think his original composition for Tetris, Type C, deserves _far_ more love than it gets.
How do I not remember that there was a time when Nintendo Power was seemingly trying to make a cat girl on a 4 wheeler (apparently either her or the 4 wheeler being named "SUSIE") into a mascot character for the gossip section? I'm guessing one of the Japanese artists was a fan of Dominion Tank Police.
Gave Mega Man in Dr. Wily's Revenge a replay thanks to Switch Online, and yeah. You were right. Incredibly short and insubstantial game, even for hardcore Mega Man fans its appeal begins and ends at "for a time this was your only portable option for the franchise". That's not even getting into the screen crunch and the laggy action. Ah well.
I’m very excited! I’ve been a long time fan of your work and I have to say among Segaiden series, your Gameboy World/Works is my favorite. I’ve been long awaiting this day you’d continue your Gameboy deep dive. My favorite system. Thank you for all your amazing in depth work over the years Jeremy
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh more gb works! So excited! Always had a more intense nostalgia for gb compared to the nes. Probably because two of those Chinese bootleg 100-in-one carts so I've played all the obscure games mentioned
I had to sign a "contract" with my mom, promising that I would actually play my GameBoy if she bought one for me, and that I wouldn't just leave it lying around. Lmao if only she knew she would have to beg me to breach it.
The GB did have a lot of weird synergy with America at launch. They apparently got the guy who redesigned the NES console for the west to help design the look of the device, so in a way it was always designed with western sensibilities in mind. Japan even got the US TV commercials dubbed over in Japanese, which was particularly strange.
What a fantastic video! A great summation, of Game Boy's time, from its inspiration, in the form of various proofs-of-concept, to its final years. Thank you so much, for doing this!
I wouldn't say "imminent," precisely. Those books need a lot of TLC and reworking, and I need to get a few other books out first (Metroidvania, NES Gaiden, NES 1988, Master System 1986-87).
Thanks for asking, I was going to... I've got all the other in the WORKS series but this one. Really hope a revised and augmented edition sees the light of day at some point then!
25:46 - 26:05 This is why the original Game Boy is my favorite handheld of all time. The simplicity of it all--lacking even a color screen--yet being able to produce games that hold up even today.
I had Metroid 2 and Links Awakening, for me those were more like portable versions of the Snes games. I got a power adapter so I didn't need to buy batteries again
I can't remember what movie the clip from the beginning is from but I saw it when I was a kid and to this day it was the funniest thing I've ever seen.
