After seeing the Play Date, I couldn’t help but remember my old (and missing) yellow Game Boy Color. It was like a burst of nostalgia. The morning when the Three Wise Men brought it to me at my aunt and uncle’s house, the afternoons playing with my friends in the park, the thrill the day I completed my first Pokédex…

It has been the perfect excuse to start Retrovision, a section I’ve been eager to do for a long time, where I’ll talk about gadgets, objects, series, movies, and albums from another time.

Given the affection with which I’m going to talk about it, you might think my reaction to seeing that the kings had brought me a Game Boy Color was excessive but it wasn’t like that. At that time I was into Legos and not much into gadgets. In fact, my mother enjoyed it the most during the first few months. It’s not just that she played more than I did, but she was as hooked as kids today are to Fortnite.

Thanks to that, I had many more games than usual, and since she bought a lot of magazines, she knew almost all the cheats and it was hard to get stuck. She was like the Wikipedia and every time we went to the park, a crowd of kids would gather around her to ask for advice. I don’t have any photos from that time, but you can imagine the scene.

Although, to be honest, it wasn’t bad having an adult around when we did Pokémon trades. There was more tension than between China and the United States, especially with evolution trades. If someone dared not to return the creature to its rightful owner, trouble ensued. I had to do so many negotiations to complete my first Pokédex that you can’t imagine the joy I felt when I finally did it.

The graphics weren’t much to speak of; in fact, you often had to fill them in with your imagination, but the games were a lot of fun and you could spend hours with them. The most obvious is Pokémon (Yellow, Silver, Crystal…), but it’s not the only one: Super Mario Bros, Wario Land (I wish they’d release a new one), Harry Potter (it was a great RPG)…

What really was crap was the screen. There’s no amount of nostalgia that can save that. Compared to any mobile phone today, the color was almost negligible. Not to mention the positions you had to get into so that the light hit it right and you could see the screen.

And that was just one of many drawbacks of the hardware at the time. There were many limitations, so a lot of imagination was needed to overcome them. You just have to look at accessories and games as ingenious as the Game Boy Camera with its printer, Pokémon Pinball (with vibration) or the magnifying glasses and lights that fixed the screen a bit. I had a case full of these gadgets that would be unthinkable today.

When I was little, I didn’t think much of it, but you don’t know how sad I am now to have gotten rid of that yellow Game Boy Color and many of the games. Thankfully, I have friends like Gotzon or Patricia who let me borrow it from time to time to take photos and play for a while.

It seems I’ll have to spend a lot of time surfing the internet or travel to Japan to recover everything. That or wait for Nintendo to get motivated and launch a Game Boy Classic Mini in the style of the SNES Classic Mini from a couple of years ago.

And if not, there’s always the Play Date from Panic, which is also yellow and surely someone will be motivated to hack it to install an emulator.