A while back I had been writing little reflective essays, and this one in particular mashed up some of my personal backstory with some gaming-adjacent moralizing, and some lessons on pursuing your dreams. I came across that essay this morning and thought some of my readers might enjoy it.
This is decidedly not the story of how I eventually bought myself a Game Boy video game system.
This is not the story of me finally getting the game system of my literal dreams a decade after it was released, how in my twenties I broke down and spent my travel money on a toy and then wallowed in a span of glorious delayed childhood.
No.
That is a tale for another chapter of this collection.
Instead, this is the story of why I never got a Game Boy video game system when it mattered the most.
It is the story of how and why I was denied and how being denied has almost certainly shaped the story of my life.
This is the story of the Game Boy I never got.
It’s early in 2024 as I write this, nearly thirty five years after the Game Boy was released to the public. And as the holiday season rolled through this past year—as we plunked ourselves down on our couch to watch though our list of holiday films both classic and new, movies like A Christmas Story and Eight-bit Christmas (to cherry pick a couple titles that precisely match the point I am about to make) I couldn’t help but notice a theme.
That theme? The lessons of unrequited commercialism, and the apparently-universal desire of little kids around the world to procure some MacGuffin-like seasonal toy that would make all their childhood dreams come true thus unlocking the real life trophy that is something-something, stuff doesn’t actually matter as much as you think it does, memories, love, Christmas, the end.
I also couldn’t help but relate.
I couldn’t help but feel a few pangs of tugging heartstrings, even just a little because when I was that age living throught the unrecognized glamour of the mid-eighties in quasi-rural middle of nowhere Canada, what I wanted most in my mundane little life was simply, unequivocally, unrelentingly a Game Boy.
Clearly I’ve already spoiled the ending to this story.
I’ve already spoiled it because, I repeat: it took me many more years, leaving the country, getting lost in Europe, and tangling myself up in a mediocre self-justification of an excuse before I would actually, somewhat apologetically, pull out my wallet with my own pittance of a savings account and unapologetically buy a Game Boy for myself.
I did not, repeat DID NOT, get a Game Boy when I was actually a little boy, I did not get a Game Boy when it mattered. I did not get it when it would have calmed that roiling emotional beast of unrequited commercialism and sent me down a decidedly different life-path with a bit less checked emotional baggage.
At least, this is what I presume would have happened had I acquired a Game Boy at the age of twelve, thirteen, even fourteen, fifteen, sixteen or even older, which again: I did not.
Junior High Schooled
I assume that most people remember the Game Boy, but for the sake of the many future scholars who are reading this and puzzling over the concatenation of words that form the name of the famous Nintendo brand gaming console, a Game Boy is—was—kinda still might be the definitive handheld gaming device, a device whose name, like Kleenex or Coke, has become synonymous with the entirety of a product class.
Until the Game Boy arrived on the scene portable video based electronics essentially did not exist.
Mostly.
I mean, of course they existed. The Game Boy did not spring whole cloth from nowhere. Yet, from my twelve-year-old’s perspective this was new technology—and borderline magic. In the nineteen eighties, most any electronic device that you could hold in your hand and interact with (in the same way that what one hundred and eight percent of the population of Earth does with their phones today) was at best a niche product from the back pages of a Radio Shack catalogue and probably required six D-batteries or an extension cord. We had portable electronic games, sure, but they were one-off toys. Electronic football was an array of LED lightbulbs with some creaking plastic control pads. Our Game-and-Watch style LCD games were the size of a stack of credit cards and never ran out of batteries, but were the gaming equivalent of programming a VCR while someone was throwing balls at your head.
So, clearly, the Game Boy was special.
It stormed into the video game world with its little green-hued screen complete with a boxed-in Tetris game cartridge and thus ushered in an era of video games that were truly portable.
And I remember the very first time I saw one.
School was back in after a too-short summer vacation.
My friend, the same friend who got everything his tiny little heart desired because his parents had diposable income, all of it, whatever he wished for—you know that kid—had, of course, acquired a brand new Game Boy video game system for his birthday. And because it must have been important for him to rub that fact in our faces, he had brought it to school.
I remember with liquid-crystal-display clarity that my friend was playing Mario.
On a school bus.
Mario!
Specifically, he was playing Super Mario Land. Super. Mario. Land! On a bus.
Holy cow! He was actually playing a Mario game on a school bus, leaping and running and eating power-ups and stomping little monochrome Goombos and it was the most glorious thing I’d ever witnessed in my not-yet-a-teenager life.
I was adequately familiar with the likes of the the other Super Mario Bros. titles, having spent hours on borrowed hardware burning through the orignals on NES.
And here it was on a school bus. In the nineteen-eighties.
I don’t know how to articulate how much that blew my mind back then.
