Today the YouTube algorithm, in Its Infinite Wisdom, recommended I watch a video of some guy opening a box of GameBoys he’d bought from Japan. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except as part of the excruciatingly dull unboxing process,1Yes I’m aware of the irony he checked all the battery compartments to look for signs of corrosion.
That made me jump up and run2(or at least the best I could approximate after six months stuck inside the house) to my closet, where a mysterious box sits underneath all the detritus that an American consumer-focused nerd has been able to accumulate over a few decades. Inside that box is a de facto collection of Nintendo handhelds ranging from the GameBoy Color to the 3DS. (I never owned an original GameBoy, and I can’t say I’m particularly interested in getting one at this point).
I say “de facto” since I’ve never intentionally been a collector of these things; I just worked at video game studios for a long time, and they just kind of accumulated. If you work in games and aren’t keeping up with what Nintendo is doing, you’re not doing it right.
When my fiancé got into Pokémon Go a while back, I told him I’d played one of the games years ago, and I might be able to help if the game ever started to rely on which types were strong or weak against other ones. That was when I rediscovered the mysterious box, and I realized that I hadn’t played one of the games years ago. I’d played all of them. I just kept pulling them out of the box, one after another, like a magician pulling handkerchiefs from his sleeve, or Mary Poppins pulling impossible quantities of tea sets and coat racks from her carpet bag.
I don’t have an active memory of playing these things; it’s something like the lost time after an alien abduction. It might as well have been another person playing these things, but still using my name each time. We must share the same brain, though, because I can’t remember a single damn thing from AP Calculus, but for some reason I know in my bones that you should use a grass or water type if you ever come up against a Geodude.
That guy didn’t know how to take care of electronics, though, since all the devices that used removable batteries still had them sitting inside. Fortunately, none of them were ruined or even slightly corroded. (My Sony PSP’s rechargeable battery is oddly swollen, like a tick, but fortunately those seem to still be available and reasonably priced).
Weirder than that, the DS’s rechargeable battery had still kept its charge. Even more surprising to me, the AAs left carelessly in the no-longer-quite-so-Arctic-white GameBoy Advance (in its original package!) still had enough of a charge for me to remember how bad I am at Super Mario Bros 3. I’m so used to treating electronic devices like Star Trek red shirts, ready for them to die at any moment, that it’s remarkable to see something that just turns on and works immediately, after so many years lying inert. There’s something to be said for making electronics durable enough for children prone to dropping them or trying to eat them. Maybe instead of ripping off Apple, device manufacturers should’ve been trying to rip off Fisher Price.3I am curious now how many of my every-other-iPhone-since-the-original can still be charged up and function.
Also in the box are all the games I de facto collected over the years. I don’t have a grand, Super Potato-worthy collection, but I’ve got my favorites: Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance I & II, a few Zeldas and Mario Brothers, various colors and gemstones worth of Pokémons, Pokémon Pinball with its built-in rumble pack, a Japanese import of Nintendogs and the American release, and Super Puzzle Fighter.4A hugely underrated game, and none of the various games that inspired it have the same magic as that one.
It’s kind of an odd feeling, seeing so many people for whom these games are profoundly nostalgic, and realizing I’ve just got them tossed in a box in the closet. The nostalgia they conjure for me is being in my late 20s or early 30s and buying them mainly to avoid the fear of missing out. I still could never bring myself to sell them. I wonder if, when it’s finally time for them to be donated to someone, they’ll still have any magic left in them.
GameBoy Color, DS, and GameBoy Advance SP A GameBoy Advance in its original box A Sony PSP, which I didn’t want to fell left out 3DS with Nintendo Club Mario carrying case