Game Boy - JCPenney Christmas Catalog - 1996

 

       I have so much love for the Game Boy. Ironically, Mike and I were just talking about Game Boys last night, specifically how smaller isn't always better. Since its birth, there have been many improvements to the original design. We've gotten color graphics, bigger screens, backlighting (which seemed to take forever to get), more efficient power (no more 4 "AA"s), even double screens and a stylus for expanded game play. The one "improvement" I haven't been so fond of has been it's smaller size. Look at that brick of a Game Boy up there. That's a substantial game player! While the smaller sizes have made Game Boys more portable than ever, I can't play the Game Boy Advance without my hands cramping up. Game Boy had been around a while by the time Christmas 1996 came around. In fact, if you look, they'd already released the Pocket Game Boy which, admittedly, I'd forgotten about. We were two years away from Game Boy Color, so this was pretty much the end of the line for our chunky, green-screened friend.
     I still own my original Game Boy. Heck, I still have its original box, which it now sits in. I got mine a few Christmases before 1996. I remember heading out to the Colonial Heights Wal-Mart a couple of days after Christmas. I had every penny of my Christmas money with the intention of making my Game Boy dreams a reality. Game Boys were big ticket items, so I had to get a blue vested employee to unlock the case and hand it to me. It was almost too much. I remember playing with it in the car; the exhilaration of that "ding" as the Nintendo logo flashed on the screen for the first time. Even to this day, when I open the box and pull out my old school Game Boy, for a split second I'm 12 years old again. Yeah, by today's standards, Game Boy looks archaic, but I could bust it out right now with its original Tetris cartridge and easily waste the rest of the day.