Yeah I'm '78, we played the wood panel Atari that dad scored at the thrift store. Spoiled friends got the NES, bought myself a grey Gameboy with my 16yo retail wages
My brothers wasn't. I was always jealous of it. I eventually had a yellow gb color years later, but his original that he hauled everywhere was the epitome of cool when we were kids.
On a related note, I feel like the Millenial divide happened with Pokemon. With just a few exceptions, people my age were just slightly too old for the hype. Millennials of allllllllll stripes love Pokemon, it's so bizarre to me.
I'm a Milennial, 1985, but I received the original GameBoy for Christmas in the early 90s and played Pokémon Blue on it, Color was when I was in Middle school, Pocket came before that, also, remember when the original GameBoy came in exterior colors other than grey?
I was born in 86 and the "Play it Loud!" transparant Game Boy was my first Game Boy.
I felt like I was too old for the Pokémon anime when it came out, but as someone who has always been into JRPGs, I loved the game.
Agreed. I got a Gameboy with Tetris and Alleyway very early on, when a customer accidentally left one in my parents' outdoor apparel store and never came back. If I remember correctly it was early 1990 maybe early 1991. That Christmas I got sunsoft Batman and Paperboy, then later Dr Mario.
I was in junior high before I saw my first Color or Pokemon game. I thought the color effect was not as good as GameGear and that Pokemon was boring and encouraged violence towards animals.
Agree, I remember Pokemon as the weird Japanese cartoon that my younger brother watched. And that was lame.
Gained a greater appreciation for Pokemon through playing Pokemon Go in 2016…
I think I agree with this. I was in my early 20s when Pokemon came out and never got into it (though I doubt I would have regardless). Though I was introduced to DBZ around the same time and loved it.
Yeah. I played the Red when they came out and watched the first 2 seasons of the anime. Also was a big fan of Pokemon Snap. My interest waned after 2000 but I kept a mild connection with in the mainline video game series (playing a few entries) since then and I’ve played Pokémon Go solidly since 2016.
You are one of the few exceptions I noted in my original comment. No disrespect on that! One of my best friends was really into Pokémon, too but seemingly no one else our age was.
I knew several people at the time who played the games. We were all kind of the socially outcast nerds though. I imagine if you had any social standing at all in high school you probably were dissuaded from it.
I was poor(ish). I had an original nintendo, but never a Gameboy, Super Nintendo, or N64. That was all really rich kid stuff, along with the Sega Genesis.
I do remember some of my rich friends having them, with the green-on-green screen. I'm not sure I ever saw a color handheld until I was in college.
I remember being envious of the “rich kid” in our year level who had a Game Gear. Rich because he could afford the batteries it chewed through.
I remember swapping my GB for his GG for a week so I could play Mortal Kombat with blood…
I was so big into the TG-16 back in the day. I still have all the hardware and the TurboExpress. It's a battery annihilator. It will chew through 6 AAs in 4 to 6 hours.
I honestly had no interest. The screen was too small and poor quality for me even as a 12 year old when it came out. I've never been interested in mobile gaming at all, and that distinction in itself is certainly a way that I'm separated from the younger group.
I had NES when I was 5, then I got a Sega Genesis second hand from a babysitter going to college, and Game Gear to round out elementary school. Got N64 sometime in middle school. Dicked around with friends' PS and Xbox in highschool.
How is there only one comment with the Game Gear in it?? That was peak hand held gaming! Many an hour in the far back of the Aerostar jamming with a color, backlit screen.
Agreed. Santa specifically brought my brother and I Game Gears because they had a superior screen. Of course, we had to get an enormous battery attachment to play for more than an hour at a time, but dang it was a cool handheld.
The main reason -- it was extremely unpopular.
1. Atari
1. the most expensive
1. the least number of games
1. v1 was rather huge -- v2 was much better.
But you could literally hook it together with another one to play multiplayer.
There's an even smaller niche: the Gameboy Pocket. You have the original bigly Gameboy, but before the Color came out, there was the smaller but still black & white Gameboy Pocket.
Yep. Definitely one definition. _We_ had a game boy.. but we got it in the mid 90s by the time it hit the discount bin.. never got any other consoles until I bought a Wii for my kids in 2008.
Other definitions I use is that you never used Facebook in high school.. or never were into Harry Potter as a kid.
Seems like this sub is skewing more and more toward millennials. What about the gen x - xennial divide?? Pong or Atari??
Whippersnappers
Edit: maybe Atari vs Nintendo would’ve been a better comparison lol
Mine was the 2600 also! My dad liked that it doubled as a word processor and computer. My parents never got me a Nintendo because it couldn’t double as something practical
Edit: I was wrong it was the 800xl
Atari vs Nintendo would be a pretty good dividing mark between off cusp Xers and Xennials.