I went home that night with visions of Mario so vivid in my mind that I actually put them to paper, sketching out the scenes of the level I’d witnessed him playing, drawing them out in elaborate detail because I could not begin to articulate to my brother, three years my junior, what I had witnessed earlier that day and how it had changed my perception of the universe forever. There was no internet from which to pull more information. There was no simple way to explain to anyone else in my family what I had experienced, the emotions of wonder and thrill and envy that coursed through my veins. There was only a few short minutes of raw, looking over-the-shoulder of my friend and patiently hoping he would share his good fortune with others elation.
I wanted one of my own.
I needed one of my own.
I would do anything to be that kid on the school bus hunched over his very own Game Boy and living the dream of any nerdy game-loving junior high student. Somehow.
Rise of the Resistance
“How much?!” Is probably what my parents barked at me. I don’t recall this particular interaction so clearly or postively as I can recall my few moments of Game Boy joy on that big yellow school bus. I don’t recall precisely because the volume of conversations that followed in the proceeding months, particularly as my birthday came and went, then Christmas came and went, none of it resulting in that little rectangular box wrapped up for me as a gift, the volume and tone of those conversations was on a trajectory of disappointment and frustration.
In Canada the launch price of a brand new Game Boy was about eighty-nine bucks. In 2024 money, that works out to the inflated equivalent of a little over two hundred dollars. Roughly speaking, a Game Boy in 1989 dollars was about the same price, maybe a bit cheaper, than the “lite” version Nintendo‘s current generation console the Switch. I need to caveat that here because in modern bucks eighty-nine Canadian dollars isn’t a lot of cash. That’s a tank of gas. That’s a modest family dinner out at an average restaurant. That’s a digital download of just one game title on a Playstation 5 console.
Eighty-nine bucks doesn’t buy what it used to, but back then eighty-nine bucks would have changed the course of my life.
At least—
Well—
Life changing is how it felt every time I argued the case for somehow, anyhow, I will do anything, acquiring my own glorious, amazing, you-just-don’t-understand how this would make me feel mom-and-dad Game Boy video game system.
A-Button B-Button Testing
Look, I’m not a psychologist or a professional mind doctor nor even just a guy who can really write with anything resembling confidence or certainty about the long term effects of child-rearing by parents upon kids as they grow up. I might a bit of a philosopher, sure. And I have been a kid—and a parent, and I definitely have lived a good chunk of this single life of mine spanning the transition from one to the other. What I’m trying to explain here is that when I tell you that “parents aren’t always right” and that mine probably, maybe, could have, would have, didn’t but really should have caved and bought me the darn Game Boy, or preferably, let me buy my own Game Boy or just somehow in some mysterious way found a way to let me have this thing I really, really, really wanted, I merely write this as a single data point of my own personal experience.
You can’t A-B Test your own life. You can’t go back and try the other way. All you can do is look at the facts and dig into your memories and tug on the threads that weave it all together. You can mash the buttons of your mind in peeling back the onion-layers of your own psychology hope some bit of truth is revealed.
When I mash those mental buttons I realize that I get a lot of personal therapy lessons and a smattering of insight and sunlight shined into the tangled code that makes up my adult ideas about the universe. These were neither traumatic events, nor were they particularly taxing on me at a corporeal level. To even call it a struggle or a burden would be an extreme exaggeration. Yet, there was almost certainly something formative about these events that were my inability to clear the immeasurable invisible threshold set by my parents that would have allowed me to become the teenage owner of a Game Boy handheld video game system. I cannot re-live the life I had with that switch toggled over to B where a rectangular box showed up under the Christmas tree or better, that life where they one day the parents just finally relented, shrugged and drove me down to Toys R Us to plonk my very own cash on the counter and return home to play my own copy of Super Mario Land. I’ll never really know for sure, but I can see it there like a signpost on the path of my life reading “Please Select Your Character” and I’m pretty sure I should have been allowed to pick an alternate option.
But wait.
Hold up, you’re thinking to yourself right now. There are a lot of big claims here about consumer mentality and formative child psychology and absolutist parenting ideas. State your evidence, you’re telling me.
To be honest, as I have been writing this I have been thinking about that exact point. I mean, what was my thesis here other than that of feeling sorry for myself and contending that there was something formatively deficient in my life as a result of me not getting this darned Game Boy toy when I was a kid? Did it really truly have an impact, or am I merely mapping some other disastifaction with my adult life back onto my childhood history?
Then I saw it. I saw the connection on television.
One recent evening my wife happened to load up one of our streaming services and she clicked on a documentary about kids and music. It was a heartwarming story about the small team of people who keep the literal thousands of musical instruments in working order on behalf of the Los Angeles school system and consequently ensure that kids around the that city have access to musical education. Through a handful of interviews we the audience are introduced to kids who by fault of poverty or other misfortunes would not be able to play the violin or the sousaphone or any of a hundred other instruments in their school band. And the moral lesson of the story, the point of that documentary, was that good people help kids aspire to their dreams.
Before you dismiss me for equating a video game toy with a functioning French horn or a well-tuned piano, follow me here for a few moments longer.
See, my hypothetical unpurchased Game Boy is not really about the Game Boy is it?
Not really.