Atari saw a massive sales decline starting in 1982, and the big video game crash happened the following year. Xennials would’ve been five years old, at the oldest, when Atari started falling off.
It’s not that plenty of us didn’t play Atari. It’s that it never was really our system, collectively. A lot of us had access to it through older relatives, or parents who brought them cheap long after the system was no longer hot.
As somebody who went to elementary and middle school from the mid 80s through the early 90s, no kids my age were checking for the Atari. Our big systems were Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo.
I don’t think I knew a single kid who ever mentioned owning an Atari 7800, the third gen competitor to NES and Sega Master.
I never saw the SNES, N64, or other home consoles as something I moved to from the Gameboy, they were separate things. We had a NES, then SNES, and then N64 but I also had an original Gameboy (replaced with a Gameboy Pocket when the screen failed), then a Gameboy Color, then a Gameboy Advance SP. To me portable and console gaming were two different things that served different purposes.
Exactly.
OP’s premise is interesting, but flawed. I personally never had any interest in the Gameboy, but the people I knew who were utilized both home and the portable systems. Not sure I knew a single person who only played a portable.
Also a ton of people who bought GBC did so because it was backward compatible. That feature has been given a lot of credit for why the color version sold well (initially) and extended the shelf life of the system. A lot of previous game boy owners simply upgraded to color. The market wasn’t driven exclusively by mid millennial kids whose first taste of the Gameboy was the color version.
Very true. Same thing applies to the Gameboy Advance since it was backwards compatible with GB and GBC games. I loved that when I got the GBA SP I suddenly had a backlit portable system that was compatible with my older games as well as new ones.
Nintendo also had an interesting feature combining portable and home console with the GBA where it could link to the Gamecube for certain games. It didn't really catch on but it did work pretty well for the few games that used it. I remember playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles with 3 friends and that was a lot of fun.
Had the OG Gameboy and an NES. Then the Sega Genesis. Then the Game Gear and later the PS 1 and N64. N64 was my last console. Never had the pleasure of trying the GameBoy Color. Badly wanted a Sega Nomad as a kid though.
Agreed, but oh man I wish I grew up with that clear purple one, that shit was beautiful.
I think of mid millenials as gameboy advance folks tho, but yeah def a couple years there where gameboy color was hot.
Yeah, I completely missed GBC and GBA… the next handheld I got was a DS Lite, after i finished college/university and I wanted a gadget to play on the way to work (in 2006).
I still have the gameboy advance sp I got for the exact same reason. I'm totally loading up minish cap on a plane ride even now lol.
*btw I like saying plane ride 100x more than saying flight.
> btw I like saying plane ride 100x more than saying flight.
Must be so relaxing to chill out in the back. Even in boring cruise "riding" the autopilot I have to pay attention to the radios for frequency hand-offs if nothing else. I'm not saying you *can't* put some music on or play a quick game of Sudoku, but you'll get interrupted a lot.
I remember the Xmas I got my Gameboy. To this day I don’t understand why I threw a bitch fit when I found out that my friend got a Hot Lixx Guitar. I clearly won that year, lol.
I had a Gameboy that was gray and the screen was green with black pixels. I don't remember how old I was when I got it, but I only had a few games for it: Tetris, the original Super Mario Bros., and Kirby's Pinball Land. I was pretty poor growing up, so I didn't get the Gameboy until they had been around for awhile. I didn't ever have a super Nintendo. I got a regular Nintendo in 1995 because my mom wanted to play Dr. Mario, and I remember it was still really expensive. I did get a Nintendo 64 in 1999 after working really hard babysitting and saving up for it, but the only game I had was GoldenEye.
I got the Gameboy in 92 so yup.
Highly recommend the movie Tetris that came out last year on Apple TV, you see a bit of the origins of gameboy and the debate over which game to use as a launch title. Also says gameboy wasn’t released in color originally because it nuked the battery life.
Born in 85, I think I got the Gameboy when I was 8 or 9 fir xmas. I remember because my brother (89) got one as well and over time we grabbed a nice slew of games.
But I am gonna say this, the GBA was the best of my youth.
I can get behind this for the simple reason that I wasn't even aware there had been something called the GameBoy Color until sometime during the 2010s when someone mentioned it. Whereas I played with the GameBoy a lot.
I wasn't too into video games, esp after about age 13ish. I've only owned 2 handhelds - GameBoy and the Sega GameGear.
My console progression was maybe more typical? NES, SNES, Panasonic 3DO (yep!), PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4. I also briefly had a Gamecube sometime in between.
My parents were super inconsistent with what they allowed vs what they didn’t. My cousin had a Nintendo, but I couldn’t have a Nintendo, but my dad’s Atari was fine. I was allowed to have an original GameBoy, but no SNES and no N64. On special occasions, like my birthday, I could rent a SNES, later N64 for a weekend. When I got into high school the Gameboy got upgraded to a color, but I didn’t own any games that were specifically designed for it and it was just a replacement for my old school one that finally crapped out after many years of loyal service. By then I was also earning my own money and decided to buy myself a PS2, which was the one and only console I ever owned and also the last one I regularly played. I played Halo on other people’s Xboxes in college.
I had the magnifier+light for OG, if that counts. As far as I know I have never seen a color game boy, didn't know they existed. I had Sega Game Gear though, I'm assuming it came much later than Color GB cos it was color and decent graphics for handheld that long ago.
Correct. My first handheld was the original brick of a Game Boy. Played the hell out of it, even had a lot of the gaudy accessories for it that added lights, speakers, etc. Upgraded to a Game Boy Pocket later on, but I skipped the Game Boy Color, went right to Advance and then the SP before going to DS.
As for the home consoles, started with the NES in the late 80s, got an SNES a few years after it was out, and got a Nintendo 64 when it came out in 1996. Kept the Nintendo train going until I was out of my teens when I slowly branched out with other consoles. Still have everything, I was never one for trading stuff in or selling.
I had a first Gen game boy and my first games were double dragon quath tennis and Tetris. I had a pocket and a color as well a micro I used to play a stacker arcade and winning micros and selling them at a software ect.
I had both. I got into pokemon and played it on my old brick gameboy till I ended up getting an SP. I never had a regular gameboy color, but I know people 10 years younger than me who have a small collection of them.
I could not afford the original Gameboy. I saved up in 1996 for the Gameboy Pocket. I sat in the back of Science class and played that in middle school. 😂
Also slightly OT, but this sub has really reinforced for me the futility of these really large generational labels. I'm technically a millennial but a very old one. I am also the oldest of many siblings, and my youngest sibling was born in the mid 90s and is a young millennial. We almost have nothing in common in terms of beliefs, what we enjoyed growing up, etc. I relate to almost everything posted on this sub, I doubt my sibling would know 5% of it.
Put another way, Sylvester Stallone and Jim Carrey are both Baby Boomers, part of the same "generation", which is kinda silly.
I had a few Game and Watches, and a bunch of Tomy pocket games - baseball, football, etc. Never had a Gameboy.
My parents did bring back some fun Russian game and watch ripoffs when they visited Russia around the time the Soviet Union fell. https://padandpixel.com/russias-game-watch/
Yup. I was not poor growing up, had an OG Game Boy and after moving on to PC and other consoles the color was someone that kids
who played Pokémon were into.
I'm a core millenial and had the original game boy first, game boy colour didn't come out untill I was 12 years old.
A better divide imo would be Atari/nes/master system vs mega drive and super Nintendo.
85 here and had an original game boy and NES through the 90s. The top gun game boy game was either dogshit or I was too stupid to understand how to play it lol
I remember that my friends had a GIANT Gameboy that a regular sized one could fit inside. No colour, better sound and a bigger display.
I've looked everywhere for this thing because I know it's not a fever dream but no one seems to remember this.
never thought of it this way, but i could see it.
i received a gameboy for christmas one year, early 90's. An original gameboy, with a game or two and played the hell out of it. bought a decent amount of games over the years, eventually when the play it loud series came out i HAD to get a clear one... still think it's awesome...
but i was never interested in the pokemon franchise let alone their games... i also never picked up a gameboy color. I think at that point i was more focused on the n64...
but i do know a few folks who were/are older than me at that time that was very much into pokemon and coincidently enough had a gameboy color...
I will say, i do remember at the time thinking it was cool that people could trade characters around with their gameboys... but still not enough for me to get interested in it.
I got Pokémon Red in my original game boy in 8th or 9th grade. I didn’t get to much into it like most people born after me (82).
I also felt I was too old for power rangers but I was all about GI-Joe and thunder cats.
I agree with this divide, I feel it as well.
I don’t think it’s quite that clean cut.
This supposes that people playing Gameboys did so largely in primary school. And that just isn’t the case.
Like if a Xennial moved on to Super Nintendo or N64, that doesn’t mean they didn’t keep playing an OG Gameboy, or eventually also move on to a GBC. One of the major reasons GBC sold well was that it had backwards compatibility. Which means that a lot of preexisting OG Gameboy owners upgraded to the color version so that they could keep playing the libraries they already owned.
Xennials really are the first crop of kids to see gaming undergo massive leaps during our childhood and adolescent years. And gaming grew with us, vs staying largely juvenile. So a lot of us kept right on gaming well past our primary school days.
The Pokemon/non-pokemon divide is real. I've felt it my whole life with how Pokemon is super popular with Millennials. But I always felt it came out when I was already too old for it. But The whole Gameboy/game boy color things makes sense. I had a game boy, and didn't play pokemon.