If I were to go back through this essay and replace every reference to the words Game Boy with, say, a baseball glove, a carpentry set, a watercolour box, or yeah, a musical instrument, this story would easily become a heartwarming tale about a kid who’s folks denied him an opportunity. I would instantly become the protagonist in a relatably sad tale of a kid who “coulda been a star”—or an artist or at least kinda, sorta reached for his dreams.
Because here’s the truth. I’ll admit it. The Game Boy in this story is something of my own MacGuffin, a false lead, my object of desire that is mostly just a story mechanism to provide a reason for me, the author, to tell a different tale, a story adjacent to the red herring.
Sure, I wanted a Game Boy—but what I really needed, what I was denied in those months following the school bus Game Boy episode, was agency.
Would buying a Game Boy have made me happy?
Sure, for a few weeks I would have been gloriously overjoyed, showing off my new toy to my friends and wearing out the buttons on Tetris or Mario or some other portable game..
Would owning a Game Boy have changed the course of my life?
I’ve implied as much but—well—okay—probably not, despite all those earlier contentions. But then I’ll never really know.
But! But. But? Would having the agency to make that decision on my own have taught me something about who I was, what I valued, and in that very specific and narrow band of time, given me formative insight into my relationship with how I felt about my own personal worth and the pursuit of the things I needed or wanted in life over the whims and detractions of other people?
Almost certainly, yes.
The Game Boy was never the point.
The point was that the Game Boy entered into my peripheral vision at a time when I had the means and the desire to aspire to something that was in my heart, in me, no matter how silly or trivial or commercial. I’m pretty sure we all have one of those things. Yours might have been a new bike or an electronics hobby set or an Easy Bake Oven. Mine was a Game Boy. I’m pretty sure we can all look back on our lives and pick out the moment when A versus B we were set down a course of understanding that yes, certain people do actually get the thing they want, be that a the baseball glove, the violin, the art set, or even just the Game Boy—and on the other side of that choice, certain people don’t.
Certain people get told no.
This is who you are. This is what you get.
Certain people are told that their dreams are foolish or not worth pursuing.
Certain people are made to save their money for so-called important things and to set their hopes aside in favour of practical considerations.
This isn’t a parenting lesson.
This isn’t a commentary on the nature of need fulfilment.
This isn’t a sweeping generalization about the effects of privilege or consumerism or entitlement or even words regarding crushed dreams as stern lessons for growing minds.
This is merely a personal assessment of my own experience. My parents were wrong back then, even if was just about this one thing, and I’m pretty sure a lot of my own weird adult beliefs about my experience as someone with big ideas, broad hopes and silly dreams—and then my ultimate story of failing to pursue a lot of those, all of that can trace a lineage straight as an arrow back to those days of trying to spend my own eighty-nine bucks to get myself a Game Boy.
Lately, I find myself trying to pursue the things that I want as an adult. These are not material possessions or even extraordinary aspirations. After a long pursuit in a dead-end profession I took a plunge and aligned both my resources and resolve to seek out something more soulful and spiritual. I went looking for a career change, and from that a more creative participation in the universe, the pursuit of joy and happiness and simplicity in my day-to-day. My lifelong dream of becoming a writer was dangled out in front of me, and a single amazing opportunity to pursue it. And all of these things have come at a cost, both financially and emotionally. Yet the emotional cost, the struggle against my core sense of self worth, the very idea that I even deserve to try to aspire to this crazy dream-like stuff has been the hardest to mortgage, because the credit score traces all the way back to the 1980s and a little kid who could have, should have, but didn’t get a damn video game system.
I know this in my core, I have evidence for it because I listen to myself. I hear the language I use, the very words I use to describe these adult pursuits. I frequently apologize. I couch my need for better mental health, and otherwise logical decisions, and of course that dream of a job that gives me purpose and meaning, I couch my explanation in words like privilege and personal crisis.
I am forever waiting, looking over my shoulder and around every corner for someone to butt their nose in and point out that I don’t deserve this and I should not be doing it.
Like that twelve year old who wanted a Game Boy, I am the kid who just heard no. This thing is not for you. This thing you desire is silly, it is an extravagance and even if you’ve easily got eighty nine bucks in your bank account to spend on it, it’s not something you deserve to have.
Like I said this is not the story of how I eventually bought myself a Game Boy video game system. Rather this is the story of a simple denial of agency, choice and worth—and sure, had this been a shinier story of my childhood denial of a pair of hockey skates or piano lessons or going to summer camp I might come across as far more sympathetic than a wannabe gamer kid. But the heart wants what it wants, be you twelve years old or four times that age. Be that thing a Game Boy or the fulfilment of a dream bigger than what the world has offered you on its own.
And though we as parents, friends, family, or simply well-wishers can never really know if someone is yearning for just a Game Boy or if someone is learning a deeper lesson from that heartfelt pursuit, it’s worth noting that everyone deserves to pick option B, to play the character they want to play, and to have that tiny bit of agency that informs them that they can, should, and will chase that dream—if that’s what they want to do. Go for it.