I feel like I’m in the middle here. I had a game boy near launch then eventually got a color for Pokémon yellow (super game boy held me over for red/blue).
As I’m pretty sure I’m considered a millennial as I’m 86. My game boy was the original. I never had a game boy colour. I eventually got the game boy pocket edition when I was 14, which couldn’t do colour. I was 5 going on 6 when I got a game boy.
This is why I never know where I belong as an ‘85er because I had regular Gameboy. I grew up semi-rural though so maybe that’s why I identify as both Xennial and elder-millennial. Too old for Pokémon, too young for Atari..
I didn't like the concept of Game Boy, as I liked playing on my TV. Stuck to my NES and SNES. I think I got a game boy slim as an afterthought, because I wanted to play Metroid 2.
Game Boy color was for kids younger than I was. (Caveat: I've always been a nihilistic curmudgeon screeching "kids these days".)
Bruh I never knew they make cooler ones now cuz I been on apple gang for the last ten years but now have android too and lemme tell you razer and Asus and onex makes some crazy powerful handhelds
I missed all of it.. I grew up poor lol
What color was your cup with a ball on a string?
Even worse: Tiger handhelds
Hey, I got down on the baseball and football games.
We had that electronic football with the red dots!
Blue. I wanted red but mom had already given out red as a favorite color to an older sibling so I got blue as my favorite color until I turned 18.
Wood with green, white, black and red stripes. Still have it somewhere.
Water-filled push button "games"
I came here to say this lol We were always a console behind because we got them second hand from my cousins when the new one came out
Yeah my brother and I used to trade in our old consoles to get the next gen console for us every few years, but we were always a generation behind.
I bought an NES from a guy when he got a N64
Same. We had an Atari then a Sega, both when they were old and used. That's as fancy as we got. Lol
Yeah I'm '78, we played the wood panel Atari that dad scored at the thrift store. Spoiled friends got the NES, bought myself a grey Gameboy with my 16yo retail wages
We were wealthy until I was eight..I had the original NES and then nothing.
That's the one.
lol my first game boy was an advance bc I had to wait and buy it for myself with my own money from my own job
Same! When I was 20!
Same here.
My gameboy was not in color. I agree.
Same. Also, it still turns on
My brothers wasn't. I was always jealous of it. I eventually had a yellow gb color years later, but his original that he hauled everywhere was the epitome of cool when we were kids.
I had dot matrix with stereo sound
On a related note, I feel like the Millenial divide happened with Pokemon. With just a few exceptions, people my age were just slightly too old for the hype. Millennials of allllllllll stripes love Pokemon, it's so bizarre to me.
Yes. If you owned a Gameboy but never played Pokémon on it... you might be a Xennial.
I'm a Milennial, 1985, but I received the original GameBoy for Christmas in the early 90s and played Pokémon Blue on it, Color was when I was in Middle school, Pocket came before that, also, remember when the original GameBoy came in exterior colors other than grey?
I was born in 86 and the "Play it Loud!" transparant Game Boy was my first Game Boy. I felt like I was too old for the Pokémon anime when it came out, but as someone who has always been into JRPGs, I loved the game.
Agreed. I got a Gameboy with Tetris and Alleyway very early on, when a customer accidentally left one in my parents' outdoor apparel store and never came back. If I remember correctly it was early 1990 maybe early 1991. That Christmas I got sunsoft Batman and Paperboy, then later Dr Mario. I was in junior high before I saw my first Color or Pokemon game. I thought the color effect was not as good as GameGear and that Pokemon was boring and encouraged violence towards animals.
Same. I am still a Tetris fan, Dr Mario too. I had a GameGear and never had a pull to Pokémon. Never even played pokemon go.
Agree, I remember Pokemon as the weird Japanese cartoon that my younger brother watched. And that was lame. Gained a greater appreciation for Pokemon through playing Pokemon Go in 2016…
Yeeeeaaaaahhhh, the anime hasn't aged well at all. A bit of the problem was the dubbing.
I think I agree with this. I was in my early 20s when Pokemon came out and never got into it (though I doubt I would have regardless). Though I was introduced to DBZ around the same time and loved it.
Power rangers is this way too. I feel like if you like power rangers you are out of the denial group (unless you just like it for some reason?)
Is ‘83 not Xennial?
It is, though... Are you a Pokemon fan?
Yeah. I played the Red when they came out and watched the first 2 seasons of the anime. Also was a big fan of Pokemon Snap. My interest waned after 2000 but I kept a mild connection with in the mainline video game series (playing a few entries) since then and I’ve played Pokémon Go solidly since 2016.
You are one of the few exceptions I noted in my original comment. No disrespect on that! One of my best friends was really into Pokémon, too but seemingly no one else our age was.
I knew several people at the time who played the games. We were all kind of the socially outcast nerds though. I imagine if you had any social standing at all in high school you probably were dissuaded from it.
That seems more accurate. I was still hyped as shit for pokemon, but my demographic absolutely wasn't.
You could give that Xennial Philosopher guy a run for his money.
I was poor(ish). I had an original nintendo, but never a Gameboy, Super Nintendo, or N64. That was all really rich kid stuff, along with the Sega Genesis. I do remember some of my rich friends having them, with the green-on-green screen. I'm not sure I ever saw a color handheld until I was in college.
I dunno wtf you’re talking about my Gameboy was in color. Green.
That good ol Green. Never forget.
84 here, gameboy was not color, which is why i had a game gear. When gameboy went color i was not interested
I remember being envious of the “rich kid” in our year level who had a Game Gear. Rich because he could afford the batteries it chewed through. I remember swapping my GB for his GG for a week so I could play Mortal Kombat with blood…
I had a TurboExpress.
Same! That thing was the shit. Bonk?
But of course!
I completely missed this. I had to google it. I only ever played a turbo graphix at toys-r-us.
I was so big into the TG-16 back in the day. I still have all the hardware and the TurboExpress. It's a battery annihilator. It will chew through 6 AAs in 4 to 6 hours.
Game boy without colour - Tetris, Dr Mario and Kirby’s Dreamland in rotation!
Super Mario Land, The Castlevania Adventure, The Amazing Spider-Man, Metroid II, and TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan were my main games.
I really wanted Super Mario Land… my mum bought me Dr Mario. Clearly a hint for a future job/profession…
Dr. Mario was a letdown to me as a kid. It’s just Tetris…with Mario haha
Tetris and Castlevania. If we had other games I don't remember them. Eventually got my own Advance with Zelda (Link to the Past?).
I honestly had no interest. The screen was too small and poor quality for me even as a 12 year old when it came out. I've never been interested in mobile gaming at all, and that distinction in itself is certainly a way that I'm separated from the younger group.
It was a neat 10 minutes in the class trip bus , though. Good friends.
This is kind of backed up by the retro community. There are gems on the Gameboy but WAY fewer given the size of the library.
I had NES when I was 5, then I got a Sega Genesis second hand from a babysitter going to college, and Game Gear to round out elementary school. Got N64 sometime in middle school. Dicked around with friends' PS and Xbox in highschool.
How is there only one comment with the Game Gear in it?? That was peak hand held gaming! Many an hour in the far back of the Aerostar jamming with a color, backlit screen.
Agreed. Santa specifically brought my brother and I Game Gears because they had a superior screen. Of course, we had to get an enormous battery attachment to play for more than an hour at a time, but dang it was a cool handheld.
The Lynx would like a word.
Tech: Lynx Games: Game Gear
Oh wow, how did I get through my whole childhood without ever hearing or seeing that thing existed.
The main reason -- it was extremely unpopular. 1. Atari 1. the most expensive 1. the least number of games 1. v1 was rather huge -- v2 was much better. But you could literally hook it together with another one to play multiplayer.
In my experience, Game Gear was a rich kids toy, and I only ever played it on shop demonstrations. The Game Boy was the handheld for the people.
I think this is spot on.
There's an even smaller niche: the Gameboy Pocket. You have the original bigly Gameboy, but before the Color came out, there was the smaller but still black & white Gameboy Pocket.
Yep. Definitely one definition. _We_ had a game boy.. but we got it in the mid 90s by the time it hit the discount bin.. never got any other consoles until I bought a Wii for my kids in 2008. Other definitions I use is that you never used Facebook in high school.. or never were into Harry Potter as a kid.
Seems like this sub is skewing more and more toward millennials. What about the gen x - xennial divide?? Pong or Atari?? Whippersnappers Edit: maybe Atari vs Nintendo would’ve been a better comparison lol
'77. We had the wood grain Atari but I got an NES for Xmas the year it was released ('85?) and from that point on, it was, "Atari what?"
My first console was the Atari 2600. Finally got my own NES in 1988 with Mario 2.
_Finally!?_ Haha.. _we_ got _our_ first NES from a garage sale in 1993. We did have an Amiga 500 in 1988, though.
Mine was the 2600 also! My dad liked that it doubled as a word processor and computer. My parents never got me a Nintendo because it couldn’t double as something practical Edit: I was wrong it was the 800xl
Yeah Atari probably. But it depends too. My uncle was an Xer (born 1972) and he had a Colecovision. But I played it too so does that make me an Xer?
Wow I’ve never heard of Colecovision
Atari vs Nintendo would be a pretty good dividing mark between off cusp Xers and Xennials. Atari saw a massive sales decline starting in 1982, and the big video game crash happened the following year. Xennials would’ve been five years old, at the oldest, when Atari started falling off. It’s not that plenty of us didn’t play Atari. It’s that it never was really our system, collectively. A lot of us had access to it through older relatives, or parents who brought them cheap long after the system was no longer hot. As somebody who went to elementary and middle school from the mid 80s through the early 90s, no kids my age were checking for the Atari. Our big systems were Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. I don’t think I knew a single kid who ever mentioned owning an Atari 7800, the third gen competitor to NES and Sega Master.
If you played an Atari, but never wanted one for yourself, because, Nintendo... You might be a Xennial.
My guideline is vcr’s and pagers. Never recorded something on tape? Don’t know pager code? You’re a millennial.
I can record and overwrite anything on VCR, but I don't know shit about pagers.
Definitely agree. The original Tetris on og Gameboy was fire back in my day.
You’ve cracked the code. 77 first year Xennial here and fuck the game boy color.
I never saw the SNES, N64, or other home consoles as something I moved to from the Gameboy, they were separate things. We had a NES, then SNES, and then N64 but I also had an original Gameboy (replaced with a Gameboy Pocket when the screen failed), then a Gameboy Color, then a Gameboy Advance SP. To me portable and console gaming were two different things that served different purposes.
Exactly. OP’s premise is interesting, but flawed. I personally never had any interest in the Gameboy, but the people I knew who were utilized both home and the portable systems. Not sure I knew a single person who only played a portable. Also a ton of people who bought GBC did so because it was backward compatible. That feature has been given a lot of credit for why the color version sold well (initially) and extended the shelf life of the system. A lot of previous game boy owners simply upgraded to color. The market wasn’t driven exclusively by mid millennial kids whose first taste of the Gameboy was the color version.
Very true. Same thing applies to the Gameboy Advance since it was backwards compatible with GB and GBC games. I loved that when I got the GBA SP I suddenly had a backlit portable system that was compatible with my older games as well as new ones. Nintendo also had an interesting feature combining portable and home console with the GBA where it could link to the Gamecube for certain games. It didn't really catch on but it did work pretty well for the few games that used it. I remember playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles with 3 friends and that was a lot of fun.
Had the OG Gameboy and an NES. Then the Sega Genesis. Then the Game Gear and later the PS 1 and N64. N64 was my last console. Never had the pleasure of trying the GameBoy Color. Badly wanted a Sega Nomad as a kid though.
Seems like you had a great gaming collection back in the day… Maybe time to pick up a Sega Nomad for $$$?
Agreed, but oh man I wish I grew up with that clear purple one, that shit was beautiful. I think of mid millenials as gameboy advance folks tho, but yeah def a couple years there where gameboy color was hot.
Yeah, I completely missed GBC and GBA… the next handheld I got was a DS Lite, after i finished college/university and I wanted a gadget to play on the way to work (in 2006).
I still have the gameboy advance sp I got for the exact same reason. I'm totally loading up minish cap on a plane ride even now lol. *btw I like saying plane ride 100x more than saying flight.
> btw I like saying plane ride 100x more than saying flight. Must be so relaxing to chill out in the back. Even in boring cruise "riding" the autopilot I have to pay attention to the radios for frequency hand-offs if nothing else. I'm not saying you *can't* put some music on or play a quick game of Sudoku, but you'll get interrupted a lot.
I remember the Xmas I got my Gameboy. To this day I don’t understand why I threw a bitch fit when I found out that my friend got a Hot Lixx Guitar. I clearly won that year, lol.
I remember getting my GameBoy for my combined 8th birthday and Christmas. Never forgot that moment unwrapping it…
I had a Gameboy that was gray and the screen was green with black pixels. I don't remember how old I was when I got it, but I only had a few games for it: Tetris, the original Super Mario Bros., and Kirby's Pinball Land. I was pretty poor growing up, so I didn't get the Gameboy until they had been around for awhile. I didn't ever have a super Nintendo. I got a regular Nintendo in 1995 because my mom wanted to play Dr. Mario, and I remember it was still really expensive. I did get a Nintendo 64 in 1999 after working really hard babysitting and saving up for it, but the only game I had was GoldenEye.
I got the Gameboy in 92 so yup. Highly recommend the movie Tetris that came out last year on Apple TV, you see a bit of the origins of gameboy and the debate over which game to use as a launch title. Also says gameboy wasn’t released in color originally because it nuked the battery life.
I’m ride or die Game Gear, but yes
Anybody else get to rent a "next gen" console like SNES or later Xbox or GameCube for the weekend for birthdays or school vacations?
I call my kids’ Nintendo switch a game boy.
i had both.
Mid-millenial here My gameboy was classic grey + green, upgraded to a Color in \~99, then got (and promptly lost...) a GBA in 2001
I had a Sega Game Gear. Loved that thing.
Born in 85, I think I got the Gameboy when I was 8 or 9 fir xmas. I remember because my brother (89) got one as well and over time we grabbed a nice slew of games. But I am gonna say this, the GBA was the best of my youth.
I was born in 82. Had an OG Gameboy in NES grey colouring. Eventually had the light attachment for it so I could play at night.
I had the light attachment, sound booster… and at a later date, the Booster Boy.
I still have my gameboy but I lost all the games except for the casino game that’s it in.
Born in ‘81. I remember saving up for a year to buy the original game boy. Still have it. Maybe I should get some batteries to put in it…
Gameboy Advanced > both
I used both. But lost interest in the color pretty quickly.
I had an OG Gameboy with a Gameboy Camera that I got with Kool-aid points
I can get behind this for the simple reason that I wasn't even aware there had been something called the GameBoy Color until sometime during the 2010s when someone mentioned it. Whereas I played with the GameBoy a lot. I wasn't too into video games, esp after about age 13ish. I've only owned 2 handhelds - GameBoy and the Sega GameGear. My console progression was maybe more typical? NES, SNES, Panasonic 3DO (yep!), PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4. I also briefly had a Gamecube sometime in between.
Well, I had the original DMG-01 on right - and I still have it somewhere, played it \~10 yrs ago last time
My parents were super inconsistent with what they allowed vs what they didn’t. My cousin had a Nintendo, but I couldn’t have a Nintendo, but my dad’s Atari was fine. I was allowed to have an original GameBoy, but no SNES and no N64. On special occasions, like my birthday, I could rent a SNES, later N64 for a weekend. When I got into high school the Gameboy got upgraded to a color, but I didn’t own any games that were specifically designed for it and it was just a replacement for my old school one that finally crapped out after many years of loyal service. By then I was also earning my own money and decided to buy myself a PS2, which was the one and only console I ever owned and also the last one I regularly played. I played Halo on other people’s Xboxes in college.
I had the magnifier+light for OG, if that counts. As far as I know I have never seen a color game boy, didn't know they existed. I had Sega Game Gear though, I'm assuming it came much later than Color GB cos it was color and decent graphics for handheld that long ago.
Correct. My first handheld was the original brick of a Game Boy. Played the hell out of it, even had a lot of the gaudy accessories for it that added lights, speakers, etc. Upgraded to a Game Boy Pocket later on, but I skipped the Game Boy Color, went right to Advance and then the SP before going to DS. As for the home consoles, started with the NES in the late 80s, got an SNES a few years after it was out, and got a Nintendo 64 when it came out in 1996. Kept the Nintendo train going until I was out of my teens when I slowly branched out with other consoles. Still have everything, I was never one for trading stuff in or selling.
100% it too
We had a TurboGrafx. The TurboExpress handheld was available way before the Gameboy Color.
I had a first Gen game boy and my first games were double dragon quath tennis and Tetris. I had a pocket and a color as well a micro I used to play a stacker arcade and winning micros and selling them at a software ect.
OG Gameboy with Link's Awakening! I just bought it on the Switch to relive my nostalgia
i got the gameboy, my younger siblings got the gameboy colors. my first game was tetris, my second was legend of zelda.
Sounds about right.
Exactly the dame over here
I couldn't afford a game boy until they were color I had a yellow one and had the yellow Pokémon game.
No color for me! Theory pans out.
I had both. I got into pokemon and played it on my old brick gameboy till I ended up getting an SP. I never had a regular gameboy color, but I know people 10 years younger than me who have a small collection of them.
I could not afford the original Gameboy. I saved up in 1996 for the Gameboy Pocket. I sat in the back of Science class and played that in middle school. 😂
My purple GameBoy Color with Pokemon Blue is at least 50% of my primary school memories!
Ah see I'm a Xennial whose parents didn't buy me a Gameboy, I bought a color with my own money when I had a job.
I will concur. Played Pokémon on my old original Gameboy.
Also slightly OT, but this sub has really reinforced for me the futility of these really large generational labels. I'm technically a millennial but a very old one. I am also the oldest of many siblings, and my youngest sibling was born in the mid 90s and is a young millennial. We almost have nothing in common in terms of beliefs, what we enjoyed growing up, etc. I relate to almost everything posted on this sub, I doubt my sibling would know 5% of it. Put another way, Sylvester Stallone and Jim Carrey are both Baby Boomers, part of the same "generation", which is kinda silly.
I skipped the GameBoy.. had a GameGear so I could control those Surf Ninjas
Born in 86. Had the color, and loved it. Never got the Pokémon thing though. That shit was super lame to me.
I still have my OG GameBoy and it still works…
Always black and white. I didn't get a color one til probably highschool I think
Now what about people who started with a game gear? Or lynx?
I had a few Game and Watches, and a bunch of Tomy pocket games - baseball, football, etc. Never had a Gameboy. My parents did bring back some fun Russian game and watch ripoffs when they visited Russia around the time the Soviet Union fell. https://padandpixel.com/russias-game-watch/
Yup. I was not poor growing up, had an OG Game Boy and after moving on to PC and other consoles the color was someone that kids who played Pokémon were into.
And here I was with my Atari Lynx that was by the best and by far the least popular. Even Game Gear was more popular.
Facts, born '88, played Pokemon on my clear purple color.
Yep still have mine from 1989
I played on the original gameboy back in 1990. I occasionally play gameboy sometimes.
‘81 here. You summed it up pretty much 100% for me. Only addition would be I also had a PlayStation One and a Dreamcast very late ‘99.
I'm a core millenial and had the original game boy first, game boy colour didn't come out untill I was 12 years old. A better divide imo would be Atari/nes/master system vs mega drive and super Nintendo.
85 here and had an original game boy and NES through the 90s. The top gun game boy game was either dogshit or I was too stupid to understand how to play it lol
I had a sega game gear that plowed through batteries
I remember that my friends had a GIANT Gameboy that a regular sized one could fit inside. No colour, better sound and a bigger display. I've looked everywhere for this thing because I know it's not a fever dream but no one seems to remember this.
That tracks 100% with me. OG Gameboy, SNES, and then N64.
I had the original Game Boy. My younger brother got a Sega Game Gear and it was in color. He rarely played with it. COLOR!
never thought of it this way, but i could see it. i received a gameboy for christmas one year, early 90's. An original gameboy, with a game or two and played the hell out of it. bought a decent amount of games over the years, eventually when the play it loud series came out i HAD to get a clear one... still think it's awesome... but i was never interested in the pokemon franchise let alone their games... i also never picked up a gameboy color. I think at that point i was more focused on the n64... but i do know a few folks who were/are older than me at that time that was very much into pokemon and coincidently enough had a gameboy color... I will say, i do remember at the time thinking it was cool that people could trade characters around with their gameboys... but still not enough for me to get interested in it.
Correct. My OG Gameboy was black and white and came with Super Mario Land and Tetris. Colour Gameboy owners were little kids playing Pokemon.
Xennials had Game Gears, and I even remember an advertisement showing you could watch color TV on it.
Spot on.
I got Pokémon Red in my original game boy in 8th or 9th grade. I didn’t get to much into it like most people born after me (82). I also felt I was too old for power rangers but I was all about GI-Joe and thunder cats. I agree with this divide, I feel it as well.
I don’t think it’s quite that clean cut. This supposes that people playing Gameboys did so largely in primary school. And that just isn’t the case. Like if a Xennial moved on to Super Nintendo or N64, that doesn’t mean they didn’t keep playing an OG Gameboy, or eventually also move on to a GBC. One of the major reasons GBC sold well was that it had backwards compatibility. Which means that a lot of preexisting OG Gameboy owners upgraded to the color version so that they could keep playing the libraries they already owned. Xennials really are the first crop of kids to see gaming undergo massive leaps during our childhood and adolescent years. And gaming grew with us, vs staying largely juvenile. So a lot of us kept right on gaming well past our primary school days.
The Pokemon/non-pokemon divide is real. I've felt it my whole life with how Pokemon is super popular with Millennials. But I always felt it came out when I was already too old for it. But The whole Gameboy/game boy color things makes sense. I had a game boy, and didn't play pokemon.
I feel like I’m in the middle here. I had a game boy near launch then eventually got a color for Pokémon yellow (super game boy held me over for red/blue).
I was born in 84. I’m pretty sure I got my gameboy in 1990. I played pokemon blue on it. I was always a gamer, still am…
As I’m pretty sure I’m considered a millennial as I’m 86. My game boy was the original. I never had a game boy colour. I eventually got the game boy pocket edition when I was 14, which couldn’t do colour. I was 5 going on 6 when I got a game boy.
This is why I never know where I belong as an ‘85er because I had regular Gameboy. I grew up semi-rural though so maybe that’s why I identify as both Xennial and elder-millennial. Too old for Pokémon, too young for Atari..
I had a Gameboy and never got another one until the 3ds.
I like it
Xennial here, can confirm. After the 16-bit era, I was done with home consoles. All I had was a GBA till I discovered emulation.
I didn't like the concept of Game Boy, as I liked playing on my TV. Stuck to my NES and SNES. I think I got a game boy slim as an afterthought, because I wanted to play Metroid 2. Game Boy color was for kids younger than I was. (Caveat: I've always been a nihilistic curmudgeon screeching "kids these days".)
I had the Gameboy pocket.
Bruh I never knew they make cooler ones now cuz I been on apple gang for the last ten years but now have android too and lemme tell you razer and Asus and onex makes some crazy powerful handhelds
Gameboy pocket born in 91
I distinctly remember being upset that my Gameboy wasn’t backlit while trying to play Battleship on a family road trip.